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< Back Andrei Iacob University of Essex iGGi Alum Identifying Immersion in games using EEG and other measures (Industry placement at Sony SIE) The project aims to identify markers for immersion in player’s EEG signals. A few steps towards it include designing an experiment that reduces data noise and helps identify time frames for immersion during gameplay, recording EEG data among other “tests” to improve the accuracy of the state localization on a timeline. This research could prove useful for the games industry in a few ways: - it can provide tools for game testing (e.g. which parts of the game are immersive, which parts lack in that aspect) – thus making it easier to improve the game experience across the board; - it could also be used in making real-time adjustments to games (increase / decrease difficulty levels, pace, etc. to enhance the player’s immersion). Although the EEG data is the main focus of the project, it is not the only one. Correlations will be analyzed between different tests and in-game behaviors that should render even more information regarding the player’s state and mindset during gameplay. This information will be just as valuable and perhaps more readily available for widespread use in the near future. Andrei is a keen programmer and gamer. He graduated with a BSc (Hons) in Computer Science from the University of Essex. Andrei’s research interests are in the field of brain- computer interfaces and computer games. His hobbies include programming, gaming, guitar and skiing. Please note: Updating of profile text in progress Email Website LinkedIn Mastodon BlueSky GitHub Other Link Themes Player Research - Previous Next

< Back Dr Myat Aung University of York iGGi Alum Immersion is a state in which players are engaged to a degree of total absorption that inhibits the ability to correctly report one’s surroundings or time. Present theory on immersion has developed a coherent model that provides sufficient evidence to distinguish itself from other cognitive concepts such as presence, attention, selective attention, absorption and flow. However, immersion research thus far has been hindered by difficulties with taking in-vivo measurements of cognition and physiological responses during videogame play. This presents an ideal opportunity for implementations of neuroimaging methods to carry out such real time measurements of attention, as well as other cognitive processes and their roles in videogame immersion. Using various combinations of neural and physiological methods such as skin conductance, eye tracking, electroencephalography and even functional magnetic resonance imaging, it is now possible to obtain richer data in immersion research. The goal of this project is to apply such methods in order to better define and measure videogame immersion, identify the cognitive processes and hierarchical models that are involved in immersion and ultimately contribute to the literature in videogame immersion. Though neuroimaging is limited by statistical sensitivity, challenging experimental logistics and non-ideal lab environments, they are still presently the best tools available to obtain fine-grain data of attention and the many other cognitive components of immersion. Such knowledge would contribute significantly to a better understanding of effective development of videogames, as well as educational tools. I am an MPsych Psychology graduate from the University of York, having studied Psychology, Cognitive Neuroscience & Neuroimaging for four years. My Master’s research was primarily in vision, attempting to manipulate and record parahippocampal responses to visual stimuli selected parametrically by computer algorithms. During my degree I also spent much of my time researching videogames, studying the literature on the effects of videogame play on sleep, and working with a IGGI PhD student as a lab assistant. Between my degree and my PhD, I have also been working as a data analyst at Digital Creativity Labs researching skill learning in large gaming populations from Riot Games’ League of Legends. Please note: Updating of profile text in progress Email Website LinkedIn Mastodon BlueSky GitHub Other Link Featured Publication(s): Different rules for binocular combination of luminance flicker in cortical and subcortical pathways Investigating the non-disruptive measurement of immersive player experience The trails of just cause 2: spatio-temporal player profiling in open-world games Predicting skill learning in a large, longitudinal MOBA dataset Themes Game AI - Previous Next

< Back Dr Oliver Withington Queen Mary University of London iGGi Alum Available for post-PhD position Oliver Withington is a AI and games researcher working on novel methods for evaluating content generation systems for games. Following a successful career in the healthcare technology industry he decided to combine his life long love of games and interest in AI research into a PhD with the iGGi CDT in 2020. He lives in London with his wife and two young daughters, and when he is not writing about, thinking about, or talking about games you can probably find him in either his local bouldering gym, or in the park either pursuing or being pursued by two small children. A description of Oliver's research: Oliver's primary motivation is to make the evaluation of novel content generators more standardised, robust and straightforward for both researchers and game designers. Currently his focus is on techniques for producing informative visualisations of the output spaces of content generators. His work has been published at many of the leading conferences in his field, and he has also taken his work and ideas to the game industry, most recently in the form of a talk at GDC 2025's AI Summit. Email owithington@hotmail.co.uk Website LinkedIn Mastodon BlueSky GitHub Other Link Supervisors: Dr Jeremy Gow Dr Laurissa Tokarchuk Featured Publication(s): Designer Difficulties: Visualizing the Possibility Spaces of Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment Systems Exploring the Possibility Space of 1 Billion Spells Exploring Minecraft Settlement Generators with Generative Shift Analysis HarmonyMapper: Generating Emotionally Divers Chord Progressions for Games. The Right Variety: Improving Expressive Range Analysis with Metric Selection Methods Visualising Generative Spaces Using Convolutional Neural Network Embeddings Compressing and Comparing the Generative Spaces of Procedural Content Generators Illuminating Super Mario Bros: quality-diversity within platformer level generation Themes Creative Computing Design & Development Game AI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4m1gYriq_pc Previous Next

