Mutual care taking: collectively creating our respiratory wellbeing with open sciences
Poster presented at the General Meeting of the Global Alliance against Respiratory Diseases in Beijing.
Background: Worldwide, 6 people out of 10 have no access to treatment, or are not encouraged to follow it. Air pollution alone kills 7 million people yearly, reduces our life expectancy by 20 months, and costs 6% the gross world product. Devices to assess lung capacity remain often unavailable in low / middle income countries.
Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: Inversion Edition
Torment characters from Greek mythology! Forever! Push Sisyphus back down the hill! Peck out Prometheus’s liver! Withhold the apple from Tantalus! Albert Camus said we must imagine Sisyphus happy! So the boulder must be even happier! Right?!
Space Noodles
Space Noodles is a game designed to combine a rhythm and a cooking game. It is meant to be accessible to people who have no specific game experience. However they may feel more comfortable trying it with someone who may help them if needed. As a player you will become the assistant of the best noodle chef in the universe and help him cooks for his customers. The playing experience may have an interesting balance between stress and addictive meditative state.
Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: UI Edition
Sliders! Radio buttons! Dialog boxes! Menus! Progress bars! These are the instruments of our eternal contemporary torment! The ancient Greek gods would have approved! We are all Sisyphus now!
Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: Chess Edition
Chess! It already feels like a punishment to so many people! But now even more so! What if Zeus threw chess sets instead of lightning bolts?! What if Archimedes was a vengeful god?! What if you just kept getting chessed for eternity?!
Polished: An Intensely Relaxed Nail Salon Experience
You deserve a break. You deserve to luxuriate. You deserve…to get your nails did. Be fierce, be playful, be a work of art. And when you’re done, marvel in your creation and take those hands out into the big beautiful world.
Polished: An Intensely Relaxed Nail Salon Experience is a game that takes you to the salon to sit still, paint carefully, and try to give your nails the perfect finish–if you can be graceful enough. But don’t worry, even if you mess up, you’ll still look like a million bucks.
Polished was developed as part of the I WILL MAKE YOU A BETTER PERSON project, where team members used non-hierarchical development processes and community of care ideological frameworks as starting points for research-creation. The game expresses some of the core thematics that arose from our group project, such as luxury, self-care, and the pressures of burnout, while still being small, silly, and easy to play. The process work behind the game’s creation was presented in a performance/hybrid panel at CGSA 2019, and abridged summaries of the talk are available on the TAG blog.
Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: The Twine
Hypertext! Hyperpunishment! Click links while your heart sinks! Read texts and repent your defects! Enjoy the Twine! Your soul’s on the line!
Theatre and Games Project: Site-Specific Play and the Evolution of ‘MISSING’
Over the last few years, members of TAG research lab have been collaborating with ZU-UK, a participatory theatre collective based in London, England, whose interactive performances situate audiences within the unfolding of actions and events.
ZU-UK are renowned for their distinctive personal, political and sometimes humorous approach to creating interactive performances. Known for their attention to detail, care and complete respect for audience members, the company are leaders in participatory theatre and performance art (read their full description here). Moreover, ZU-UK’s theatrical experiments often explore intersections between audience and performer through improvisation and interaction, encouraging the re-negotiation of traditional roles within theatre pieces. Their most recent and ongoing piece, Binaural Dinner Date invites participants into the spotlight, evoking intimacy and openness through a correlation of performed gestures and words, while simultaneously investigating contemporary dating expectations.
Sandra Keys: Escape Room on Elder Abuse
This collaborative project was done by: Scott DeJong, Dr. Kim Sawchuk, Constance Lafontaine, Jess Marcotte, RECAA, CREGES, ACT
The escape room on elder abuse is an interactive, educational and immersive space to grapple with the sensitive issue of elder abuse. Small teams of two to four individuals are invited to enter a room, where they are asked to solve puzzles and riddles together. As they progress in the game, players learn about some of the forms that elder abuse can take, and about the resources that are available in the community. The room is designed to open up conversation and raise questions about the messy situations associated with Older Adult Mistreatment. This project is based on a collaboration between ACT, Respecting Elders: Communities against Abuse (RECAA) and the Centre de recherche et d’expertise en gérontologie sociale (CREGÉS).
Reasoning with Computers
Play-D-Pain
Liquid Perceptions
Let’s Play Permadeath Speedrun, Season 2
Re-Crafting Games: The inner life of Minecraft modding
Abstract
Prior scholarship on game modding has tended to focus on the relationship between commercial developers and modders, while the preponderance of existing work on the open-world sandbox game Minecraft has tended to focus on children’s play or the program’s utility as an educational platform. Based on participant observation, interviews with modders, discourse analysis, and the techniques of software studies, this research uncovers the inner life of Minecraft modding practices, and how they have become central to the way the game is articulated as a cultural artifact. While the creative activities of audiences have previously been described in terms of de Certeau’s concept of “tactics,” this paper argues that modders are also engaged in the development of new strategies. Modders thus become “settlers,” forging a new identity for the game property as they expand the possibilities for play. Emerging modder strategies link to the ways that the underlying game software structures computation, and are closely tied to notions of modularity, interoperability, and programming “best practices.” Modders also mobilize tactics and strategies in the discursive contestation and co-regulation of gameplay meanings and programming practices, which become more central to an understanding of game modding than the developer-modder relationship. This discourse, which structures the circulation of gaming capital within the community, embodies both monologic and dialogic modes, with websites, forum posts, chatroom conversations, and even software artifacts themselves taking on persuasive inflections.
ctrl+R: Reflections on Prompting Reflective Game Design
In this presentation we will explore multiple levels of our research question: “What makes a reflective game?” We will first trace the lineage of our game design tool called ctrl+R that is intended to prompt new and reflective game ideas. We will secondly review the preliminary qualitative data collected from a test run of ctrl+R during Global Game Jam 2019, before reflecting on our learned insights about making contexts that we will continue to apply during further ctrl+R development.
Altering Play: How League of Legends Uses Data to Direct Play
Presented at CGC 14th Annual Conference (Insidious):
This presentation explored the "new features" that have entered the League of Legends player client. With increased social features, and promotions on collaborative play, the platform alludes to its adoption of web 2.0 business logics. As these platforms accumulate player performance to develop cosmetics, characters and personalized advertising, questions around player privacy and game play choice arise. By outlining the changes that have entered the games platform over the past decade, this presentation posed questions for further research around social engineering within commercial, free-to-play, online game platforms.
