A Canadian Game Studies Association Pre-Conference
Serious Game Arcade

Panel 1
What are we doing when designing serious games?
As evident from the variety of projects represented in this event, serious games come in many guises, from diverse disciplines, and with different motivations and goals. This panel will look at the practice of serious game design: how we understand what we do, what we have in common, and what challenges, pitfalls, approaches, and needed supports we share.
Panel 2
How do serious games open up possibilities through play?
Serious games imagine new realities, ideas, or directions, but it is only in their play that these become actualized. This panel rests in themes of imagined futures, painful pasts, and current struggles, to ask what possibilities serious games explore not in their design but in their play and implementation. We look at serious games as tools for research, where the questions they ask bleed beyond their design but to the audiences they interact with and the impact they have.
The Arcade
Games from Educators, Academics, and Designers
Known Mysteries
Known Mysteries is an experimental narrative game that follows a small town that has been taken over by an oil-tech conglomerate and the residents and workers aim to figure out ways to keep living in it. It operates similar to a visual novel, mixed with full motion video. The player is aligned with Sorrow, a woman who is still grieving the sudden loss of her parents, quits her job and returns to her childhood home. It is about the feelings brought on in the climate crisis and imagining a future of community coalition to work against it.
The game uses compressed found footage and particular design techniques to lower the computational demand and lower carbon output of downloading and playing the game. It is hosted on a solar-powered web server.
Stream Evil
Following games like Centre of Excellence, Paparazzi, and It Comes in Waves, this project explores how to weave together narrative, gameplay, and moral dilemma. In this instance the player takes on the role of a Twitch streamer, who must choose whether to stay true to their normal 'hero' gameplay, or step outside that role and possibly make Partner, with its attendant fame and income.
(val)iant
(val)iant: or, val's guide to having a broken vag is a medical narrative game about vagina problems, including pelvic floor dysfunction. Play as Val, a nonbinary college student struggling with their relationship to their body, as well as their relationship with sex. This game is fundamentally about how we as a society learn (or don't learn) about sex.

Les Coulisses du Quotidien
Les Coulisses du Quotidien is a serious game that raises awareness about urban challenges and the realities of daily caregiving. It explores the complexities of urban planning and mobility through the lens of caregivers, highlighting the invisible workload they manage. Players navigate the responsibilities of a day in the life of women and individuals responsible for caregiving within their families or communities. Through play, players gain insight into the real-life workload of care and the overlooked urban barriers they face such as travel planning, location accessibility, public space usage, and the lack of shared facilities.
Crops Withered
The Crops Withered is a single player tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) I designed inspired by the grecian tale, “The Abduction of Persephone.” Used to account for the changing of seasons, the story focuses on Demeter, goddess of the harvest, searching for her daughter, Persephone, who has been abducted to the underworld by its ruler, Hades, to be his queen. The player chronicles Demeter’s quest to find her daughter. Cards drawn from a tarot deck align with prompts for the players to respond to in their narration, a type of procedural storytelling. Playing from Demeter’s perspective allows the player to engage the tensions among the various tellings of Persephone’s Abduction, leaving space for ambiguity as a sight of playful exploration of ambivalence among the interpretations; whereas Persephone’s own perspective might offer a much too definitive answer. Doing so, we allow space to understand how one can be both a survivor of deep trauma and a mighty queen goddess.
Project Aude
In the near future, disaster has struck the UNB Archives and Special Collections. A terrible fire has destroyed all the incredible photographs, papers, and artifacts that document UNB’s history. But, wait… all is not lost! Out of the shadows step a group of professors to announce the completion of a long-running secret research project. Codenamed Project AUDE (short for Accelerated Universal Dimensional Engine), it is the world’s first functioning time machine! The professors reveal their plan to save the university’s history by sending their best student assistants back in time to recover the artifacts and photographs lost in the fire.
Answer Campus: First Semester
Answer Campus: First Semester is a narrative game that follows a first year undergraduate student as they navigate the social, academic, and emotional terrain of their first semester. Designed to foster empathy and reflection, the game blends slice-of-life storytelling with light simulation mechanics. Players explore campus spaces, build relationships, and respond to challenging conversations around stereotypes and microaggressions.
Each playthrough surfaces a few uncomfortable conversations, ensuring a personalized and replayable experience. The game also features a minigames tied to socializing and academic success. Built for research and education, Answer Campus: First Semester is the entry point to a larger game universe through various episodes that focusing on varying themes.
Protection
Protection: The Board Game was created to help humanitarian professionals learn about protection in an engaging and practical way. Protection applies the principals of Results-Based Protection (RBP) through realistic scenarios to test and instruct on this agile methodology. Players navigate realistic scenarios, building their knowledge and testing their decisions to see how they impact people at risk. The game is grounded in the InterAction RBP approach, particularly the protection risk equation and the idea of protection as an outcome. While ideally played in workshops with experienced facilitators, the game includes guides that make it accessible to all. It is best suited for NGO leaders working in crisis environments, offering a hands-on experience in how to prioritize protection at a strategic level. The ultimate goal is freedom from violence, coercion, and deliberate deprivation.

