User retention is the first challenge in introducing any information and communication technologies (ICT) for health applications, particularly for seniors who are increasingly targeted as beneficiaries of such technologies. Interaction with digital technologies may be too stressful to older adults to guarantee their adoption in their routine selfcare. The second challenge, which also relates to adoption, is to supply empirical evidence that support the expectations of their beneficial outcomes. To address the first challenge, persuasive technologies such as serious games (SGs) are increasingly promoted as ludic approaches to deliver assistive care to older adults.

Presented at the Canadian Game Studies Association, this presentation built off of my previous work of League of Legends, discussing how of conglomeration, user data and the esport scene influences player behaviour. Connecting to arguments of surveillance, filter bubbles, and the digital economy, this presentation argued that game platforms are actively shaping users play habits and preferences. I initially explore the relationship between Tencent's control of Riot Games (founders of League of Legends) and the social features that are introduced and adjusted. This is furthered by connecting it to recent work on the dangers of the digital economy, exploring how these economic practices are embedded in the free-to-play game platform. Finally, this presentation concluded with a brief discussion of the competitive community space. Highlighting the impact of League of Legend's popular competitive scene, I argue that its popularity directly influences players to participate in the game 'like the pros'. While some of my claims do not directly impact each player, these processes (among unexplored others), cause a change in community play. I conclude by discussing the positive potential of these process, specifically around toxic community cultures.

This thesis explores how a selection of video games, created by transgender people using the free software Twine, create space for the survival and flourishing of queer and trans subjects through visions of transformative relationships. It deploys the lenses of queer theories of failure (Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure), disidentification (Muñoz, Disidentifications), and utopianism (Muñoz, Cruising Utopia) to perform close readings of the techniques of narrative and game mechanics used as strategies for survival, resistance, and relationality in anna anthropy’s Encyclopedia Fuckme and the Case of the Vanishing Entree and Queers in Love at the End of the World, Porpentine Charity Heartscape’s With Those We Love Alive, and ira prince’s Queer Trans Mentally Ill Power Fantasy. The analysis focuses on games produced in and around the moment of the “Twine revolution” (Harvey) that aimed in the early 2010s to radically re-envision video games as spaces for minoritized subjects to thrive. Even as the transformation of video games culture as a whole remains an unrealized ideal, this paper argues for the importance of revisiting the under-examined queer strategies these games depict and enact in order to imagine possibilities for “rewrit[ing] the game” (Halberstam in Halberstam and Juul), and through this for “rewrit[ing] the map of everyday life” (Muñoz, Cruising Utopia 25), possibilities which can allow for the flourishing of queer and trans modes of relationality within and against toxic and exclusive norms in game play and design.

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.