< Back Dr Guifen Chen Queen Mary University of London Supervisor Dr Guifen Chen is a Lecturer in Neurobiology at QMUL. Her work focuses on the neuronal basis of multisensory integration, spatial cognition and memory. Her lab uses state-of-the-art techniques such as immersive virtual reality and in vivo electrophysiological/probe recording in mice. Her research is currently supported by funding from BBRSC and the Royal Society. Dr Chen completed her undergraduate studies in both biology and computer science at East China Normal University in China. She then pursued PhD in neuroscience, conducting research at both East China Normal University and Boston University in the USA. Following that, she undertook postdoctoral research at University College London in the UK. Her work has been published in high-impact journals such as Nature Communications, eLife, and Current biology. Email guifen.chen@qmul.ac.uk Website LinkedIn Mastodon BlueSky GitHub Other Link Themes Creative Computing Design & Development Immersive Technology Player Research - Previous Next

< Back Callum Deery University of York iGGi Alum Callum is a researcher and game developer investigating how real-time player experience measurement can be used to drive adaptive games. Aiming to embed player experience questionnaires into games in a way that doesn’t break immersion and presence, his PhD is focussed on leveraging the wide range of existing player experience questionnaires to improve games ability to adapt to players. This will involve exploring the states of immersion and presence: What is necessary to maintain them? What experiences can players reflect on without breaking immersion? How do we embed a questionnaire into an in-development game without disrupting the player experience? Email callum.deery@gmail.com Website LinkedIn Mastodon BlueSky GitHub Other Link Supervisors: Dr James Walker Dr Anna Bramwell-Dicks Themes Accessibility Design & Development Player Research - Previous Next

< Back Dr Abi Evans University of York Supervisor Abi Evans is a Lecturer in Interactive Media in the Department of Theatre, Film, Television, and Interactive Media at the University of York. Her research is at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Learning Sciences, exploring how technology can provide real-time adaptive scaffolding for the skills and processes associated with effective learning in a variety of settings. Abi is particularly interested in supervising students who want to create and evaluate games and immersive experiences for learning or develop approaches for measuring learning in games. Her current project focuses on developing experiences for people who are learning to code, specifically tackling barriers to learning such as imposter syndrome and misconceptions about coding concepts. Abi would also welcome students interested in games for learning in other disciplines and in informal settings as well as traditional academic disciplines. Email abi.evans@york.ac.uk Website LinkedIn Mastodon BlueSky GitHub Other Link Themes Design & Development Immersive Technology Player Research - Previous Next

< Back Dr Piers Williams University of Essex iGGi Alum Partial Observability as a game mechanic There is a wide variety of different types of games, each providing its own unique challenge to artificial intelligence. Not all games provide full access to the environment, creating interest and difficulty by hiding particular pieces of information from the player. Other types of game expect teamwork from the players rather than being solely adversarial. Some games use both restrictions, and it is this type of game that this thesis concentrates on. Piers graduated from the University of Essex with an MSc in Computer Science. His interests lie in the field of Artificial Intelligence and in particular Multi-Agent Systems. Please note: Updating of profile text in progress Email Website LinkedIn Mastodon BlueSky GitHub Other Link Featured Publication(s): The 2018 Hanabi competition Hexboard: A generic game framework for turn-based strategy games Evaluating and Modelling Hanabi-Playing Agents Monte carlo tree search applied to co-operative problems Artificial intelligence in co-operative games with partial observability Ms. Pac-Man Versus Ghost Team CIG 2016 Competition Cooperative games with partial observability Themes Game AI - Previous Next

< Back Dr Alena Denisova University of York Supervisor Alena Denisova is a Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of York, UK. She is actively involved in collaborative and interdisciplinary projects that involve conceptualising and measuring user experience of video games and designing and building educational and persuasive interactive media. Her research explores the role of the `placebo effect’ of technology in shaping player experiences, perceived challenge and uncertainty in video games, and, more recently, emotionally impactful player experiences - understanding how these experiences are shaped with the view to inform the design of games that promote these experiences. Alena is an active member of the games HCI community: she is a co-chair of the IEEE Task Force on Automatic Gameplay Evaluation and a member of the Programme Committee for the annual CHI and CHI Play conferences. She is interested in supervising students that have qualitative, mixed method or design experience that they wish to apply to studying digital games. Possible research topics include exploring what makes choices in games meaningful for players, how perceived uncertainty, risk-aversion, and luck affect decision making in games, and how skill is acquired and advanced throughout while playing video games. She is also keen to work with students who wish to work on games with a purpose. For instance, designing and developing games that promote informed decision-making about moral and ethical choices, such as promoting sustainable lifestyle, reflecting on important real-life issues, developing personally, etc. Email alena.denisova@york.ac.uk Website LinkedIn Mastodon BlueSky GitHub Other Link Themes Applied Games Design & Development Player Research - Previous Next

