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< Back Dr Charline Foch University of York iGGi Alum Available for post-PhD position Charline first came to the UK in 2011 to study English and Film Studies at King’s College London, before going on to a MSc in Film, Exhibition and Curation at the University of Edinburgh. By chance, accident or fate, she stumbled into the games industry, working in an independent game studio in Berlin, where she touched upon customer support, community management, content writing and QA for a new MMORPG. This experience gave her the push to start a PhD in video games. In her spare time, she is an avid film viewer, volleyball player, and amateur artist. Charline’s research focuses on how people conceptualise failure, with an emphasis on its perceived positive, desirable effects on player experience. Throughout her PhD, she has conducted research among video games players to gain a better understanding of what they perceive as the purpose and value of failure in the games they play; and conducted research among video games developers to gain a better understanding of what processes, obstacles, and ideas go into the design and implementation of failure in their games. With a focus on single-player, more narrative-driven games, she has used this research to design a cards-based design toolkit to support game designers in approaching the question of fail states and player experience in the early stages of the game development process, helping them reflect on the intersection between failure, game mechanics, storytelling, and player experience when working on their games. Aside from her PhD, Charline has also worked with the Digital Creativity Labs on the PlayOn! project, a European project gathering 9 theatres across Europe working on immersive technologies (VR, AR, apps for audience participation...) and theatre productions. During her time at PlayOn!, she has worked on the connections between the games industry and the performance arts, investigating how technology, game design principles, and theatre can work together, and what barriers practitioners face when attempting to reconcile all sides in a single production through experimentation and collaboration. charline.foch@york.ac.uk Email https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@chafoch Mastodon https://charlinefoch.carrd.co Other links Website https://www.linkedin.com/in/charline-foch-97196663 LinkedIn BlueSky Github Supervisor: Dr Ben Kirman Featured Publication(s): “The game doesn't judge you”: game designers’ perspectives on implementing failure in video games “Slow down and look”: Desirable aspects of failure in video games, from the perspective of players. Themes Design & Development Player Research - Previous Next

< Back Dr Yongxin Yang Queen Mary University of London Supervisor Dr Yongxin Yang is a lecturer in financial technology at Queen Mary University of London, UK and he is also a part-time professor in finance at Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, China. His research is in the area of meta learning and its interactions with other machine learning paradigms like reinforcement learning. He has broad interests in applied machine learning, esp. for finance problems, for example, portfolio optimization and financial derivatives pricing. For the project of meta reinforcement learning, we want to explore the learning algorithms that can transfer an existing RL agent into a new task (e.g., a new game episode) with the minimal effort on retraining it. For the project of AI Economist, we are going to create a multi-agent system, where each agent behaves like a human being who will interacts with the environment and other agents (e.g., produce and trade), then we study how a certain policy (e.g., monetary and tax) affects the economy. yongxin.yang@qmul.ac.uk Email Mastodon https://yang.ac/ Other links Website LinkedIn BlueSky https://github.com/wOOL/ Github Themes Applied Games Game AI Game Data - Previous Next

< Back Dr Søren Riis Queen Mary University of London Supervisor Søren Riis has more than 15 years of experience in teaching computability, complexity and the art of creating fast efficient algorithms. He has a strong interest in reinforcement learning and generative adversarial networks (GANs) related to strategy games. Riis has been actively involved in computer chess, and is listed on the wiki of influential people in chess programming https://www.chessprogramming.org/ Søren Riis is a strong player of strategy games including Chess, Shogi, Go and Bridge at an internal level. He has worked as a consultant for an AI company and is involved in applying deep learning for the card game of bridge. For the last 5 years he has been working on technical projects related to machine learning and reinforcement learning. He has practical experience and interest in scientific computing on super computers, and in creating C and C++ libraries to run from within python. Søren Riis is particularly interested in supervising students with a strong technical and/or maths background. Aptitude for strategy games with an interest in one the following ares is an advantage. Games requiring inductive reasoning combined with exploration. Hidden identity games (Werewolf, Resistance/Avalon, Mafia etc) Using GANs to sample realistic scenarios during gameplay Deep Reinforcement Learning in multi-agent strategy games Building and analysing games for investigating evolution of communication. Research themes: Game AI Game Design Game Creativity Games and mathematics s.riis@qmul.ac.uk Email Mastodon https://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/profiles/riissoren.html Other links Website https://www.linkedin.com/soren-riis-13602117/ LinkedIn BlueSky Github Themes Creative Computing Game AI Game Data - Previous Next

