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< Back Dr Debbie Maxwell University of York iGGi Research Collaboration Coordinator Supervisor Debbie is a lecturer in User Experience Design and Interactive Media at the Department of Theatre, Film and Television. Her background spans computing, HCI and Design and she currently teaches user experience (UX) design and design methods and critical design on the BSc Interactive Media programme. Her research focuses on the roles of traditional storytelling and engagement in digital contexts. I’m interested in the ways that people interact with and reshape technology through stories, as both method and artefacts, and across media. She is particularly focuses on applying design and stories across health and wellbeing and environmental design drawing on speculative design processes and approaches. Debbie uses interdisciplinary approaches that draw on a range of fields including Human Computer Interaction (HCI), ethnography, interaction design, social anthropology, and service design. Her research always involves working with communities using participatory methods. She is particularly interested in supervising students with a design or HCI background on the following topics: design of applied games for environmental education or knowledge exchange design and application of serious games to mental health and wellbeing contexts design and application of serious games to outdoor spaces, particularly cultural heritage settings Research themes: Games with a Purpose User experience design Design methods and ethnography Speculative design debbie.maxwell@york.ac.uk Email Mastodon Other links Website LinkedIn BlueSky Github Themes Applied Games Design & Development Player Research - Previous Next

< Back Dr Anthony Constantinou Queen Mary University of London Supervisor Anthony Constantinou’s research is on Bayesian Artificial Intelligence for causal discovery and intelligent decision making under uncertainty. He applies his research to a wide range of areas, including gaming, sports, medicine and finance. He is the founder of the Bayesian Artificial Intelligence research lab at Queen Mary University of London. He is interested in supervising students who are interested in working with machine learning algorithms that discover causal relationships from data (applied to game data), or building intelligent decision-making models using Bayesian networks (applied to game data). Please note that these projects focus on working with game data. Students interested in these projects should have skills that are relevant to: Machine learning for causal discovery Bayesian networks Statistics and probability theory a.constantinou@qmul.ac.uk Email Mastodon https://www.constantinou.info Other links Website https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthony-c-constantinou-728b6b49/ LinkedIn BlueSky Github Themes Game AI - Previous Next

< Back Pilar Zhang Qiu Queen Mary University of London iGGi Alum Pilar is a researcher with a background in Design Engineering. She has a keen interest in user experience and interaction, wearables and the use of cyber-physical systems in the medical field. Her PhD centres around the creation of play assessments for neuromotor conditions in children with cerebral palsy. This gravitates around the idea that better and more objective clinical data can be obtained through gamification of common assessments. Please note: Updating of profile text in progress Email Mastodon https://www.pilarzhangqiu.com/ Other links Website https://www.linkedin.com/in/pilar-zhang-qiu/ LinkedIn BlueSky https://github.com/pili-zhangqiu Github Themes Applied Games - Previous Next

< Back Dr Maximilian Croissant University of York iGGi Alum Available for post-PhD position I’m a psychology researcher, writer and game designer, exploring our emotional connection with games and creating games with purpose. Coming from a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in psychology and neuroscience, I’m now at the intersection of emotion research, design, and human-computer interaction and try to build design-oriented solutions for adapting game content to affective data. My project will include theoretical groundwork, investigating the emotional relationship between player and games and from there build an affective fear-focused VR horror game with specific and practical solutions in terms of emotion measurement, modelling, and adaptation. The ultimate goal is to help fill knowledge gaps that currently hold us back on making commercially viable affective games and provide tools to design games for a deep emotional impact. I’m also the Co-Founder of Vanilla Noir, a small studio working on applied games that aim to promote well-being and satisfying user experiences. For me, games are a great tool to explore psychological phenomena through interactions and the design and development of games based on applied psychology has great potential to help make the world a bit of a better place. mc2230@york.ac.uk Email http://www.maximilian-croissant.de/en Mastodon https://www.vanilla-noir.com Other links Website https://www.linkedin.com/in/maximilian-croissant LinkedIn BlueSky https://gitlab.com/MaximilianCroissant Github Supervisor(s) Dr Cade McCall Featured Publication(s): Advancing Methodological Approaches in Affect-Adaptive Video Game Design: Empirical Validation of Emotion-Driven Gameplay Modification Using Virtual Reality to Investigate the Influence of Sleep Deprivation on In-the-Moment Arousal During Exposure to Prolonged Threats Affective Systems: Progressing Emotional Human-Computer Interactivity with Adaptive and Intelligent Game Systems An appraisal-based chain-of-emotion architecture for affective language model game agents Emotion Design for Video Games: A Framework for Affective Interactivity Theories, methodologies, and effects of affect-adaptive games: A systematic review A data-driven approach for examining the demand for relaxation games on Steam during the COVID-19 pandemic Endocannabinoid concentrations in hair and mental health of unaccompanied refugee minors Progress in Adaptive Web Surveys: Comparing Three Standard Strategies and Selecting the Best Themes Design & Development Player Research - Previous Next

