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< Back iGGi Research Retreat "Unconference" For the second year running, we've assembled a group of 30 people at a remote Holiday Village near Matlock (Derbyshire) to connect individuals over their shared research interests, and to exchange ideas and experiences. The retreat spanned over 4 days (3 nights), and participants were made up of 16 iGGi PG Researchers, 2 iGGi Alumni, 9 Games Industry Members, 2 iGGi Academic Supervisors, and 1 iGGi Admin. The format: The first session of the day is always a "pitching" session. Each participant can put forward the topics they would like to see investigated and invite other participants to join their group. Groups with at least 2 members then retreat to a breakout space on site (e.g., their cottage's living room, outdoors seating, the common room) to work on their project for the rest of that day. The day's results are shared with everyone in the evening, and a larger, more detailed presentation is held on the last day before event close. This year, we had set simple rules as to who can pitch ideas on each day in order to give everyone a fair chance for gathering a group and to foster the creation of new connections. Some of the groups' outcome has been made available in summarised format via these dedicated pages/articles ! Given the enthusiastic feedback we've so far received, we aim to run a similar retreat in 2026, and we're already excited for it! iGGi Unconference Group Outcomes (List) Previous 21 Aug 2025 Next

< Back iGGi @ Develop:Brighton 2025 What an exceedingly exciting Develop we had this year! With 24 sponsored/official iGGi PG Researchers and Staff, and a fair few Alumni/soon-to-be Alumni, iGGi's presence confidently reached the count of 30. Here are some of iGGi's highlights: The iGGi Stand on the Develop Expo Floor With above-average footfall compared to previous times, the iGGi stand proved to be busy and popular this year. Visitors to the stand included familiar, friendly faces (big thanks to all of those "Friends of iGGi" who managed to drop by!), games industry folks who were new to the idea of iGGi and interested to hear about potential collaboration with iGGi , and then there were also those who thought about pursuing games further on an academic pathway . In summary, many vivid conversations were had, and regardless of whether they were future-opportunity-focused or more just-in-the-moment, we enjoyed them all! Displays at the stand were: "Exploring Human Behaviour in Social Virtual Reality" by Karl Clarke "Interactive Tool to Explore Different Playstyles in MicroRTS" by Ruizhe "Jay" Yu Xia "Detachment Undone" by Luiza Gossian "Future Factory - a Card Game" by Prasad Sandbhor An invitation for Indie Devs of Narrative Games to participate in a focus-study by Alex Flint Our this year's showcase video and " iGGi @ Develop " lookup iGGi Speaker at Develop This year, we were thrilled to hear Francesca Foffano's presentation on Player Emotional Design where she talked about how we experience emotions best design practices emotional design design solutions for Emotional Accessibility If you missed the talk or you would like to recap, Francesca shared the slides and you can find them under this link . iGGi Speaker at the Game A11y Gathering The Game A11y Gathering was a satellite event to Develop and organisers included iGGi Alum Jozef Kulik , last year's iGGi Con Keynote Cari Watterton, and Mollie Evans (Nothing Without Us). The second iteration of this game-accessibility-focused micro conference was sponsored by Sony Interactive Entertainment PlayStation Studios, Games User Research, PlaytestCloud, Scopely, and hosted at Unity Technologies. Like last year, it brought together developers and advocates from across the industry to discuss accessibility in games. Notably, iGGi PG Researcher Steph Carter was a speaker at the event. Steph's presentation was titled "Why Words Matter: Accessible Language in Games" and discussed how the words we use - whether in menus, dialogue, or instructions - shape how players understand and interact with game worlds. Steph shared why language is a crucial part of games accessibility, drawing on their experience as a neurodivergent player, an accessibility consultant and linguistics specialist. Quite a few of the other iGGi PGRs also attended the event and found it very instructive in its practical focus. Big thank you to organisers, sponsors and hosts, for putting on this fabulous event! >>> PICTURES TO FOLLOW Develop Impressions In comparison to last year's slightly subdued vibes and despite the fact that we've still not seen the end of incoming waves of layoffs (e.g., Microsoft), this year's atmosphere felt relaxed and cautiously optimistic. The sunny weather certainly helped! Two of the iGGis in particular struck lucky during the Develop Expo and won things at other stands. Namely a PS5 (in the raffle from GamesAid ) and a Packman Machine (in a contest at Big Games Machine ) After three days of full-on networking, it was finally time for a bit of chillin by the beach. The week left us looking forward to next year already! See you again in 2026, Brighton! Previous 10 Jul 2025 Next

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 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

