Centre de recherche TAG (Technoculture, Art and Games)^BR+CA/QC

Centre de recherche TAG (Technoculture, Art and Games)<sup>BR+CA/QC</sup>

Dr. Rilla Khaled is an Associate Professor at Concordia University and Director of its Technoculture, Art and Games (TAG) Research Centre. She works with design, games, and HCI, and focuses on interactive technologies to improve the human condition.

Enric Llagostera is a game maker and researcher from São Paulo, Brazil who engages with unconventional, anti-capitalist ways of making and circulating games. His PhD research questions what is alternative about alternative game controllers.

Dr. Jess Rowan Marcotte designs, writes and thinks about interactive experiences from a queer, intersectional point of view. They co-founded the Soft Chaos Cooperative and lead the Queerness and Games conference (QGCon). Their doctorate is in interaction design, from Concordia University.

Steven Sych is a Master’s in Design (MDes) student. His work places the technological-quotidian realities of 2021 into surprising contexts and configurations, and aims to open up pathways for meaningfully re-approaching the role of the digital in our everyday lives.

Enric Llagostera ^BR/QC — Cook Your Way

A relational work based on cooking to comment on immigration systems and multiculturalist discourses. Cook Your Way is a game about how immigration systems and capitalist discourses of multiculturalism combine to oppress migrants. Visa applicants (the players) are tasked with cooking a typical dish of their country of origin at a cooking station. Immigration authorities then evaluate applicants according to their efficiency and potential to contribute to the new country’s society. Cooking becomes a standardized test, one step within a longer application process.

Jess Rowan Marcotte ^CA/QC — TRACES

Hybrid play on transgender experience in light of time travel. TRACES is a physical-digital hybrid game experience about trans experiences and science-fiction-themed time travel in a Western 2018/2019 context. It uses RFID technology and custom interfaces to guide players through a space while they are observed and approached by the denizens of 2019.

Steven Sych ^CA/QC — MNG+ (Menu New Game+)

Exploration of an imaginary based on a video game main menu. Main menus are the first thing we see when we start a video game. We often ignore them entirely. Yet through a main menu, it is possible to preview an entire game: from its atmosphere and graphics to its gameplay and story, we immediately get a sense of the whole. MNG+ explores this marginal, ignorable corner of games by presenting a series of main menus for games that do not exist. Each menu invites the audience to imagine its specific game, with its own development, gameworld, set of mechanics, graphical style, and so on. It is a work of magical realist interactive fiction.