The theme of this year’s Canadian Game Studies Association conference was “Edges”. Situated during the annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, the theme seemed geographically appropriate given the location on Canada’s western edge in Victoria, B.C. a few kilometres from the Pacific ocean.
Our post -doc Jen Whitson presented her paper “The Core vs. Casual battle over metrics-driven design” which won the best conference paper, and award she shared with Carl Therrien of Universite de Montréal for his paper “Living in the Edge, or Mapping the Situation: The illusion of symbiosis and the six types of mapping in video game interface design.
William “Diamond Bill” Robinson, winner of last years best paper award opened the Wednesday sessions by giving a plenary talk on player competency with his “On the Necessity of Player Competency” with focussed on his board game Gets It Better: Poor, Ugly, Gay, Stupid, Sick.
Other presentations from TAGsters were:
Lynn Hughes presents the Jeu Le Jeux exhibition that she curated w/ Cindy Poremba & Heather Kelly in 2012 in Paris.
Skot Deeming & Christine Kim present their Vector game art festival&symposium. Skot will be joining TAG in September as a INDI PhD student, supervised by Prof. Lynn Hughes.
Thorstein Busch who gave two papers “Corporate responsibility: at the edge of the gaming industry?” and “How to regulate ‘toxic gamer culture’? Online gaming platforms and corporate responsibility”.
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I presented my paper “Individuals of Play” about the ontological status and significance of play.
-Adam van Sertima