< Back Prasad Sandbhor University of York iGGi PG Researcher Available for post-PhD position Prasad is a serious game designer, researcher and educator specialising in environmental, nature-themed games, with an interdisciplinary practice informed by user-centred design and strategic management. In his PhD, he has developed the 'Thinking Through' framework for designing contextual role-playing games to support understanding of climate actions. He works at The Playful Learning at York (PLaY) Group, co-leads Play for the Planet Network and has co-founded the 'Play in Nature' initiative, which creates playful experiences that connect people with nature. A description of Prasad's research: Prasad's PhD research focuses on designing games that encourage players to 'think through' their climate actions. He designed and evaluated 2 physical role-playing games where players immerse themselves in realistic, relatable scenarios drawn from their own lives and communities. He drew upon climate change education and communication research, utilising serious game design and user-centred design methods to create these games. Instead of dictating what players should do, these games foster spaces for reflection, discussion, and sharing regarding the dilemmas, trade-offs, and tensions associated with climate actions. He has synthesised his findings into a framework called the 'Thinking Through Framework' for designing role-playing games. This framework consists of 7 design principles aimed at researchers, designers, and educators in the fields of climate change education and communication, enabling them to create their own role-playing games for climate action. Email prasad.sandbhor@york.ac.uk Website LinkedIn Mastodon BlueSky GitHub Other Link Supervisor: Dr Jon Hook Featured Publication(s): Climate Companions: Designing a Live Action Role-playing (LARP) Game that Helps in Thinking Through Climate Actions Learning through play? What board games reveal and conceal about climate change Life on Wings: Relating to a Bird's Life in a City through a Board Game Radical Alternate Futurescoping: Solarpunk versus Grimdark Climate Club: A Group-based Game to Support Sensemaking of Climate Actions Themes Applied Games Design & Development - Previous Next

< Back George Long Queen Mary University of London iGGi PG Researcher Available for placement George is an iGGi PhD student interested in AI assisted game design, specifically the process of game balancing. After graduating with a BSc in Computer Science at the University of Essex, he joined iGGi in 2021. His research focuses on how AI can be used to balance games, in particular games with asymmetric elements. He has most recently been working on using agentic Large Language Models to theorycraft optimal strategies in games. A description of George's research: "My research focuses on balancing games through identifying overpowered or unfair rules, which can then be accounted for: My previous work identified how we can estimate unit point costs in miniature wargames. These wargames are played by forming armies comprised of units, the sum of each unit's point costs must be within the total army budget. Therefore it is crucial that these point costs accurately represent how useful the unit is in combat. We used Linear Regression and Linear Programming to estimate these point costs and improve the balance of an example game. Currently, I am investigating how we can use Large Language Models to theorycraft optimal strategies in games.I used an agentic approach where an agent comes up with an initial theory, tests in out in games, and uses the results of the game to create an iterative feedback loop to improve the strategy." Email g.e.m.long@qmul.ac.uk Website LinkedIn Mastodon BlueSky GitHub Other Link Supervisor(s): Dr Diego Pérez-Liébana Featured Publication(s): STEP: A Framework for Automated Point Cost Estimation Balancing wargames through predicting unit point costs PyTAG: Challenges and Opportunities for Reinforcement Learning in Tabletop Games Themes Design & Development Game AI Game Data - Previous Next

< Back Dr Ben Kirman University of York iGGi Training Coordinator Supervisor Available to supervise non-iGGi students for 2024 intake Ben is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Prof) in Interactive Media at the University of York, who has over 20 years' experience as a creative technologist. Since his first programming job fixing Y2K bugs (you're welcome), he has worked with dozens of organisations, large and small, in design and prototyping playful experiences. His research uses game design and playful design as a way to explore the complex effects of emerging technologies through novel and unexpected interactions and experiences. Most often, this is through the design and development of games, digital/physical prototypes, and design fictions. Ben has applied this in topics ranging from immersive theatre, dog technology, non-league football, radical cycle delivery, and time travelling robots, to educational games, esports, new situationism and magic. The unifying theme is play – as a topic of study, a way of working, for research insight, and as expression or output in games or playful experiences. This work, especially the more bizarre stuff, has often been covered by traditional media, including the BBC, New Scientist, Wired, The Guardian, TIME, Metro, the New York Times, and Your Cat magazine. Ben is keen on supervising students with strong creative drives, with an interest in making, design, experimentation, and a broad perspective on games and play. This might be a project about playful props in immersive theatre, or a project about context in locative and site-specific games, or any other project that looks to explore new possibilities and new implications of emerging technology through the lens of play. Research themes include: Game Design Applied Games Computational Creativity Sports with an E and without an E Player Experience Email ben.kirman@york.ac.uk Website LinkedIn Mastodon BlueSky GitHub Other Link Themes Applied Games Creative Computing Design & Development Esports Player Research - Previous Next