< Back Dr Mathieu Barthet Queen Mary University of London Supervisor Dr Mathieu Barthet is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL). He is the Programme Coordinator of the MSc in Media and Arts Technology by Research and oversees Industry Partnerships for the Centre for Doctoral Training in AI & Music. He received an MSc degree in Electronics and Computer Science in 2003 (Paris VI University/Ecole Polytechnique de Montréal), and an MSc degree in Acoustics in 2004 (Aix-Marseille II University/Ecole Centrale Marseille). He was awarded a PhD in Acoustics, Signal Processing and Computer Science applied to Music from Aix-Marseille II University and CNRS-LMA in 2008, and joined the Centre for Digital Music at QMUL in 2009. Mathieu conducts research in the fields of Music Information Research, New Interfaces for Musical Expression and Music Perception, in which he published over 100 peer-reviewed academic papers. His research interests include music and emotions, audio-visual interfaces and extended reality, AI-based musical interfaces, music recommendation, and musical timbre. He is particularly interested in supervising students with an HCI and/or AI background combined with musical skills or a sensitivity to music, to investigate how games can be used for musical education and production, or how game audio can be enhanced using AI and new interfaces. Research themes: Game Audio and Music Games for Music Education or Production Audio in Sports Games m.barthet@qmul.ac.uk Email Mastodon https://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/profiles/barthetmathieu.html Other links Website https://www.linkedin.com/in/mathieu-barthet-9519ab17/ LinkedIn BlueSky https://github.com/mabara Github Themes Game AI Game Audio - Previous Next

< Back Younès Rabii Queen Mary University of London iGGi PG Researcher Available for post-PhD position Younès is an awarded game designer and generative AI researcher. Their current research is concerned with the relationship between a game's rules, its narrative, and how to build AI systems that can understand these relationships, manipulate them, and invent new ones. Younès also has been a game developer for the past 10 years. They specialize in crafting new forms of play and making it accessible for their peers. Their work has been previously exposed in the French embassies and international conferences like the Game Developers Conference, the Gamedevs of Color Expo and the A MAZE Festival. A description of Younès' research: Younès' research goal is to bring to video games some of the most interesting properties of roleplaying games: their ability to trust every player with building a part of the game, and their ability to generate both new narrative and gameplay on the fly. Younès is working both on the AI techniques needed to allow that, and how to design the social spaces around those games in a way that won't hurt players or abuse creators. For the end of their PhD, Younès is designing a prototype in that new genre, counting among the first games to contain a form of Live Automated Game Design. yrabii.eggs@gmail.com Email Mastodon http://pyrofoux.itch.io/ Other links Website https://www.linkedin.com/in/youn%C3%A8s-rabii-755717185/ LinkedIn BlueSky https://github.com/pyrofoux Github Supervisor(s): Dr Mike Cook Dr Jeremy Gow Featured Publication(s): " Hunt Takes Hare": Theming Games Through Game-Word Vector Translation Why Oatmeal is Cheap: Kolmogorov Complexity and Procedural Generation Revealing game dynamics via word embeddings of gameplay data Themes Creative Computing Design & Development Game AI - Previous Next

