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< Back Seeding for Success: Skill and Stochasticity in Tabletop Games Link Author(s) J Goodman, D Perez-Liebana, S Lucas Abstract More info TBA Link

< Back Radical Alternate Futurescoping: Solarpunk Vs Grimdark Workshop THIS NEWS ARTICLE WAS WRITTEN BY PRASAD SANDBHOR AND SARAH MASTERS ACADEMIC MINDTREK CONFERENCE Academic Mindtrek 2023 was an exciting conference based at Tampere University in Finland and focused on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) that featured talks and workshops in research and development on games, gamification, human-nature interaction, AI, robotics and lots more, including punk game design!🌱🧷✨🤖 COLLABORATION Intelligent Games and Games Intelligence (IGGI) PhD researchers Prasad Sandbhor and Sarah Masters proposed and delivered a design and research workshop at Academic Mindtrek 2023 titled Alternate Radical Futurescoping: Solarpunk vs Grimdark. The workshop was conducted in a hybrid set-up and involved the co-creation of mock-ups of play experiences dealing with eco futures and climate action in solarpunk and grimdark themes. PARTICIPATION A dedicated website was created for the workshop that provided information about its purpose and enabled participant registrations. It was promoted over Twitter, Linkedin and various communities interested in climate change and game design. The workshop received 15 registrations. 11 participants (6 online, 5 in-person) took part in the workshop as 4 registrations got cancelled due to various reasons. The participants belonged to diverse backgrounds such as PhD and postdoctoral research in games and HCI (that included 2 iGGi PhD researchers), creative arts, future visioning and game design. Workshop slides and reference materials were emailed to all participants prior to the workshop in order to help them familiarise themselves with the topics and methods being used. Participants were given a choice of either forming a group or working by themselves to create a mock-up of a play experience concept. 4 participants (1 in-person, 3 online) opted to work by themselves as solo creators while the rest formed 2 groups (1 group of 4 participants in-person and 1 group of 3 participants online). 3 participants (1 in-person and 2 online) joined only the mock-up creation part of the workshop. WORKSHOP The workshop aimed at bringing people from diverse interdisciplinary backgrounds together to conceptualise speculative play experiences for climate change engagement. Therefore, the workshop format included the facilitation of mock-up co-creation, initiation of a community of radical alternate futurescopers and reflection on the design journeys followed to articulate the opportunities, risks, challenges and effects associated with working on solarpunk and grimdark genres. Details about the context, goals, format and schedule of the workshop are available as a workshop can be found here The workshop consisted of 4 phases - introduction, conceptualisation, mock-up creation, and critical reflection discussion. The slide deck provided here was used across all phases of the workshop. In the first phase, participants were introduced to solarpunk and grimdark genres and given prompts for mock-up creation. In the second phase, they were taken through hands-on exercises using Critical Game Design, Triadic Game Design, and Design Box methods to support them in ideating and developing their concepts. In the third phase, participants created conceptual mock-ups on the medium of their choice. The last phase of the workshop involved a showcase of the participants' mock-ups, followed by a thorough discussion and critical reflection session. They also reflected on their own emotional journeys during the workshop. The workshop used a dedicated Discord channel for collaboration and communication between the organisers and both online and in-person participants. An itch page was set up for hosting the mock-ups created during the workshop. OUTCOMES The workshop produced 6 mock-ups of play experience concepts that followed solarpunk and grimdark genres. Although the design brief to the participants expected them to choose one of the two genres, it was observed that all concepts preferred an amalgamation of the two genres. The concepts generated during the workshop included a game about surviving the winter of 2023 in Ukraine, an open world VR experience related to deep sea impacts of climate change, a grimdark game related to urban forests, a resource management game about developing green spaces in cities, a city building game dealing with flood management, and a strategy game on climate refugee migration conflict. In the fourth phase of the workshop, participants presented their play experience concepts using mock-ups and took part in a reflection exercise over a Miro board. The reflection exercise included 6 questions dealing with the design process followed, the challenges faced and the takeaways from the workshop. Preliminary insights are as follows: >> Reflections on the design process and workshop format - The format of the workshop was found helpful by the participants. They reported that the prompts given were useful in quickly deciding the topic and using it as an anchor for the design process involving the triadic game design framework and the design box method. >> Challenges faced - The participants noted that while ideating in the context of the prompt, it was easy to slip from one genre to the other as some prompts had an inherent inclination towards one of the genres (for instance, a prompt about the climate refugees aligned with grimdark genre more than solarpunk). Some participants found managing the scale or scope of the game topic difficult during the workshop. It was also shared that following solarpunk aesthetics in the limited time and resources was challenging. Another feedback comment related to the challenges said that it was hard to work with solarpunk as its overtly positive vibe was “killing the dramatic elements”. >> Feelings and takeaways - For most of the participants, the takeaways from the workshop were related to the design processes followed and game design strategies for designing and developing games and play experiences for future research. When asked about their feelings about the future in the context of climate change experienced during the mock-up creation journey, they said that the duration of the workshop was too short to observe the feelings. Here are a few selected participant comments on the question: “Did creating your mockup change the way you feelabout the future in the context of climate change, if so, how?” "Not sure if it made me feel differently about climate change, but definitely about using games to tackle the issue. And about the potential of both solarpunk and grimdark conventions to convey different ideas." “Tips the scale a bit, games have been a great way to spread your message and awareness as you immerse the player to think and live your world” “It was very illuminating; an alternative way of brainstorming and fleshing out solutions. I feel more optimistic about climate action.” Workshop and its outcomes CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK Overall, the workshop was successful in achieving its objectives. The participants learned new concepts and methods of design and were able to create innovative play experiences with a climate change lens. The critical reflection discussion helped them articulate the challenges of creating solarpunk and grimdark artefacts. The workshop and the conference also served as an opportunity to connect with other researchers working in the domains of climate change games and human nature interaction. We intend to work further on the mock-ups created during the workshop and the feedback comments gathered in the form of a research publication. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We want to give a big shoutout to all our amazing participants for their contributions. We couldn't have done it without you!🙌We would like to say thank you to Academic MindTrek Conference 2023 for hosting us and to IGGI - Intelligent Games & Game Intelligence for supporting us with its collaboration fund to make it happen.😊 Prasad Sandbhor, Sarah Masters Previous 3 Oct 2023 Next