The Feed:
A game of social media mischief
Build conspiracies, sew outrage, or maybe share cute cats - you choose. The Feed is a game where you make and move content throughout social media. From influencers, to trolls, and agents of chaos, players take on actors to show how content moves through media environments for good or bad. Craft your media spaces, manipulate communities, and use tactics to have the Feed bow to you.

Omertà Unbroken
Omertà Unbroken is a serious card-based role game designed to stage critical encounters between human creativity and generative AI in filmmaking. Framed by the visual and narrative legacy of The Godfather, this game invites 7–9 players to collaboratively construct prompts for AI video generation tools like Runway, while uncovering hidden saboteurs within their team. Blending deception, cinematic craft, and AI interrogation, the game challenges players to reflect on authorship, agency, and the emerging aesthetics of machine-generated media. Its open-ended, generative format fosters not only engagement but deep reflection on the cultural and political implications of AI. By transforming anxiety into agency, the game enables a break from deterministic narratives around automation and invites players to co-author the evolving role of technology in storytelling.

EconoEmpire
EconoEmpire is a dynamic, team-based business simulation game designed to immerse students in the real-world complexities of running a company in a competitive economy. Over a 12-week period, players make strategic decisions in areas such as pricing, production, investment, marketing, and human resources. Each team manages a fictional company within a specific industry—such as technology, fashion, agriculture, or healthcare—and must respond to changing market conditions and unpredictable events.
EconoEmpire is more than a game—it’s an active learning experience that brings business theory to life through engaging, competitive, and cooperative gameplay. It enhances decision-making skills, encourages critical reflection, and prepares students for the complexities of real-world economic leadership.

CoExist
Coexist emerged from a simple yet powerful question: What if chess pieces from opposing sides were allowed—or even encouraged—to share the same space? This idea sparked the creation of a cooperative, chess-inspired experience that reimagines traditional gameplay. The objective is not domination, but unity: by combining the movement abilities of their pieces, players create “safe zones” that protect them from the game’s hazards. Strategic collaboration is essential, as players must plan their moves together, anticipate threats, and adapt to changing conditions. The ultimate goal is to bring both kings together on the same tile for a symbolic handshake—a gesture of peace, cooperation, and shared victory.
Coexist encourages a shift in mindset, from competition to coexistence, offering a thoughtful twist on a centuries-old game.

The Jagged Time
The Jagged Time is a narrative deckbuilder about the Late Bronze Age Collapse which explores the ways that games can articulate historical arguments. The player leads the People of the Reeds, an analogue for New Kingdom Egypt, through hundreds of years of history, shaping both their own domestic political institutions as well as the shape of the broader world before the overlapping crises of the Late Bronze Age Collapse threaten to tear it all down.

City Player
CityPlayer is a game that contributes to democratizing urban development, making planning processes more transparent, inclusive, and accessible. By strengthening citizen participation, CityPlayer aims to foster more sustainable, responsive, and equitable cities, supporting long-term urban resilience. In the game the player is presented with a series of ‘journeys’ that they can take in and around the hub, exploring different topics such as ‘how safe is it waiting for a bus at midnight’ or ‘how easy is to find the bike racks’ or ‘how does greenery / public art/music all affect feelings of well-being within the hub’.
For each journey, the game lets the player explore a range of scenarios (different locations for bike racks, different configurations and levels of lighting, different seating types, different signage options), and through experiencing these scenarios, they can give informed feedback on their preferences around these scenarios.

Project: Self
​Project: Self (working title) is a visual novel "dating" sim that explores why we often readily give empathy to others' shortcomings and struggles, but rarely to our own. In the game, you play as a new tenant of a building that needs some serious maintenance. Your role is to get your fellow tenants to sign on for a tenancy board, so that you can hold an absent landlord accountable, but each of the tenants is hesitant to sign. By spending time with each tenant, traversing through their lives and struggles, you will learn more about who they are and their hesitations and try to persuade them to join your cause.