If you scored some new gear these holidays, you might consider donating some of your old stuff to us: specifically, we’re looking for Playstation 3s, flat-screen monitors/LCD TVs (22″+), and digital projectors to enhance our game literacy and exhibition programs. Email us at info@handeyesociety.com if you’re feeling like being generous to a non-profit videogame arts organization!

To see what you’d be contributing to, here’s a quick recap of what we’ve been up to in our 2014 efforts to showcase and nurture creative expression in games.

We celebrated our fifth birthday with a Fancy Videogame Party at the Art Gallery of Ontario, with over 600 game enthusiasts — check the video here. We also helped program a videogame section for an Ontario Science Centre event.

Our game literacy program Game Curious? was held at the Toronto Reference Library. Participants from diverse backgrounds played and discussed a variety of games every Saturday for six weeks, followed by a six week course where some participants made their own games.

We prototyped a new initiative called To the Streets, exhibiting local games in public spaces for passers-by to play. Check out the video documentation and call for collaborators here.

We ran two Artsy Games Incubators, one focused on animators and one on writers, with the intent to create inter-arts dialogue and collaboration. (Crumb Quest, above, was one of the games produced — click here to see more!)

We had Comics vs Games at the Toronto Comics Arts Festival again, with a slate of talks held at Bento Miso such as the one above about autobio comics and autobio games.

We did talks about Toronto game culture and our activities at the Game Developers Conference (“Curating Video Game Culture: The New Wave of Video Game Events” can be watched here) in San Francisco and IndieCade in Los Angeles.

WordPlay, our Festival of Writerly Games, returned to the wonderful Toronto Reference Library with a half-dozen international speakers and a new Awards ceremony. If you missed the Dungeons of Fayte talk, you can now check out the audio and slides here.

Our website got a much needed revamp and our logo got a refresh!

Thanks to our volunteers who helped us make it happen, and of course thanks to our 2014 partners: those mentioned above and Wild Rumpus, OMDC, Curio, Ontario Trillium Foundation, OCAD, Ryerson, Art Starts, Toronto Arts Council, Attract Mode, Sensorium, Vector, Toronto Animated Image Society, Toronto Animated Arts Festival International, & Story Planet.

We’re busily planning our 2015 now, so stay tuned for details on what’s upcoming!