< Back Prof. Damian Murphy University of York Supervisor Damian Murphy is Professor in Sound and Music Computing at the Department of Electronic Engineering AudioLab, University of York, where he has been a member of academic staff since 2000, and is the University Research Theme Champion for Creativity. He started his career in the Performing Arts Department at Harrogate College and has previously held positions at Leeds Metropolitan University and Bretton Hall College. His research focuses on virtual acoustics and he has published over 130 journal articles, conference papers and books in the area. He is a member of the Audio Engineering Society, a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and a visiting lecturer to the Department of Speech, Music and Hearing at KTH, Stockholm. Prof. Murphy is also an active sound artist and the Director of the £15m XRStories Creative Industries R&D Partnership exploring interactive and immersive storytelling for the UK’s creative and cultural sectors. He is interested in supervising students with interests in sound design, acoustics and audio signal processing and with a particular focus on: Interactive and immersive audio environments for real-time systems Room acoustics simulation and auralisation Assessment of immersive audio content for gameplay and competitive advantage Interactive/immersive audio storytelling Acoustic scene classification using spatial and spectral feature Audio for immersive environments. Research themes: Game AI Game Audio and Music Games with a Purpose Player Experience damian.murphy@york.ac.uk Email Mastodon https://www-users.york.ac.uk/~dtm3/ Other links Website https://uk.linkedin.com/in/damian-murphy-b272b914 LinkedIn BlueSky Github Themes Creative Computing Game Audio Immersive Technology - Previous Next

< Back Andrew Martin Queen Mary University of London iGGi Alum Applications in game development for programming language theory and AI Modern game development is highly iterative. Iteration is usually discussed in terms of a team completing design iterations, but can also be considered at the level of an individual developer attempting to complete a task, or experimenting with some ideas. At this level, the feedback loop provided by the tool becomes critical. Programming environments in particular often have a very poor feedback loop. Programming feedback can be thought of in terms of how quickly and seamlessly the user is able to observe the results of their work. This process is usually plagued with manual tasks and long pauses. It is common that a user will need to recompile, relaunch their program, and then manually recreate whatever state is required to observe the behaviour that they are working on. Frameworks like Elm, React and Vuejs are establishing a new norm of automatic hot-reloading with state preservation. These systems represent a branch of programming language research that is strongly focused on developer experience. In order to improve upon this work for game development, we must overcome the unique challenges that game development entails. Although the systems mentioned are all quite recent, there is a rich vein of research to draw on, which can be traced through dataflow programming, Smalltalk, Erlang, functional-reactive programming, Lisp and more. Predictive completions are considered by many to be a natural next-step in the evolution of live programming environments. An AI programming assistant would propose program fragments as completions or alternatives. The agent may seek to anticipate the user’s intent, or to provide creative suggestions. There is much relevant research in the fields of program synthesis, inductive logic programming, machine learning and genetic programming. One significant problem is how to smoothly and safely integrate a system like this into the user’s workflow. Many of the properties useful for safely enabling live programming features, such as isolation of side-effects, will also permit an AI agent to safely generate and execute code. Andy graduated from Imperial College London with an MEng in Computing in 2011. Following this he worked on game engine tools and technology at a startup called Fen Research, and then as a senior developer at a software consulting firm called LShift. In 2016 he spent six months working as a Research Associate in the Computational Creativity group at Goldsmiths, before starting his PhD. Please note: Updating of profile text in progress Email Mastodon Other links Website LinkedIn BlueSky Github Themes Game AI - Previous Next