< Back Dr Marko Tot Queen Mary University of London iGGi Alum 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'. Email m.tot@qmul.ac.uk Website LinkedIn Mastodon BlueSky GitHub Other Link Supervisor(s): Dr Diego Pérez-Liébana Featured Publication(s): Adapting a world model for trajectory following in a 3d game Bootstrap Your Own Teacher: Online Policy Distillation for Multi-Game Reinforcement Learning Statistical Forward Planning Algorithms 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

< Back Prof. Massimo Poesio Queen Mary University of London Supervisor Massimo Poesio is a cognitive scientist whose primary field is Computational Linguistics / Natural Language Processing. He is interested in the interdisciplinary study of language processing using evidence from computational modelling, corpora, psychological studies, and neuroscience; specific interests include computational models of anaphora resolution (coreference); the study of disagreement on language interpretation through the creation of large corpora containing multiple judgments (an area in which he pioneered the use of games-with-a-purpose with the development of Phrase Detectives, http://www.phrasedetectives.org ); the interpretation of verbal and non-verbal communication in interaction; and the study of conceptual knowledge using a combination of methods from human language technology and neuroscience. He has also been involved in a number of projects applying NLP methods to real life problems, such as detecting deception online, or identifying human rights violations reports in social media. He holds a European Research Council grant on identifying disagreements in language through Games-With-A-Purpose, DALI and is a co-founder of the open access journal Dialogue and Discourse . Using conversational agents in games Applying games to label data for AI Research themes: Game AI Game Design Games with a Purpose Email m.poesio@qmul.ac.uk Website LinkedIn Mastodon BlueSky GitHub Other Link Themes Applied Games Game AI - Previous Next

< Back Dr Joe Cutting University of York iGGi Alum + Supervisor Dr Joe Cutting is a Lecturer in Human-Computer Interaction in the Department of Computer Science at the University of York, UK. He has a BSc in Computer Science and an MSc in Cognitive Science from the University of Birmingham and completed an IGGI PhD at the University of York in 2019. Much of his research is in the area of the effects of playing video games on outcomes such as learning, cognitive abilities, wellbeing and behaviour change. This includes new psychological theories of how learning happens in video games and how game play can affect mental health, as well as studies on how game play can prevent cognitive decline in older people. He is also creating applied games to address current issues in education such as student wellbeing and teacher recruitment. Before becoming an academic, Joe enjoyed a varied career which included working as an interactive producer for the London Science Museum and founding his own digital startup company in the area of applied games. Email joe.cutting@york.ac.uk Website LinkedIn Mastodon BlueSky GitHub Other Link Supervisor(s): Prof. Paul Cairns Featured Publication(s): 01 01V Difficulty-skill balance does not affect engagement and enjoyment: a pre-registered study using artificial intelligence-controlled difficulty Higher working memory capacity and distraction-resistance associated with strategy (not action) game playing in younger adults, but puzzle game playing in older adults Objective difficulty-skill balance impacts perceived balance but not behaviour: A test of flow and self-determination theory predictions The task-attention theory of game learning: a theory and research agenda The Relationship Between Lockdowns and Video Game Playtime: Multilevel Time-Series Analysis Using Massive-Scale Data Telemetry Four grand challenges for video game effects scholars: How digital trace data can improve the way we study games Measuring the experience of playing self-paced games Measuring game experience using visual distractors Four dilemmas for video game effects scholars: How digital trace data can improve the way we study games The many faces of monetisation: Understanding the diversity and extremity of player spending in mobile games via massive-scale transactional analysis Busy doing nothing? What do players do in idle games? Understanding whether lockdowns lead to increases in the heaviness of gaming using massive-scale data telemetry: An analysis of 251 billion hours of playtime Themes Applied Games Design & Development Player Research - Previous Next

< Back Ruizhe "Jay" Yu Xia Queen Mary University of London iGGi PG Researcher Available for post-PhD position Ruizhe has bachelor degrees in Mathematics and Physics and a master's degree in Artificial Intelligence. After a short time as a consultant he decided to pursue research into what got him into AI in the first place: game agents. He enjoys games of all kinds, but strategy and RPG games occupy a sizeable portion of his collection. AI agents that perform with superhuman skill in increasingly complex games have appeared in recent years, but these agents are not always useful to game developers. Players within a game exhibit significant variance in their skill levels and play styles. Therefore, game agents with similar variance would better represent the player base. The research Ruizhe proposes will focus on three areas: measuring skill and play styles, developing game agents that mimic a range of human play styles and skill levels, and making these agents human-like. Upon successful completion, this research will improve the game development process via automated playtesting and will enable the development of AI agents that are more engaging and interactive. Email r.yuxia@qmul.ac.uk Website LinkedIn Mastodon BlueSky GitHub Other Link Supervisor: Prof. Simon Lucas Dr Jeremy Gow Featured Publication(s): Play Style Identification Using Low-Level Representations of Play Traces in MicroRTS Themes Game AI Game Data - Previous Next

