As part of the research project Making Sense of Games, the Center for Computer Games Research is pleased to invite you to this joint lecture by Prof. Carl Therrien from the Université de Montréal and Max Birk, PhD student at the University of Saskatchewan.

Schedule:

16:00 – 16:45: Carl Therrien: Changing views: Towards a visual history of the video game experience.

This talk offers an overview of the ongoing results emerging from a historical documentation project conducted at LUDOV (video games observation and documentation university Lab, Université de Montréal). Throughout this project, the video game experience has been analyzed and documented both in terms of core gameplay configurations, and as a marketed image. Ultimately, users will be able to navigate a web visualization module built from the analysis of thousands of printed ads and hundreds of games over the course of fifteen years.

Bio: Prof. Carl Therrien, PhD, Université de Montréal, Canada. Carl Therrien’s research critically explores the historiography of video games and seeks to create tools to better understand the evolution of this culture and its social perception. Therrien has co-founded and chaired many editions of the Game history symposium in Montreal. His research has been published in Game Studies, New Media & Society and Sciences du jeu. Following a PhD thesis on immersion, he has published on the topic in many anthologies, including The Routledge Companion to Game Studies.

16:45 – 17:00: Break

17:00 – 17:45: Max Birk: From the Shadows into the Spotlight: How Understanding Play Experience can Transform Assessment and Interventions in Mental Health. The stereotypes of the negative effects of video game play have overshadowed their potential to support individual well-being and mental health. In this talk I will address the importance of understanding individual differences in play experience and motivation when leveraging games to build the future of at-scale mental health assessment and interventions. Drawing from research experience in designing and researching digital games from an interdisciplinary perspective that brings in expertise from computer science, psychology, and human-computer interaction, I will focus on how we address the ever-present tension between ecological validity and experimental control in digital games research. This talk will provide a foundation to discuss the interdisciplinary demands that we face when utilizing games to address global challenges in mental health research.

Bio: Max Birk is a PhD Student in Computer Science at the University of Saskatchewan. His research evolves around the psychological concept of the self, focusing on implications for player experience research and game design, e.g., modeling motivation and engagement. Max studied at the University of Trier, Germany, where he researched the physiological and endocrinological effects of videogames. Working in psychophysiology, experimental psychology, games user research, and humancomputer-interaction, Max has a variety of experience, all connected by his interest in games. He has worked with globe spanning companies like the Chinese company Tencent, and with indie companies of all sizes in Europe and North America. Max has served as a program committee member for multiple international HCI conferences. Currently he is the assistant to the chairs for CHI 2018 in Montreal, and co-chairs the Spotlight paper track for CHI Play 2017 in Amsterdam. With 20 published or accepted papers related to games, and several best paper awards, Max was selected for the prestigious IGDA Games Developer Conference scholarship in 2016.