The Postdoc Day IMMERSe event at U Waterloo last week gave me a chance to present in front of and listen to presentations from games scholars doing work all over the network’s six schools. As I mentioned in my last weeknote, the meeting was not something I was originally meant to present at–I was sent mainly to network, listen, and maintain continuity for Concordia’s node. However, an unexpected turn of events brought me to UW toting a presentation to give on behalf of our own postdoc Rob Gallagher, who couldn’t make it. I was a little blindsided by the whole thing–I thought it was going to be a meeting around a table, and when I arrived I learned we were talking in front of an audience in a small theatre. The talk I gave, however, is probably the least interesting thing I can bring back from the event. Anyone who’s read my writing on this site in the past is well versed in the IMMERSe work we’ve been doing over the past year. Instead of rehashing any of that, I’ll write here about the other presentations I heard, as best as I can recall them.

After Neil Randall got up and made some opening remarks about the genesis of the network, the first presentation of the day was delivered by Amanda Phillips, the incoming postdoc at UC Davis. Like me, Amanda has a background in English lit, and the work she’s concentrating on at Davis speaks to that. Their focus seems to be on gender, race, and sexuality in games. The team is interested in games as civic technologies, how they can be used to communicated meaningful themes (currently they’re developing games about fracking, queerness, urban datascapes, and feminist game studies) and as pedagogical social justice tools in the classroom: Phillips herself has led a class on game design that did four weeks reading theory and six weeks building prototypes of games that looked at stuff like nuances of domestic violence (Tethered: two players tethered together in a maze, one of whom can drag and damage the other) and IF on same-sex relationships in an LA urban gangster sort of context (Love like a cholo: a dating simulation). Surprisingly, though it was an English class, the students didn’t need to be taught a lot of the technology (this resonates with the class Darren Wershler taught this spring in which students were expected to play in Minecraft). She’s currently planning a social game jam for the fall (another possible point of overlap with our node and something I need to tell Carolyn Jong about when she gets back in a few weeks).

Besides this work, UC Davis seems to be a great place to go if you want to look at performance studies stuff incorporated with game studies–one project mentioned was data mining Beckett, another was Play the Knave, where you animate theatre using the  Kinect–not only acting, but also lighting and staging (all this is based on the Mekanimator technical platform). The node is relying on UC Davis’ many theatre connections, particularly Shakespeare (they have ties to both Stratford and the Folger Shakespeare Library). They’re also doing some work on medievalism in gaming, another obvious point of connection between our two teams, and something that may be of particular interest to Stephen Yeager.

But the most fascinating work seems to be Amanda’s own project, one which takes a deep look at the politics of motion capture and how it impacts facial expression. The racial politics of performance are embedded in all video games, even those that claim to allow you the freedom to make your own character. Phillips noticed that the subjects used to exhibit facial capture technology are often women and people of colour, an observation that led her to Facegen, the 3D modelling middleware by Toronto-based developer Singular Inversions that supplies a lot of the facial modulation stuff in video games, including Elder Scrolls and Fallout titles. Based on Amanda’s research, the sliders you can use to customize your avatar’s face at the beginning of the game are connected to each other in ways that normalize race and gender–so for example, if you slide more towards female and you get more East Asian aspects. The implications of this study are huge and immediately many more questions open up. And obviously, the area of identity performance in TES games is interesting and relevant to us over here, especially Carolyn’s work into gendered bodies in Skyrim mods.

Amanda didn’t miss all these clear connections and potential collaborations either–I gave my presentation right after she gave hers (she wasn’t there physically, but rather telecommuted), and before the rest of the presentations had even finished she sent me an email basically identifying all the same things I’ve elaborated above. It looks like there may be room for our nodes to communicate with each other really effectively and get some cool work done in the coming year.