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Publications (All) iGGi is a collaboration between Uni of York + Queen Mary Uni of London: the largest training programme worldwide for doing a PhD in digital games. iGGi Publications Filter by iGGi Theme Accessibility Applied Games Creative Computing Design & Development Esports Game AI Game Audio Game Data Games Business Immersive Technology Player Research Filter by iGGi Author Select iGGi Author Filter by Publication Year Select year Filter by Publication Type Select Publication Type World and human action models towards gameplay ideation A Kanervisto, D Bignell, LY Wen, M Grayson, R Georgescu, ... Nature 638 (8051), 656-663, 2025 Dr Marko Tot View Details Cost-Effective Attention Mechanisms for Low Resource Settings: Necessity & Sufficiency of Linear Transformations P Hosseini, M Hosseini, I Castro, M Purver arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.01643, 2025 Peyman Hosseini View Details Domestic Cultures of Plant Care: A Moss Terrarium Probe N. Binyamini Ben-Meir, P.G.T. Healey, S. Deterding Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '25), 05-09 July 2025, Funchal, Portugal. ACM, New York, NY, USA 19 Pages Nirit Binyamini Ben Meir View Details Claims for no evidence also need evidence VM Karhulahti, N Huntington-Klein, N Ballou OSF, 2025 Dr Nick Ballou View Details Towards an Ontology of Wargame Design L Ouriques, CE Barbosa, J Kritz, G Xexéo IEEE Access, vol. 13 Joshua Kritz View Details From social media to artificial intelligence: improving research on digital harms in youth KL Mansfield, S Ghai, T Hakman, N Ballou, M Vuorre, AK Przybylski The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, Volume 9, Issue 3p194-204, 2025 Dr Nick Ballou View Details When 1+ 1 does not equal 2: Synergy in games Joshua Kritz, Raluca Gaina arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.10304 Joshua Kritz View Details Scaling Analysis of Creative Activity Traces via Fuzzy Linkography A Smith, BR Anderson, JT Otto, I Karth, Y Sun, JJY Chung, M Roemmele, .. Proceedings of the Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Amy Smith View Details "Leave our kids alone!": Exploring Concerns Reported by Parents in 1-star Reviews L Winter, L Helsby, D Zendle CHI '25: Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Article No.: 1036, Pages 1 - 16 Lauren Winter Dr Laura Helsby View Details UKRN Local Network Lead Guidebook UKR Network, SJ Westwood, DL Hird, N Ballou, M Belyk, C Bokhove, ... OSF Preprints, 2025 Dr Nick Ballou View Details XAIxArts Manifesto: Explainable AI for the Arts N Bryan-Kinns, SJ Zheng, F Castro, M Lewis, JR Chang, G Vigliensoni, ... arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.21220, 2025 Dr Terence Broad View Details Archaeological Gameworld Affordances: A Grounded Theory of How Players Interpret Environmental Storytelling F Smith Nicholls, M Cook CHI '25: Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Yokohama, Japan, Article no 465, p. 1 - 20 Florence Smith Nicholls View Details Reliving 10 years old: Descriptive Insights into Retro Gaming N Ballou, N Bowman, T Hakman, AK Przybylski OSF, 2025 Dr Nick Ballou View Details Seeding for Success: Skill and Stochasticity in Tabletop Games J Goodman, D Perez-Liebana, S Lucas IEEE Transactions on Games, 2025 Dr James Goodman View Details Efficient solutions for an intriguing failure of llms: Long context window does not mean LLMs can analyze long sequences flawlessly Peyman Hosseini, Ignacio Castro, Iacopo Ghinassi, Matthew Purver 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING) Peyman Hosseini View Details Fuzzy Linkography: Automatic Graphical Summarization of Creative Activity Traces A Smith, BR Anderson, JT Otto, I Karth, Y Sun, JJY Chung, M Roemmele, ... arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.04599 Amy Smith View Details Formal Constraints and Creativity: Connecting Game Jams, Dogma ’95, the Demo Scene, OuBaPo, and Renga poets G Lai, I Vecchi Games and Culture, 2024 Gorm Lai View Details Using Virtual Reality to Investigate the Influence of Sleep Deprivation on In-the-Moment Arousal During Exposure to Prolonged Threats E Sullivan, C McCall, LM Henderson, M Croissant, G Schofield, S Cairney JOURNAL OF SLEEP RESEARCH 33, 2024 Dr Maximilian Croissant View Details Playing NetHack with LLMs: Potential & Limitations as Zero-Shot Agents D Jeurissen, D Perez-Liebana, J Gow, D Cakmak, J Kwan arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.00690, 2024 Dominik Jeurissen View Details Climate Club: A Group-based Game to Support Sensemaking of Climate Actions P Sandbhor, J Hook FDG '24: Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, Article No.: 32, Pages 1 - 12, 2024 Prasad Sandbhor Prasad Sandbhor View Details GeoPos: A Minimal Positional Encoding for Enhanced Fine-Grained Details in Image Synthesis Using Convolutional Neural Networks M Hosseini, P Hosseini arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.01951, 2024 Peyman Hosseini View Details An appraisal-based chain-of-emotion architecture for affective language model game agents M Croissant, M Frister, G Schofield, C McCall Plos one 19 (5), e0301033, 2024 Dr Maximilian Croissant Dr Madeleine Frister View Details Use of Technology in Brief Interventions L Gega, MJ Saiger Brief CBT and Science-Based Tailoring for Children, Adolescents, and Young Adolescents, and Young Adults, Springer, pp 293-309, 2024 Dr Michael Saiger View Details Contextual design requirements for decision-support tools involved in weaning patients from mechanical ventilation in intensive care units N Hughes, Y Jia, M Sujan, T Lawton, I Habli, J McDermid Applied Ergonomics 118, 104275, 2024 Dr Nathan Hughes View Details Affective Systems: Progressing Emotional Human-Computer Interactivity with Adaptive and Intelligent Game Systems M Croissant University of York, 2024 Dr Maximilian Croissant View Details View More