< Back Luke Farrar University of York iGGi Alum Luke Farrar is an iGGi PhD student at The University of York undertaking research in Flexible and Realistic Character Animations in Complex and Dynamic Environments. Luke's research focuses through his bachelor's and master's degrees were on applying machine learning to interesting and unique settings. In his bachelor's he focused on creating an application for individuals that suffered from cognitive impairments through the use of the "Microsoft HoloLens" and machine learning to allow those individuals to maintain a semblance of everyday life. In his postgraduate Luke focused on using machine learning to generalise high-fidelity scientific simulations to rapidly generate predictions for parameter combinations that had not yet been sampled in order to accelerate the production of new results. Luke revels in all things AI, knowing that there is always more to learn and seeks to continually deepen his understanding around AI. A description of Luke's research: Modern games have an increasing focus on hyper-realism and immersion to better capture the attention of players. One of the ways that games can break this immersion is by having animations that break the flow of movement or actions through the use of predefined animations. Motion matching is a solution for predicting the best next frame of an animation by looking at the pose and user trajectory. The downside however, is that when you increase the amount of possible animations in the database the runtime cost also increases. A solution was proposed known as 'learned motion matching' (Holden et al., 2020) which takes the positive properties of motion matching but also achieves the scalability of neural-network-based generative models. This project will explore and improve the learned motion matching method through implementation of memory layers to improve accuracy without the sacrifice of increasing runtime costs. A restructuring and adaptation of the existing machine learning neural network used could also improve the learned motion matching method as breaking down each step of the learned motion matching at each step could uncover optimisations that are not initially visible. Another way restructuring could improve the learned motion matching is through creating a more succinct all-in-one approach which may streamline the process. lukebfarrar@gmail.com Email Mastodon Other links Website https://www.linkedin.com/in/luke-farrar-3967b3243/ LinkedIn BlueSky Github Supervisors: Dr Miles Hansard Dr Patrik Huber Dr James Walker Themes Immersive Technology - Previous Next

< Back Philip Smith Queen Mary University of London iGGi PG Researcher Available for placement I was born and raised in Bermuda, a small island in the Atlantic Ocean with an approximate population of 65,000 people. I finished my undergraduate degree in Computer Science with a Specialist in Game Design at the University of Toronto. For my Master's degree, I studied Computer Games Technology at City, University of London. My goal is to help expand the use of video games from purely recreational activities to viable avenues for aiding in real world problems. A description of Philip's research: My research will be focusing on maximizing player engagement in gamified citizen science as a continuation of my Master's thesis. 'Citizen science' is the practice of employing volunteers from the general public for the collection and/or processing of data with respect to a scientific project. Gamified citizen science projects have relied upon prolonged engagement from volunteers, but the number of long-term participants have been unsatisfactory in current projects. This project attempts to address the lack of sufficient volunteer engagement in gamified citizen science projects. The aim is to build a framework meant to guide game designers in creating an engaging citizen science video game based on the values set by Self-Determination Theory (SDT). These values adhere to the theory’s concept of intrinsic and extrinsic motivators of engagement. Intrinsic motivation relies on the factors of player autonomy, competence, and relatedness during gameplay. Extrinsic motivation relies on external incentives to core gameplay such as in-game rewards. As part of my research, I am evaluating multiple game design frameworks focused on Applied Games and identifying the merits and flaws each have when applied to a citizen science context. The information I gather will formulate a prototype of the Framework that will be iterated upon through design workshops, development, and playtesting. p.c.smithii@qmul.ac.uk Email Mastodon Other links Website LinkedIn BlueSky https://pjsmith97.github.io/ Github Themes Applied Games Design & Development - Previous Next

< Back Dr Cade McCall University of York Supervisor Cade McCall is an experimental psychologist. He uses games and virtual environments to study emotion, cognition, and behaviour during threatening experiences. His work explores how threat unfolds over time as revealed by dynamics in motion tracking data, psychophysiological measures, and experience-sampling. McCall is interested in supervising projects with a psychological focus, including: ● human interactions with autonomous systems ● the use of games to manipulate emotions ● social interactions within games Research themes: Games with a purpose Player experience Game analytics cade.mccall@york.ac.uk Email Mastodon https://www.york.ac.uk/psychology/staff/academicstaff/cm1582/#research-content Other links Website LinkedIn BlueSky Github Themes Applied Games Game Data Player Research - Previous Next

