His research is around prototyping user generated content games. At the University of Alberta he is collaborating with GRAND researchers Geoffrey Rockwell and Jérémie Pelletier-Gagnon.

Professor Watanabe’s experience includes the planning and overseeing of various games such as Magic Pengel(/Garakuta Meisaku Gekijo Rakugaki Okoku)/, which was recommended by the Examination Committee at the 15th Media Arts Festival Media Art Interactive Division, and Minna no shiro, which won the Grand Prize at the First Annual Game Koshien Awards. He is an advocate of “ecological-sketch”, which visualizes rules and is a game design technique that begins from observations of the world as opposed
to imitating the works of others. He conducts research and development in not only traditional game development, but also in applicable fields such as education and crisis management appropriate for “gamification”. He is a member of the Research Committee, Japan Digital Game Association
and Steering Committee, Ritsumeikan Center of Game Studies.

Replaying Japan 2014
2nd International Japan Game Studies Conference
August 21st to 23rd, Edmonton, Canada
Location: Edmonton Clinic Health Academy, Rooms 420 and 430

With support from GRAND the University of Alberta is hosting the second international conference on Japan game studies. This academic conference is jointly organized with Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan. Keynote speakers include:

• Tomohiro Nishikado (Taito, Video game developer known for Space Invaders)
• Mia Consalvo (Concordia University)
• Kevin Kee (Brock University)
• Vadim Butko (University of Alberta)
• Martin Picard (U de Montréal)

Registration is free, but we ask that people register so we have a sense of numbers. There will be a banquet on Thursday the 21st; cost will be $30. Please indicate if you want to attend the banquet on the registration form so we know how many to expect.

Registration now at: https://sites.google.com/a/ualberta.ca/replayingjapan2014/home/registration

See you there!

Twitter: #ReplayJapan2014

Replaying Japan is supported by the GRAND Network for Centres of Excellence, the Ritsumeikan Center for Game Studies, the Prince Takamado Japan Centre of the University of Alberta, and the Japan Foundation.

Jérémie Pelletier-Gagnon has been selected to be a 2014 GRAND Scholar associated with the Digital Humanities (DigHum) project.

Jérémie Pelletier-Gagnon is a former recipient of the Monbukagakusho Research Student Fellowship awarded by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. He conducted research at Wako University (Tokyo) on Japanese video game culture and game localization, expanding on the subject of his master degree previously obtained at McGill University. He blogs for Kinephanos where he is also currently co-editing a new journal issue on Japanese video games and the media mix.

He is currently enrolled at the University of Alberta in the programs of Comparative Literature and Humanities Computing where he has worked on GRAND projects since starting his Ph.D. program. Current projects for GRAND include the translation of the book Famicon to sono jidai, the organization of the coming Replaying Japan 2014 conference, liaison agent for the Bioware Video Game Archive and design for mobile games on the fAR-Play platform. His thesis subject focuses on the analysis of Japanese arcade culture, specifically through the social affordances provided by the interplay between game software, cabinet design and the space of the venue.

The Game of Writing is being used for the first time in a writing course WRS 102 Writing in the Disciplines. This course is the first test of the online gamified writing environment that started as a GRAND prototype research project but not the last – we expect 200 students to enroll in the fall 2014 class.

The Game of Writing, or GwRIT (account needed), is an online writing environment that can be used in a writing course to support student writing development. An interdisciplinary team at the University of Alberta have built GwRIT so that it can be a platform for representing information about a user’s writing back to them through analytics or gamification components. Our working hypothesis is that gamification and analytics can be playful ways of representing real information back to users so that they can make decisions and possibly be motivated to write differently. GwRIT combines composing tools (word processing), reviewing opportunities (commenting), research guidance (resources), models for writing (sample documents), and advice about writing (from a variety of sources) through the GwRIT interface. 

But what sets GwRIT apart from other online learning systems is its focus on student writing in a social network. Innovative aspects of this course include students’ sharing their progress on the assignments with peers and the instructional staff; the ability for all students to see who is working on the same assignments; and the ability to ask for help or advice from those other students. In addition, feedback and informal assessment is available online from peers in the class; from paid peer tutors; from GTAs; and (eventually) from alumni. Commenting in GwRIT takes advantage of social networking practices by allowing students and instructors to give a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” in response to comments. Instructors can also “pin” a comment to the top of the comments list, which appears in a window alongside the word processing window. Students learn what makes for a good comment by reviewing comments that get both a “thumbs up” from the writer of the text and also gets “pinned” by an instructor to the top of the comments list. By writing in this social network and learning from analytics derived from their writing, we have created an innovative and exciting approach to improving student writing.

GwRIT started as a prototype developed with GRAND support by investigator Geoffrey Rockwell. GwRIT was then redeveloped for use in writing courses in partnership with Roger Graves and Heather Graves of the University of Alberta’s Writing Across the Curriculum Initiative. The development was supported by the Faculty of Arts, the Centre for Teaching and Learning and University of Alberta Blended Learning Award. With the first blended course run with GwRIT we now have a platform for the innovative teaching of writing.

A short paper on Gamification, Research and Writing was presented at “Building partnerships to transform scholarly publishing”, Whistler, BC, February, 2014.

Todd Suomela completed his PhD at the University of Tennessee in communication and information science in spring 2014.  His research focused on the framing of citizen science in the media and the organization of communication within citizen science projects.  At the University of Tennessee he worked on the DataONE project, a National Science Foundation DataNet project to integrate data in the environmental and biological sciences.  He is now starting work as a CLIR/DLF fellow in Data Curation for the Sciences and Social Sciences.  He will be working with the Digital Initiatives office at UAlberta libraries and the Humanities Computing Program on a variety of projects connected with data curation, the digital humanities, and web archives.  Although the weather may be different he is looking forward to learning more about the University of Alberta and Canada.  His personal website is at toddsuomela.com and he can be followed on Twitter @tsuomela.