Partners (All) iGGi is a collaboration between Uni of York + Queen Mary Uni of London: the largest training programme worldwide for doing a PhD in digital games. iGGi Partners We are excited to be collaborating with a number of industry partners. iGGi works with industry in some of the following ways: Researcher Industry Knowledge Exchange - this can take many forms, from what looks like a traditional placement, to a short term consultancy, to an ongoing relationship between the researcher and their industry partner. Researcher Sponsorship - for some of our researchers, their relationship with their industry partner is reinforced by sponsorship from the company. This is an excellent demonstration of the strength of the commitment and the success of the collaborations. In Kind Contributions - iGGi industry partners can contribute by attending and/or featuring in our annual conference, offering their time to give talks and masterclasses for our students, or even taking part in our annual game jam! Check out our Industry Info page here to see these types of collaboration described in more detail. There are many ways for our industry partners to work with iGGi. If you are interested in becoming involved, please do contact us so we can discuss what might be suitable for you. 22 Cans AI and Games Autistica BT BetaJester Limited BiG BlitzGame Studios Bossa Studios British Broadcasting Corporation BBC British Games Institute (BGI) CBT Clinics COMIC Research Carnegie Mellon University Cooperative Innovations Creative AI Creative Assembly Die Gute Fabrik Digital Catapult Dubit Limited Durham University ESL UK Electronic Arts (EA) Enigmatic Studios Falmouth University Fluttermind LLC