< Back Dr Sarah West University of York Supervisor Sarah West is an interdisciplinary researcher and practitioner working to bring diverse voices into research through participatory approaches, including citizen science. Sarah is currently Director of SEI York, a Centre of the Stockholm Environment Institute, a science-to-policy research institute, whose York Centre is at the University of York in the Department of Environment and Geography. She has used citizen science approaches to address topics as diverse as air pollution, biodiversity, parenting, and exploring community responses to Covid-19. Her projects mainly take place in the UK and Kenya. Sarah has spent over a decade designing, running and evaluating citizen science projects, and together with other SEI colleagues has written reports for Defra, UK Earth Observation Framework and journal articles exploring who participates in citizen science, their motivations for participation, and how volunteers can be recruited and retained. She is particularly interested in exploring how different messaging and communication affects participation in citizen science projects. sarah.west@york.ac.uk Email Mastodon https://www.york.ac.uk/sei/staff/sarah-west/ Other links Website https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-west-59b82690/ LinkedIn BlueSky Github Themes Accessibility Design & Development Player Research - Previous Next

< Back Dr Andrew James Wood University of York Supervisor I am an interdisciplinary researcher at the University of York. My background is in Mathematical Physics but my interests are now in applying computational and mathematical techniques to interesting problems, mostly in Biology. This includes such topics as collective motion (particularly in interaction networks and the role of noise) and microbiology (particularly in metabolism, industrial biotechnology, spatial structure and plasmid dynamics) as well as modelling naval conflicts and glycosylation. I have a natural interest in games and am interested in the interface between games and science, be that in using games to do, or disseminate, science or in utilising mechanisms and insights from research to inspire games. Research themes: Game Analytics Game Design Games with a Purpose Gamification jamie.wood@york.ac.uk Email Mastodon https://ajamiewood.weebly.com/ Other links Website https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamie-wood-82460055/ LinkedIn BlueSky Github Themes Applied Games Design & Development Game Data - Previous Next

< Back Dr Elena Gordon-Petrovskaya University of York iGGi Alum Elena specialises in novel forms of 'predatory' monetisation in digital games and its effects on players and is particularly interested in the links of game design to gaming disorder. She uses her background in psychology and human-computer interaction to take a player-centric perspective: developing knowledge bottom-up and working directly with players as the primary stakeholder. Her work spans ethics, wellbeing, and the lived experience of technology and its use. In her work so far, Elena has conducted a qualitative study with 1000+ players to create a taxonomy of microtransactions that players perceive to be unfair, aggressive, or misleading, and carried out a prevalence assessment of these techniques across the most popular desktop and mobile games. Most recently, her work discovered several types of harms which emerge from player interaction with games perceived as 'designed to drive spending'. Additionally, Elena has contributed to government calls for evidence around game regulation, given talks at seminar series and conferences, and collaborated on a variety of related topics, such as loot box spending, esports betting, and changes to gameplay during COVID. elepetrovs@gmail.com Email Mastodon http://elepetrovs.co.uk/ Other links Website LinkedIn BlueSky Github Supervisors: Prof. Sebastian Deterding Dr David Zendle Featured Publication(s): Learnings from the case Maple Refugee: A dystopian story of free-to-play, probability, and gamer consumer activism. Four dilemmas for video game effects scholars: How digital trace data can improve the way we study games Adapting and Enhancing Evolutionary Art for Casual Creation. The many faces of monetisation: Understanding the diversity and extremity of player spending in mobile games via massive-scale transactional analysis The relationship between psycho-environmental characteristics and wellbeing in non-spending players of certain mobile games Why microtransactions may not necessarily be bad: a criticism of the consequentialist evaluation of video game monetisation The lived experience of Internet Gaming Disorder: core symptoms, antecedents and consequences as based on a qualitative analysis of Reddit posts. Prevalence and Salience of Problematic Microtransactions in Top-Grossing Mobile and PC Games: A Content Analysis of User Reviews Predatory Monetisation? A Categorisation of Unfair, Misleading and Aggressive Monetisation Techniques in Digital Games from the Player Perspective Designing Personas for Expressive Robots: Personality in the New Breed of Moving, Speaking, and Colorful Social Home Robots A large-scale study of changes to the quantity, quality, and distribution of video game play during the COVID-19 pandemic How do loot boxes make money? An analysis of a very large dataset of real Chinese CSGO loot box openings Defining the esports bettor: evidence from an online panel survey of emerging adults The Battle Pass: a Mixed-Methods Investigation into a Growing Type of Video Game Monetisation Casual Creators in the Wild: A Typology of Commercial Generative Creativity Support Tools Not all fun and games: The design and evaluation of a game to increase intrinsic motivation in learning programming Exploring the multiverse of analysis options for the Addiction Stroop "These People Had Taken Advantage of Me”: A Grounded Theory of Problematic Consequences of Player Interaction with Mobile Games Perceived as “Designed to Drive Spending" Themes Player Research - Previous Next