More than 300 scholars from around the world are set to converge at the University of Toronto Mississauga to dig into to the multi-faceted world of video games.
The 18th annual Serious Play conference, scheduled for Aug. 12 to 14, will focus on themes such as game development, the use of games in education and the socio-cultural role of games in a world that increasingly reflects this discipline's choose-your-own adventure ethos.
"Games are uniquely relevant to our moment in history - and it has nothing to do with their economic impact or the popularity of video games," says Serious Play executive director Paul Darvasi, who lectures at U of T's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education on the topics of games and learning.
"[It has] more to do with us living in a participatory dynamic culture. [Games] are arguably the art form of the 21st century."
A long-time attendee, Darvasi and his business partner Elisa Navarro took over the conference late last year. They decided to bring the conference to Greater Toronto to take advantage of U of T Mississauga's new game studies program, the campus's extensive Syd Bolton video game collection and the energy emanating from the region's lively game development community.
Alexandra Gillespie, U of T vice-president and principal of U of T Mississauga, will deliver opening remarks as well as host a welcome reception for conference participants, including several U of T experts.
While the global gaming industry grosses more than the music and film sectors combined, the Serious Play participants will be discussing other facets of gaming - namely the many ways it can be used to improve education, training and other types of learning.
"Play is merely the way that nature incentivizes our species to learn," Darvasi says. "Children learn through play. It's a hyper-motivated way for them to engage in practices that are going to prepare them for participation in society."
Culturally, he adds, games encompass virtually all the other art forms, including writing, dance, theatre, photography, film, sculpture and painting. Darvasi, who co-owns developer Gold Bug Interactive, describes video games as "this grand opera of human endeavour, which is weird to think about because it gets a bad name that's obscuring its more potent cultural value."
Lawrence Switzky, an associate professor in U of T Mississauga's department of English and drama who has been a driving force behind the games studies program, uses game development as a way of teaching students about narrative and character, among other themes.
"This conference is a great fit for us," Switzky says. "The largest games and learning conference on the continent belongs at UTM because we have the talent and resources to accommodate it, and because we're establishing ourselves as a leader in the field with the Syd Bolton and Electric Playground collections, our game studies minor and all our programming."
The conference will include sessions on games and history education - including a session on "playing the past" with U of T doctoral candidate Ariana Ellis, who helped organize U of T Mississauga's Day of Play event last year - along with virtual reality development, cybersecurity and gamification of climate action for K-12 students. Other sessions will tackle topics ranging from higher education to health care and culture and society.
Darvasi notes that Girls Who Game, a non-profit focused on gender and gaming backed by Dell, Microsoft and Intel, will collaborate on a session on esports competitive gaming, which he says has a reputation for being a very male-centric environment.
"We're really highlighting the positive participation of women in esports, and we're going to be demonstrating that," he says.
Some game development sessions will focus on buzzy technologies like generative AI and large-language models. For example, some developers are using ChatGPT to build highly complex scenario-based games in which the players participate through prompts to navigate the story.
Darvasi says it's only a matter of time before those games acquire visual elements also generated by algorithmic and user prompts.
"That's the next step for sure."