iGGi Unconference Group Outcomes (List) iGGi is a collaboration between Uni of York + Queen Mary Uni of London: the largest training programme worldwide for doing a PhD in digital games. iGGi Research Retreat "Unconference" Since Summer 2024, iGGi has been running a "Research Retreat" (aka "Unconference") at a secluded cottage village in Derbyshire. We gather 30 people made up of iGGi PGRs, Alumni, Staff and Industry Partners and ask: What are the nagging questions from your PhD research (or, for industry partners: in your work or from your pet project) where you could use new eyes and approaches? What are the most intriguing research questions in your area? What ideas has your research/work/hobby thrown up that you'd love to take a closer look at? What are the key research ideas and questions in other areas? The ideas to be explored emerge during the retreat: Everyone can propose an idea/topic/"problem", and participants then choose which small group they would like to join to explore further. To play with new ideas. Below you can find a selection of group outcomes from the 2025 iGGi Unconference iGGi Research Retreat "Unconference" August 2025 The Future of AI This group discussed what the "future of AI" might look like, how it will change us as a society and what possibilities it could create. Read More iGGi Research Retreat "Unconference" August 2025 Social Simulation Game on a Graph / Network This group started off with the idea of a cellular automaton and set off to investigat how such a simple structure could be rendered as a playable simulation of social dynamics. Read More iGGi Research Retreat "Unconference" August 2025 Generative AI, Abstraction and Epistemology This group tried to come up with the skeleton of a short presentation for technologists in the former CIS region about the topic. Read More iGGi Research Retreat "Unconference" August 2025 Trust and Freedom in Transformative Games This group discussed how games build or break trust and the factors involved in creating tustworthy games. Read More

Locations (All) iGGi is a collaboration between Uni of York + Queen Mary Uni of London: the largest training programme worldwide for doing a PhD in digital games. Locations iGGi Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) iGGi QMUL is located at the heart of East London on Queen Mary, University of London's Whitechapel campus. Read More University of York (UoY) iGGi York is located just outside the City of York's centre, on University of York's East Campus. Read More Goldsmiths, University of London (Goldsmiths) iGGi Goldsmiths is located in New Cross, South East London, five miles from central London. Read More University of Essex (UoE) iGGi Essex is located two miles from the historic city of Colchester and set in over 200 acres of beautiful parkland. Read More

iGGi PhD Projects - listing iGGi PhD Projects 2023 This page displays the supervisor-proposed PhD projects on offer for our 2023 intake: If you are interested in any of the projects listed and would like further details and/or to discuss, please email the respective project supervisor. Please note that you can also frame your own project independently as long as you have secured a supervisor's support. For a list of available supervisors please see the accepting students section of our website. While iGGi has checked that the project descriptions listed below are within iGGi's scope , we wish to highlight that you are still responsible for ensuring that your proposal, too, is in line with this scope, and we would further like to point out that supervisor-framed projects are not prioritised in the application selection process: they are judged by the same criteria as applicant-framed proposals. For guidance to make sure that the proposal you submit (regardless of whether it has been supervisor-framed or created entirely by you) sits within iGGi's scope please refer to this link: https://iggi.org.uk/iggi-scope Select by Theme: Game AI Design & Development Player Research Game Audio Game Data Immersive Technology Creative Computing E-Sports Applied Games ALL Projects Design and Development Realistic physical interaction of 3D point cloud objects This project will investigate geometric and machine learning approaches to developing 3D game assets. Price Design and Development Duration Miles Hansard, Changjae Oh Read More Game Data Building Player Profiles in Mobile Monetisation: A Machine Learning Approach This project aims to use machine learning techniques to segment and profile mobile gamers in terms of their in-game spending. Price Game Data Duration David Zendle Read More Creative Computing Novelty Optimisation Can we identify and automatically balance the right amount of novel content we serve to players? Price Creative Computing Duration Jeremy Gow, Sebastian Deterding Read More Player Research Modelling the interactions in metaverse videogames This project will seek to inform AR and VR enabled videogames by analysing existing online platforms supporting these technologies. Price Player Research Duration Ignacio Castro Read More Game AI Automatic Evaluation of Tabletop Games This project proposal aims to research and develop methods to accurately evaluate the impact of modern Tabletop Games components in different aspects of gameplay. Price Game AI Duration Diego Pérez-Liébana Read More Game AI Principled and Scalable Exploration Techniques for Reinforcement Learning In this project, you will develop principled and scalable exploration techniques based on reducing model uncertainty. Price Game AI Duration Paulo Rauber Read More Creative Computing Novel video narrative from recorded content This project constructs novel video narratives from recorded content under employment of deep learning tools and techniques. Price Creative Computing Duration Nick Pears Read More Game Audio Machine Learning of Procedural Audio This work will investigate whether procedural audio can fully replace the use of pre-recorded sound effects. Price Game Audio Duration Joshua Reiss & Nemesindo Read More Immersive Technology Places That Don't Exist The goal of this project is to combine state-of-the-art 3D computer vision and procedural content generation to create game-ready scene models and assets from existing media. Price Immersive Technology Duration William Smith Read More Immersive Technology Tactile Interaction With Virtual Reality Content In this project the student will explore the use of vibrating motors distributed over the human hand (e.g. using a wearable glove) to give tactile feedback about the physical interactions happening in a VR. Price Immersive Technology Duration Lorenzo Jamone & Valkyrie Industries Read More Game AI Evolving Perception for Game Agents This project will investigate game agents in open world games which evolve their senses and world representation alongside learning what actions to take in each state. We will evolve game agents with highly alien behaviours which nevertheless have high fitness in the open world environment, while investigating important scientific questions about how senses and world representations evolved in humans. Price Game AI Duration Alex Wade, Peter Cowling Read More Game Data Understanding ongoing mental states using video games: applications to mental health research. This project will use a combination of neuroscience and advanced data analysis methods to examine the link between video game play and the brain. We will use a combination of cutting-edge data analytic techniques applied to large, existing video game telemetry datasets and neuroimaging experiments designed to measure changes in ongoing mental states while people play simple video games. Price Game Data Duration Alex Wade Read More Load More