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

< Back Nirit Binyamini Ben-Meir wins Best Paper Award at DIS25 Nirit Binyamini Ben Meir 's paper “Domestic Cultures of Plant Care: A Moss Terrarium Probe”, was awarded Best Paper at the ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS) 2025 . The work was lauded particularly for its originality, methodological rigour and its potential impact on the field of interactive systems. Here is the paper abstract: Houseplants are increasingly being used as part of interactive systems that aim to foster pro-environmental concern and awareness of more-than-human life. Yet such interventions rely on conflicting and untested assumptions about how people relate to houseplants. We therefore studied domestic plant care in 11 purposefully sampled households, applying a sensor-equipped moss terrarium as a living ‘thing ethnography’ probe, supplemented with semi-structured interviews. We find that social and intergenerational cultures of plant care inform people's individual concern and accountability through constituents and mechanisms like gift-giving, signaling, knowledge transfer, or joint practical care. We identify five domestic cultures of plant care in our sample, each of which frames plants differently and leads to different practical approaches to plant care. We propose design considerations that emphasise enculturation and shared care over individual behaviour change and reframe houseplants from decorative objects into living household members. You can access the full paper here . DIS25 took place 05-09 July in Madeira (Portugal). Nirit described the conference experience as very valuable, and enjoyed receiving some very useful feedback about her talk from the audience, making new connections as well as exploring its setting at Madeira Islands. Link to QMUL News article Previous 8 Jul 2025 Next

< Back iGGi Con 2025 Successfully Concluded! iGGi Con 2025 successfully concluded yesterday. Over the last 10 years, iGGi Con has firmly established itself as an annual showcases of the UK's latest advancements in games research and as a networking platform that connects individuals from industry and academia who are working in games. The iGGi Con 2025 took place at the Ron Cooke Hub on the University of York's Campus East. The event stretched over two days and comprised 13 talks, 3 keynotes, 1 panel, 1 workshop, 2 buzz talk sessions, 24 posters and plenty of coffee breaks during which attendees could engage with each other. We were excited to see so many of our industry partners present, as well as members of the increasingly large group of iGGi Alumni who shared their experience of "life after a PhD". We're already looking forward to next year's iGGi Con, also branded BiGGi Con ! BiGGi Con will be special in that it will quite likely be the last of its kind but we'd therefore envisage it to be larger and sparklier than ever! So make sure you SAFE THE DATE >>> 16-17 September 2026 <<< This time, we'll be back at the capital city >>> at Queen Mary University London <<< Can't wait to see you there! Previous 12 Sept 2025 Next

< Back Bridging Generative Deep Learning and Computational Creativity Link Author(s) S Berns, S Colton Abstract More info TBA Link

< Back Trusted Teammates: Commercial Digital Games Can Be Effective Trust-Building Tools Link Author(s) E Tan, AL Cox Abstract More info TBA Link

< Back Playing NetHack with LLMs: Potential & Limitations as Zero-Shot Agents Link Author(s) D Jeurissen, D Perez-Liebana, J Gow, D Cakmak, J Kwan Abstract More info TBA Link

< Back Metagaming and metagames in Esports Link Author(s) A Kokkinakis, P York, M Sagarika Patra, J Robertson, B Kirman, A Coates, A Chitayat, S Demediuk, A Drachen, J Hook, [...] M Ursu, F Oliver Block Abstract More info TBA Link

< Back The many faces of monetisation: Understanding the diversity and extremity of player spending in mobile games via massive-scale transactional analysis Link Author(s) D Zendle, C Flick, S Deterding, J Cutting, E Gordon-Petrovskaya, ... Abstract More info TBA Link

< Back Marko Tot Queen Mary University of London iGGi PG Researcher Hello! I'm Marko, and welcome to my page! As a part of the IGGI programme and Game AI research group, I'm working on adapting Statistical Forward Planning methods for complex environments. Statistical Forward Planning methods have proven to be effective in some simpler domains and, without requiring any prior learning, they provide a good out of the box AI algorithm. However, while these algorithms shine in certain games, they struggle to perform well in cases where the reward received from the game is sparse. In games where it takes a series of optimal actions to reach the goal, without any significant feedback from the environment in between, their performance drops significantly. My research is centered on solving this problem through automatic sub-goal generation and utilisation of local learned forward models. Creation of the sub-goals could be used to simulate the feedback from the environment and give regular rewards to the agent even in sparse and complex environments. I started my journey in video games when I got my first PC at the age of six, and at that point it was decided that I'm going to make a career out of it. So here I am, ~20 years later, a PhD. student at Queen Mary University of London, trying to make AI agents that can play games, and regularly spending too much time playing games under the excuse that it's all for 'research purpose'. m.tot@qmul.ac.uk Email Mastodon https://markotot.github.io/ Other links Website https://www.linkedin.com/in/markotot/ LinkedIn BlueSky https://github.com/markotot Github Supervisor(s): Dr Diego Pérez-Liébana Featured Publication(s): World and human action models towards gameplay ideation Turning Zeroes into Non-Zeroes: Sample Efficient Exploration with Monte Carlo Graph Search Making Something Out of Nothing: Monte Carlo Graph Search in Sparse Reward Environments What are you looking at? Team fight prediction through player camera Themes Game AI - Previous Next