< Back Doruk Balcı University of York iGGi PG Researcher Available for placement I am a game maker interested in the relationship between player creativity and game design. My work is centered around the transformative capabilities of players to invent their own metagames and play-practices, and how to support this through game design. My other interests include: drawing, literature, making zines and browser games, and playing with tools I don’t really understand. Designing for Appropriative Play How do we make games which we want to be messed with, changed fundamentally beyond our expectations in play? How do we make up rules that are intended to be bent, changed or broken? Why would we want that? Play practices that transform structures, subvert expectations and re-define their contexts are celebrated in many aspects of culture and can lead to personal and meaningful experiences. Yet research on this topic from a game design perspective has been scarce. In my project, I am exploring how we can design game systems that invite players to assume ownership of their play-practices through exploring alternative paradigms of game design. doruk.balci@york.ac.uk Email Mastodon https://fuzul.itch.io Other links Website https://www.linkedin.com/in/doruk-balc%C4%B1-19749a151 LinkedIn https://bsky.app/profile/dorukb.bsky.social BlueSky Github Supervisor: Dr Jo Iacovides Themes Design & Development Player Research - 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 alex.wade@york.ac.uk Email Mastodon https://www.york.ac.uk/psychology/staff/academicstaff/alex-wade/ Other links Website LinkedIn BlueSky Github Themes Applied Games Creative Computing Esports Game Data Player Research - Previous Next

< Back Dr Ignacio Castro Queen Mary University of London Supervisor Ignacio Castro is Lecturer in Data Analytics at Queen Mary University of London. His work sits at the intersection between economics and networks. His interest spans from online social networks and moderation to the macroscopic evolution of the Internet. He has been an investigator on three major grants that hold over £6 million in funding. His work appears in top tier journals and conferences including Web Conference, ACM SIGCOMM, ACM SIGMETRICS, ACM IMC, ICWSM, and IEEE/ACM Trans. on Networking. He is interested in supervising students with a background in social network analysis, NLP and/or machine learning. i.castro@qmul.ac.uk Email https://mastodon.social/@ignactro Mastodon https://icastro.info/ Other links Website https://www.linkedin.com/in/ignacio-de-castro-arribas-44a48117/ LinkedIn BlueSky Github Themes Applied Games Game AI Game Data Player Research - Previous Next

< Back Bobby Khaleque Queen Mary University of London iGGi PG Researcher Available for post-PhD position Bobby Khaleque is an IGGI student focused on the creation of Automated Game Design (AGD) Systems particularly for Secret Box experiences. Secret box experiences refer to games which focus less on their game mechanics and rules and more on their aesthetic design, mood evocation and exploration. AGD systems might help empower solo and indie developers during the game design process by quickly creating playable versions of games with little to no human intervention required. A further research goal of his project is game quality evaluation for games seeking to provide the aforementioned experience. After completing a Bachelors in Computer Science and a Masters in Artificial Intelligence both at QMUL he decided to pursue games research particularly for AGD and player experience due to the lack of research in regard to games aiming to provide a Secret Box experience. Bobby is part of the QMUL Game AI group actively pursuing his research in Computational Creativity to answer the question: Can a computer design a high quality Secret Box experience? b.d.a.khaleque@qmul.ac.uk Email Mastodon Other links Website LinkedIn BlueSky https://github.com/BKhaleque Github Supervisor(s): Dr Mike Cook Dr Jeremy Gow Featured Publication(s): What Factors Do Players Perceive as Methods of Retention in Battle Royale Games? Themes Creative Computing Game AI - Previous Next