< Back Prof. Alex Wade University of York Supervisor Alex Wade is a psychologist working in the field of human cognitive neuroscience. He uses a combination of structural and functional brain imaging, electrophysiology, psychophysics and big data analysis to ask how we see, solve problems and make decisions. His most recent work in the domain of video games focuses on what we can learn about global cognitive health and player personality from the analysis of large MOBA datasets in collaboration with Riot games (League of Legends). He is particularly interested in supervising students with a psychology or neuroscience background in the areas of: Using commercial video games to measure cognition and personality How the brain responds to solo- and group gameplay Can we use video games to monitor and modify real-world cognition, behaviour and mental health Research themes: Game Analytics Games with a Purpose Computational Creativity E-Sports Player Experience The neuroscience of gaming Email alex.wade@york.ac.uk Website LinkedIn Mastodon BlueSky GitHub Other Link Themes Applied Games Creative Computing Esports Game Data Player Research - Previous Next

< Back Dr Mariana Lopez University of York Supervisor Dr Mariana Lopez is a researcher in the field of sound design. She works on two main fields: accessibility and heritage. Her work on accessibility focuses on how sound design can be used to create accessible experiences for film and television audiences with sight loss, providing an alternative to traditional Audio Description practices. She was the Principal Investigator of the project Enhancing Audio Description funded by the AHRC. In the field of heritage, she focuses on acoustical heritage, by exploring how acoustic measurement techniques, computer modelling and the recreation of soundscapes can help us understand the sonic experiences of our ancestors. She was the Principal Investigator of the British Academy-funded project – The Soundscapes of the York Mystery Plays. Related to these fields she is supervising and has supervised projects in the field of mental health in connection to the creative arts; interactive installations; serious gaming and its impact on sustainability; accessibility and gaming; and sound design in participatory theatre, among others. Research themes: Game Audio and Music Games with a Purpose Sound and accessibility Equality and social justice Acoustical heritage Sound installations Email mariana.lopez@york.ac.uk Website LinkedIn Mastodon BlueSky GitHub Other Link Themes Applied Games Game Audio - Previous Next

< Back James Gardner University of York iGGi PG Researcher Final-year PhD student at the University of York and Co-Founder of pxld.ai, an AI startup for VFX. My research focuses on inverse rendering, scene representation learning, and world models. I previously held a Research Fellowship at the University of York and interned as a Research Scientist at Toshiba. An MEng graduate and IET Prize winner, I contribute to the open source project Nerfstudio and have reviewed for NeurIPS, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, and BMVC. My work is published in top-tier venues including TPAMI, NeurIPS, CVPR, and ECCV. A description of James' research: My research explores how AI systems can build richer world models from the limited views available in images and video. I study representations that reason beyond the image plane: what lies outside the camera’s view, how light and visibility shape observations, and how future views can be predicted from partial evidence. This work sits at the intersection of computer vision, machine learning, and computer graphics, aiming to learn models that are aware of space, direction, and scene structure. In the long term, it supports more capable systems for understanding, reconstructing, and editing visual worlds, with applications in immersive media, games, VFX, robotics, and augmented reality. Email james.gardner@york.ac.uk Website LinkedIn Mastodon BlueSky GitHub Other Link Featured Publication(s): RENI++: A Rotation-Equivariant, Scale-Invariant, Natural Illumination Prior TAPVid-360: Tracking Any Point in 360 from Narrow Field of View Video VENI: Variational Encoder for Natural Illumination NEURALATEX: a machine learning library written in pure LATEX Rotation-equivariant conditional spherical neural fields for learning a natural illumination prior 3D Morphable Models and Beyond (Dagstuhl Seminar 22121) The Sky's the Limit: Relightable Outdoor Scenes via a Sky-Pixel Constrained Illumination Prior and Outside-In Visibility Themes Game AI - 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 Dr Catherine Flick iGGi Responsible Innovation Lead Supervisor Catherine Flick is a Reader in Computing and Social Responsibility at De Montfort University and has a particular interest in the ethics of emerging technologies (including video games). Her video game research is largely interdisciplinary and focused on the social and ethical impacts of and ethics in design of video games. Previous video game research and talk topics includes on Pokemon Go and mental health, design of moral decision making systems in Bioware games, the representation of chickens in video games, the philosophy of zombie games, desirability of lootboxes, serious games for the hearing impaired, etc. She regularly attends and speaks at PAX East, and has spoken on games and similarly weird things at various conferences and events internationally. She is also the responsible innovation lead for the IGGI programme, so has a particular interest in development of codes of ethics or ethical design principles for games, having worked on the updated ACM Code of Ethics and run EU funded projects that developed responsible innovation guidelines in the fields of healthcare IT, smart homes/smart health, cyber security, nanotechnology & biomedicine. She is particularly interested in students who are excited about the intersection of video games and society from a critical philosophical perspective, or from a social sciences perspective. Research themes: Ethical Game Design Games with a Purpose Player Experience Gamification Social/Ethical Impact of Games Diversity & Inclusion in Games Philosophy & Games Email catherine.flick@staffs.ac.uk Website LinkedIn Mastodon BlueSky GitHub Other Link Themes Accessibility Applied Games Player Research - Previous Next