From the Interactive Media & Games Seminar Series; Bonnie Ruberg, Provost's Postdoctoral Scholar in the Interactive Media and Games Division at the University of Southern California addresses how for decades LGBTQ people have been underrepresented in mainstream video games. Queerness in video games is more than a matter of who we see on-screen; it's also a matter of identity, community, and game systems. Thinking about games from the perspective of queerness offers us valuable lessons...

From the Interactive Media & Games Seminar Series; Andrew McStay, a Reader in Advertising and Digital Media, Bangor University examines how gaming is a leading example of empathic media because it was first within the media industry to market rich consumer-level biometric entertainment; but also because it offers a clear sense of the value exchange implicit in consumer-level empathic media (data for services).

From the Interactive Media & Games Seminar Series; Jari Multisilta, professor of multimedia at the Tampere University of Technology discusses the challenge of motivating students to learn and become engaged in learning. Using the mobile video experience platform EdVisto (formelly MoViE) for creating and sharing collaboratively produced video stories. This talk presents outcomes from two projects on how students became engaged and motivated when using digital storytelling in knowledge...

From the Interactive Media & games Seminar Series; Colin Campbell, a Senior reporter at Polygon, addresses how Video games are now part of the culture wars. Their content is used by critics and consumers to stake claim to political positions, some of which are extreme. Designers use games to make powerful political arguments. This is a process that has accelerated in the last five years, even while gaming's most powerful publishers have sought to keep their heads down. Where is it likely...

From the Interactive Media & Games Seminar Series; Kellee Santiago, Partner Manager for Indie Developers at Google Play Games explores the ways in which video games have both grown in their complexity and receded further into their roots as a commodity sold behind closed curtains in the back of the shop. Is there a momentum towards something greater, or have we seen the wave crash and roll back into the sea?

From the Interactive Media & Games Seminar Series; Stephanie Boluk & Patrick LeMieux, assistant professors in the Cinema and Digital Media Program and English Department at UC Davis discuss the history of the metagame and 'The Play" an unexpected, 17-second upset that broke the metagame during The International 2, Valve’s million-dollar tournament in 2012.

From the Interactive Media & Games Seminar Series; Jon Peterson, an author researching the history of Wargames and Role-playing games looks at the long shadow that analog wargames and role-playing have cast on the games of today, and explores connections that let us contextualize modern gaming in a rich tradition of intellectual history.

From the Interactive Media & Games Seminar Series; Marilyn Walker, Professor of Computer Science and head of the Natural Language and Dialogue Systems Lab at the University of California, Santa Cruz, discusses her work on storytelling agents who retell existing stories, such as personal narratives posted on weblogs. She describes her method for representing the deep semantic structure of these stories, and how these representations allow us to produce thousands of different retellings of...

From the Interactive Media & Games Seminar Series; Lining Yao, a PhD Candidate at Tangible Media Group, MIT Media Lab discusses how Technology, is designed to recapitulate biology. As we strive to design physical objects and architecture that are adaptive, responsive and ever evolving, we find ourselves immersed in Nature’s way. Yet, after years of practice in transforming materiality for adaptive physical interfaces, we realize that it is the combination of the two worldviews — both...

From the Interactive Media & Games Seminar Series; John Aycokc, Associate Professor Computer Science, University of Calgary uses retrogame archeology to look under the hood of old games to uncover the clever tricks that make them tick. Learn about what retrogame archeology is (and isn't) and how old games are studied today.