< Back Dr Charles Ringer University of York iGGi Alum Charlie Ringer is a researcher interested in applied Machine Learning with a focus on the ways in which we can use Deep Learning to model various facets of video games streams (e.g. stream highlights, emotional moments, in-game events, various streamer behaviours etc.). As such, his work spans many Machine Learning fields, such as Computer Vision, Affect Computing, and Natural Language Processing. His research has three motivating factors. Firstly, the challenge of how to fuse multi-view stream data (e.g. audio, web-cam footage, game footage, chat) into a single model, especially when considering the challenges of ‘in-the-wild’ data. Secondly, the untapped and bountiful data source that livestreaming represents, especially regarding the way in which streamers play games and interact with their audience. Thirdly, the exciting and emerging field of self-supervised learning which has the potential to utilise this abundance of livestream data. Charlie initially worked in the video games industry working mainly on the Magic: The Gathering - Duels of the Planeswalkers series of games before studying a BSc in Computer Science at Goldsmiths, University of London. After his BSc he joined IGGI, firstly at Goldsmiths and then at York. He was recognised as a finalist for the Twitch Research Fellowship 2019 for his research on livestream data. charles.ringer@york.ac.uk Email Mastodon https://www.charlieringer.com Other links Website https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlie-ringer/ LinkedIn BlueSky https://www.github.com/charlieringer Github Featured Publication(s): Machine Learning with Applications From Theory to Behaviour: Towards a General Model of Engagement Modelling early user-game interactions for joint estimation of survival time and churn probability Time to die 2: Improved in-game death prediction in dota 2 Autohighlight: Highlight Detection in League of Legends Esports Broadcasts via Crowd-Sourced Data Multi-Modal Livestream Highlight Detection from Audio, Visual, and Language Data Twitchchat: A dataset for exploring livestream chat Multimodal joint emotion and game context recognition in league of legends livestreams Streaming Behaviour: Livestreaming as a Paradigm for Analysis of Emotional and Social Signals Deep unsupervised multi-view detection of video game stream highlights Streaming behaviour: Live streaming as a paradigm for multi-view analysis of emotional and social signals Rolling Horizon Co-evolution in Two-player General Video Game Playing Themes Esports Game AI Game Data - Previous Next

< Back Dr Daniel Gomme University of Essex iGGi Alum Players have underlying expectations of the opponents they play against in strategy games: don't break the rules, provide a sense of tension, be able to communicate plans... AI doesn't always fulfil these. Dan's focus is on finding ways to better fulfil those expectations - and even to overtly change them - in order to improve player experience. With qualitative tools and in-game testing, he's found several concrete design mechanisms that can further that goal. daniel.gomme@yahoo.co.uk Email Mastodon Other links Website https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-gomme/ LinkedIn BlueSky https://github.com/OctarineSourcerer Github Supervisor Prof. Richard Bartle Featured Publication(s): Player Expectations of Strategy Game AI Playing with Dezgo: Adapting Human-AI Interaction to the Context of Play Strategy Games: The Components of A Worthy Opponent Distributed Social Multi-Agent Negotiation Framework For Incomplete Information Games Tools To Adjust Tension And Suspense In Strategy Games: An Investigation Themes Design & Development Game AI Player Research - Previous Next

< Back Dr Evelyn Tan University of York iGGi Alum Evelyn holds a master’s degree in Industrial-Organisational Psychology from University College London (UCL) and has previously worked in the HR Technology industry where she undertook projects on game-based assessment, virtual team coaching and virtual reality (VR) hiring and training. She has published her work on developing trust in virtual work teams at CHI PLAY 2019, a premier conference for games research. On the Emergence and Development of Team Cohesion in Newly Formed Virtual Teams Evelyn specialises in teamwork and team dynamics. She is interested in uncovering how cohesion emerges and develops, and to identify its predictors. Her goal is to understand how to build high-performing teams that make people want to stay and remain united in the pursuit of their shared objectives. Under IGGI, she studies virtual teams in competitive esport games, specifically newly formed ad hoc teams. By applying theories and principles from psychology, her work can be extended to address the challenges faced by real-world teams with similar characteristics, for example emergency response teams and short-term project teams. By studying team cohesion – its emergence and development – her work addresses the broader challenges of building high-performing teams which retain their members. Please note: Updating of profile text in progress Email Mastodon https://sites.google.com/view/evelyntan Other links Website https://www.linkedin.com/in/evelyntisiantan/ LinkedIn BlueSky https://github.com/ett506 Github Featured Publication(s): Communication Sequences Indicate Team Cohesion: A Mixed-Methods Study of Ad Hoc League of Legends Teams Less is More: Analysing Communication in Teams of Strangers Trusted Teammates: Commercial Digital Games Can Be Effective Trust-Building Tools Themes Esports Player Research - Previous Next