< Back David Hull University of York iGGi Manager iGGi Admin I have worked at the University of York since October 1995, almost all of it in the Department of Computer Science. My various roles have included Laboratory and Facilities Manager, Technical Manager and, most recently, Project Manager. Outside work, I have been a change-ringer for almost 50 years, and am currently a member of the band that rings the bells weekly at York Minster. I am also an accredited teacher of bellringing. I do parkrun most weeks, alongside the occasional 10k and half marathon, like to watch cricket, and play the clarinet and piano. Email iggi-admin@york.ac.uk Website LinkedIn Mastodon BlueSky GitHub Other Link Themes - Previous Next

< Back Dr William Smith University of York Supervisor William Smith is a Reader in the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition research group in the Department of Computer Science at the University of York. He is currently a Royal Academy of Engineering/The Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellow and an Associate Editor of the journal Pattern Recognition. His research interests span vision, graphics and ML. Specifically, physics-based and 3D computer vision, shape and appearance modelling and the application of statistics and machine learning to these areas. The application areas in which he most commonly works are face/body analysis and synthesis, surveying and mapping, object capture and inverse rendering. A wide variety of tools and areas of maths are often useful in his research such as: convex optimisation, nonlinear optimisation, manifold learning, learning/optimisation on manifolds, computational geometry and low level computer vision (e.g. features and correspondence). He leads a team of five PhD students and one postdoc and has published over 100 papers, many in the top conferences and journals in the field. He was General Chair for the ACM SIGGRAPH European Conference on Visual Media Production in 2019 and is Program Chair for the British Machine Vision Conference in 2020. Research themes: Game AI Game Design Computational Creativity Graphics and rendering Content creation Email william.smith@york.ac.uk Website LinkedIn Mastodon BlueSky GitHub Other Link Themes Creative Computing Design & Development Game AI Player Research - Previous Next

< Back Emily Marriott University of Essex iGGi Alum Automated Story Generation for Games Emily is researching automated story generation for video games, focusing on the use of Planning for real-time, dynamic generation. Ideally, the stories created will reflect choices made by the player during gameplay and will update continually throughout gameplay. The aim of this research is to create a system that could be easily utilised in the development of more adaptive games. This could improve player enjoyment, increase re-playability, and allow for the inclusion or exclusion of content that may only appeal to niche audiences. Emily’s current focus is on investigating story structures and pacing to create a template for generating good stories specifically for games that are consistent, well-structured and interesting. This involves studying the pacing requirements in existing games to establish what these are and how they differ the requirements for film and TV. The system will ideally be integrated with existing game-development tools and provide an easy-to-use interface to make the creation of adaptive games easier and quicker. The eventual goal is a full story-generation system would support both the creation of quests that emerge from story requirements and a game world that fits the environment required for the story. Emily graduated from Glyndŵr University with a BSc in Computer Games Development before completing an MSc in Computer Science at Oxford Brookes University. The substance of the MSc dissertation involved generating dungeon levels and quests using grammars based on the play style the player appeared to favour. Emily enjoys playing both tabletop and computer roleplaying games, especially ones in which player actions can have a dramatic effect on the game’s progression. Please note: Updating of profile text in progress Email Website LinkedIn Mastodon BlueSky GitHub Other Link Themes Player Research - Previous Next

< Back Dr Madeleine Frister University of York iGGi Alum Madeleine joined the IGGI programme in 2020, after obtaining a master’s degree in psychology and cognitive neuroscience from the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany. Her PhD focuses on how visual characteristics influence gameplay and player experience. In 2021, she co-founded UX studio Vanilla Noir where she works as an independent designer and developer on website, app and game projects. Video games rely heavily on central aspects of human information processing, including perception, attention, and memory. The human mind is severely limited in the amount of information it can process, and a key factor for successful information processing is resisting distraction. Consequently, most user experience guidelines recommend eliminating any unnecessary information to avoid cognitive overload. Yet, in the case of video games, the presence of task-irrelevant items does not seem to compromise player experience, considering that there is an abundance of popular video games that are very high in visual complexity. On the contrary, inducing demand in the form of perceptual distraction may even be desirable in order to introduce challenge which can in turn increase enjoyment. The current project aims to deepen our understanding of perceptual distraction and its effects on game difficulty and player experience, with a specific focus on perceptual similarity between target and distractor items. Email mf1255@york.ac.uk Website LinkedIn Mastodon BlueSky GitHub Other Link Supervisors Prof. Paul Cairns Dr Laurissa Tokarchuk Dr Fiona McNab Featured Publication(s): Advancing Methodological Approaches in Affect-Adaptive Video Game Design: Empirical Validation of Emotion-Driven Gameplay Modification Perceptual Distraction and its Effects on Difficulty and User Experience in Digital Games An appraisal-based chain-of-emotion architecture for affective language model game agents Examining the effects of video game difficulty adaptation on performance and player experience Examining the influence of perceptual distraction on performance in a working memory game A data-driven approach for examining the demand for relaxation games on Steam during the COVID-19 pandemic Themes Design & Development Player Research - Previous Next