< Back Faking handedness: Individual differences in ability to fake handedness, social cognitions of the handedness of others, and a forensic application using Bayes’ theorem Link Author(s) A Flint, IC McManus, G Buckens, N Harris, HLA Ng, F Vovou Abstract More info TBA Link

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. Electronic Arts (EA)

< Back Evaluating and Enhancing Gameplay Behavioural Expressivity of Planning-Playing Artificial Intelligence for Automatic Playtesting Link Author(s) I Bravi Abstract More info TBA Link

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. Riot Games

< Back Lateralization of impedance control in dynamic versus static bimanual tasks Link Author(s) N Pena-Perez, J Eden, I Farkhatdinov, E Burdet, A Takagi Abstract More info TBA Link

Evolving Perception for Game Agents Theme Game AI Project proposed & supervised by Alex Wade, Peter Cowling To discuss whether this project could become your PhD proposal please email: alex.wade@york.ac.uk < Back Evolving Perception for Game Agents Project proposal abstract: How does perception emerge? Hugely successful approaches to creating AI game playing agents such as MuZero, AlphaGo and AlphaStar learn the action to take in each state alongside a representation of the world to aid learning. For MuZero, AlphaGo and AlphaStar the representation is a prior distribution on how promising each move is in a given board position. The prior distribution can be seen as a highly effective way to perceive and simplify the game world, for greater decision-making fitness. In this project we will create game agents, for open world games such as Minecraft, which start from rudimentary sensors and simultaneously evolve a world representation while learning to make decisions leading to high fitness in the game world. We will investigate important scientific questions about how perception has evolved in humans, alongside creating interesting agents which might exhibit very weird and "alien" behaviours. Our internal representation of the world is conditioned both by evolution (for example, the physiology of the eye and brain) and also by learned experience. What sorts of perceptual systems might artificial agents develop in a simulated world? In this project we will develop simple 'open world' games into which we will release software agents with rudimentary sensory systems, possibly alongside human-controlled agents. These agents will be able to sense their world but not, initially, to perceive it (since perception is a combination of sensing and interpretation ). Both the sensory apparatus and the structure of the machine learning networks will be free to evolve (through genetic algorithms and reinforcement learning). Each generation will need to undergo a period of 'development' to train its networks on the current environment. We seek a motivated and talented student with a creative approach to research and skills in some of AI/machine learning, programming/game design, psychology/neuroscience and data analysis, and a willingness to learn new skills as necessary. Some travel to other international labs with an interest in this space may be possible. Supervisor: Alex Wade , Peter Cowling Based at:

< Back Studying General Agents in Video Games from the Perspective of Player Experience Link Author(s) C Guerrero-Romero, S Kumari, D Perez-Liebana, S Deterding Abstract More info TBA Link

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. Metropolitan Autonomous University

< Back iGGi conference 2021 Mark the date for our next IGGI Conference: 08 - 09 September 2021 PhD students discuss and showcase their research into new technologies and directions for games.Come along and find out about new ideas, meet future employees, and steer the direction of research in the world’s largest games PhD programme. Click for Tickets and more info here - coming soon Previous 8 Jul 2021 Next

< Back Genetic optimisation of BCI systems for identifying games related cognitive states Link Author(s) A Iacob, M Morosan, F Sepulveda, R Poli Abstract More info TBA Link