iGGi Partners We are excited to be collaborating with a number of industry partners. IGGI works with industry in some of the following ways: Student Industry Knowledge Transfer - this can take many forms, from what looks like a traditional placement, to a short term consultancy, to an ongoing relationship between the student and their industry partner. Student Sponsorship - for some of our students, their relationship with their industry partner is reinforced by sponsorship from the company. This is an excellent demonstration of the strength of the commitment and the success of the collaborations. In Kind Contributions - IGGI industry partners can contribute by attending and/or featuring in our annual conference, offering their time to give talks and masterclasses for our students, or even taking part in our annual game jam! There are many ways for our industry partners to work with IGGI. If you are interested in becoming involved, please do contact us so we can discuss what might be suitable for you. Enigmatic Studios

< Back Win or learn fast proximal policy optimisation Link Author(s) DS Ratcliffe, K Hofmann, S Devlin Abstract More info TBA Link

< Back iGGi Con 2024 REGISTRATION OPENS We're excited to announce that the website for our next iGGi Conference, the iGGi Con 2024, officially launched today, and what's more: REGISTRATION IS OPEN!! The iGGi Con 2024 will be held at York on 11+12 September 2024 Check the conference website for further details on this year's event. You can also follow the dedicated twitter/x . The iGGi Conference is the annual showcase of our 60+ PhD researchers, through posters, t alks, workshops and panels. The conference provides a space for industry and academia to come together to discuss the latest and greatest in games research. Moreover, the Industry Expo will be back. Register for the iGGi Con 2024 via this link Previous 10 May 2024 Next

