Technoculture, Art and Games (TAG) is an interdisciplinary centre for research/ creation in game studies and design, digital culture and interactive art

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Beasts of Balance – Like Jenga, But With Chimeras

Posted by mi

When cracking open the box for Beasts of Balance, two things quickly become apparent.
First, it is immediately obvious that the physical elements of the game have been constructed lovingly. The box contains half a dozen animals, a collection of abstracted elemental pieces, and two sets of platforms — all beautifully molded out of lightweight plastic. The aesthetic for Beasts of Balance seems to be that of faux-origami, with the game pieces boasting broad flat edges, …

QGCon 2020 Call for Submissions

Posted by Jess

In partnership with TAG and Milieux, QGCon will be returning to Concordia University on May 23rd and 24th, 2020.
Our call for submissions is now open until October 15th. We accept games, talks, workshops, round tables, panels, and are open to experimental formats, too!
You can find more information about our Call for Speakers and Call for Games here.
We look forward to hearing from you!

Workshop: Designing Creative Voice Bots

Oct 03, 2019

Posted by ceyda

by Nicole He
In this workshop, we’ll discuss the history of speech recognition and speech synthesis, learn the basics of conversational design, and then create our own creative voice bots. We’ll learn how to appropriate corporate technology to make experimental, strange, or subversive voice assistants.
Nicole He is a programmer and artist based in Brooklyn, New York, currently making videogames, including an upcoming sci-fi voice-controlled game with the National Film Board of Canada. She has worked as …

DiGRA 2019 – A Cicada Filled Dream

Posted by jessie

In early August 2019, I had the incredible, once in a lifetime opportunity to travel across the globe to Kyoto, Japan with a group of other TAG students for the 2019 Digital Games Research Association Conference (DiGRA) held at Ritsumeikan University from August 6-10th. The conference had over 400 attendees from around the world, featured eight different tracks of talks and three highly engaging keynote presentations. It was my second conference experience and though I …

TAG Profiles: Rebecca Goodine

Posted by mi

TAG Profiles is a blog series that explores the work of current TAG scholars. Rebecca Goodine is a multimedia artist and a master’s student in Concordia’s Design program.
Tell me a little bit about what you’re doing for your master’s.
Emotions and sensitivities is sort of where I’m situated with my current research — specifically, as experienced through physical game design and creative game design that is played in-person. The project that I ended up making for …

DiGRA 2019 and “Touring” a Thesis

Posted by mi

This past August, I had the privilege of participating in the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) conference in Kyoto, Japan. DiGRA is the largest academic conference focusing on games research and I was happy to contribute with my presentation ROM Hacks, Randomizers, and Retro Games: Challenging Copyright and Remixing Zelda. I mainly discussed the second chapter of my master’s thesis — which outlines some of the ways that videogame hackers navigate copyright law to create …