Concordia’s Behaviour Interactive Scholarships propel students toward innovation in game design

Thirteen Concordia students have been awarded Behaviour Interactive (BI) Scholarships to support and inspire innovative projects in game design. The scholarship, funded by the Montreal-based independent video-game developer, aims to provide students with mentorship and resources to advance their research-creation work.

Of the recipients, four are graduate students and nine are undergraduates. Graduate awardees get $15,000 and undergraduates each receive $5,000, allowing them to push their creative projects forward. In addition to the financial support, the students will have the opportunity to showcase their projects at a spring exhibition.

“The scholarship aims to build a community of practice and make these projects as innovative and inspiring as possible,” says Jonathan Lessard, associate professor and researcher in Concordia’s Department of Design and Computation Arts. Lessard also holds the Behaviour Interactive Research Chair in Game Design.

Doctoral student Courtney Blamey and master’s student Dimana Radoeva, BA 22, are two of this year’s recipients. They each share how the scholarship will help them further their projects and the fresh approach they hope to bring to storytelling and gameplay.

A game of empathy and self-acceptance

Blamey, a PhD student in the Department of Communication Studies, is designing a unique “dating sim game” as part of her research-creation work toward her dissertation. This interactive experience allows players to engage with their own self-judgments through relationships with other characters. In the game, players form friendships with characters who personify challenges such as procrastination, imposter syndrome and the “inner child.” These characters offer players a way to examine and address self-esteem struggles many people face in their daily lives.

For Blamey, the BI scholarship funding and community of practice will allow her to focus on crucial aspects of her work.

“It enables me to focus on actually making the game. With the undergrad cohort joining us, I can get help with the art from some very talented folks,” she shares. “Over the next year, I am hoping to release a full demo, with room to grow the game beyond that point.”

Blamey is also documenting her design journey for the Games as Research project at Concordia, led by professors Rilla Khaled and Pippin Barr.

She says her goal is not only to advance her own research but also to inspire others: “I hope this project champions the idea that games can be valuable sites for research and reflection.”

Reimagining classic literature to reflect the research process

Radoeva, a master’s student in the INDI program, is reimagining the Old English epic poem Beowulf in her interactive narrative game, YOU WILL NOT WIN AND YOU MUST DIE, YOU CHURL.

Set in ninth-century Denmark, the game follows “BEED,” a fictional computational wizard who has abandoned her research on a biography of Beowulf. Players are invited to piece together her lost work and the remnants of Beowulf’s life through broken images and a textual puzzle that remixes the mythic poem.

“Essentially, I aim to craft an interactive narrative gameplay sequence that presents the poem as fragmented raw material for literary analysis by the player,” Radoeva explains.

Embracing the aesthetic of 1990s-era GeoCities blogs, the project highlights the incomplete and often chaotic nature of research, offering a humorous and engaging experience where academic materials take on new life as players dive into BEED’s “abandoned” research archive.

“The only reason CHURL exists is because the INDI program and three professors also thought the question, ‘What if Beowulf was a real guy who might have sucked and GeoCities existed in the ninth century?’ was a cool idea for a game,” she says.

Radoeva explains that the project also reflects on the research process itself: “It embraces and amplifies the messiness of research. The setting exposes the unfinished nature of the abandoned process of BEED’s academic, personal and material research.”

For Radoeva, the BI scholarship means she can dedicate herself to completing the game’s narrative and visual elements. She shares that she hopes the project inspires other students in literary game studies to pursue bold and experimental ideas.

“Whoever else is interested in doing research-creation rooted in design, remember that you also have cool ideas about academic material you are fascinated with — make a weird experimental video game about them! Now, please, for me!”

Find out more about the Individualized Program at Concordia’s School of Graduate Studies.

Explore more research-creation projects in game studies and beyond through the Technoculture, Art and Games (TAG) research centre at Concordia.