< Back Sam Hughes University of York iGGi Alum Affect and Emotion using Immersive Sound in Intelligent Games. (On Industrial Placement with Remedy Entertainment) Recent advances in high definition video displays and 3-D headsets, coupled with motion tracking and biosensor technologies, have enabled video games to reach unprecedented levels of visual immersion and interaction. There is little research however on how the aural feedback of the player, which can help assess their emotional state, can be used to inform the game intelligence and affect the emotive impact of the game. Furthermore, improvements in domestic surround sound and binaural technology are paving the way for fully enveloping and realistic soundtracks that extend the gameplay beyond the visual and can significantly enhance the emotive experience. This research project therefore addresses how current sensor and tracking technologies can be enhanced through analysis of player aural reactions such that the game intelligence can in turn provoke a conditional response via the reproduced soundtrack. In other words, how can the emotional impact of a spatial soundtrack during gameplay be enhanced by the user aural response alongside other physiological detections such as heartbeat and movement? Sam is a sound designer and voice actor who founded the audio journalism site, The Sound Architect™. Sam was selected as one of the first to ever receive the Prince William Scholarship from both BAFTA & Warner Bros. to study MSc Post Production with Sound Design at The University of York where he graduated with a Distinction and a Departmental Award for achieving the Highest Overall Average Grade. Sam has been highly active in the community for years including writing for BAFTA Guru, sitting on the BAFTA Youth Board, running Game Audio North and being an active member of BAFTA Crew Games. Most recently Sam has worked regularly with game audio company Sweet Justice on a variety of titles that include mobile and AAA. Sam’s recent credits include Injustice 2 and Madden NFL 2017. Please note: Updating of profile text in progress Email Mastodon Other links Website https://uk.linkedin.com/in/thesoundarchitect LinkedIn BlueSky Github Themes Player Research - Previous Next

< Back Distributed Social Multi-Agent Negotiation Framework For Incomplete Information Games Link Author(s) J Walton-Rivers, E Longford, D Gomme, R Bartle, M Gardner Abstract More info TBA Link

< Back Dr Ivan Bravi Queen Mary University of London iGGi Alum Ivan Bravi has obtained his B.Sc and M.Sc in Engineering of Computer Systems at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy. From January to July 2016 he was Visiting Scholar at the NYU’s Game Innovation Lab in New York, under the supervision of Prof. Julian Togelius. Since October 2017 he's an IGGI PhD student at Queen Mary University of London under the supervision of Simon Lucas. Ivan has published several workshop and conference papers in different venues such as IJCAI, Evostar, CIG, FDG, AAAI and CoG. Automatic playtesting of games can significantly streamline the process of designing, developing and releasing a game. It is also a possible application of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI): having a set of flexible algorithms that can play games regardless of their type decouples the two problems (playtesting and developing AGI algorithms) advancing both independently. When it comes to developing new AGI algorithms for game-playing a crucial characteristic is the ability of expressing different behaviours. Most of the research has focused on peak performance game-playing agents, this research project instead focuses on producing agents that are able to show different playing styles (behaviours) with no explicit domain information embedded in the algorithm. Behavioural expressivity arises from the parameterisable components of an algorithm. In classical Statistical Forward Planning (SFP) it is very straightforward to adjust these, e.g. how far ahead it's planning. A very important component of SFP algorithms is the heuristic function used to evaluate the quality of game states. Being able to define heuristics in a game-agnostic manner is a key element in maintaining the algorithms generally. i.bravi@qmul.ac.uk Email Mastodon Other links Website LinkedIn BlueSky https://github.com/ivanbravi Github Supervisor(s): Dr Diego Pérez-Liébana Prof. Simon Lucas Featured Publication(s): Evaluating and Enhancing Gameplay Behavioural Expressivity of Planning-Playing Artificial Intelligence for Automatic Playtesting Self-adaptive MCTS for General Video Game Playing Rinascimento: Playing Splendor-Like Games With Event-Value Functions Rinascimento: searching the behaviour space of Splendor Rinascimento: using event-value functions for playing Splendor Learning local forward models on unforgiving games Rinascimento: Optimising statistical forward planning agents for playing splendor A local approach to forward model learning: Results on the game of life game Game AI hyperparameter tuning in rinascimento Efficient evolutionary methods for game agent optimisation: Model-based is best Shallow decision-making analysis in general video game playing Evolving UCT alternatives for general video game playing Evolving game-specific UCB alternatives for general video game playing Themes Game AI Player Research - Previous Next

< Back Evaluating generalisation in general video game playing Link Author(s) M Balla, SM Lucas, D Perez-Liebana Abstract More info TBA Link