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< Back Dr Elena Gordon-Petrovskaya University of York iGGi Alum Elena specialises in novel forms of 'predatory' monetisation in digital games and its effects on players and is particularly interested in the links of game design to gaming disorder. She uses her background in psychology and human-computer interaction to take a player-centric perspective: developing knowledge bottom-up and working directly with players as the primary stakeholder. Her work spans ethics, wellbeing, and the lived experience of technology and its use. In her work so far, Elena has conducted a qualitative study with 1000+ players to create a taxonomy of microtransactions that players perceive to be unfair, aggressive, or misleading, and carried out a prevalence assessment of these techniques across the most popular desktop and mobile games. Most recently, her work discovered several types of harms which emerge from player interaction with games perceived as 'designed to drive spending'. Additionally, Elena has contributed to government calls for evidence around game regulation, given talks at seminar series and conferences, and collaborated on a variety of related topics, such as loot box spending, esports betting, and changes to gameplay during COVID. elepetrovs@gmail.com Email Mastodon http://elepetrovs.co.uk/ Other links Website LinkedIn BlueSky Github Supervisors: Prof. Sebastian Deterding Dr David Zendle Featured Publication(s): Learnings from the case Maple Refugee: A dystopian story of free-to-play, probability, and gamer consumer activism. Four dilemmas for video game effects scholars: How digital trace data can improve the way we study games Adapting and Enhancing Evolutionary Art for Casual Creation. The many faces of monetisation: Understanding the diversity and extremity of player spending in mobile games via massive-scale transactional analysis The relationship between psycho-environmental characteristics and wellbeing in non-spending players of certain mobile games Why microtransactions may not necessarily be bad: a criticism of the consequentialist evaluation of video game monetisation The lived experience of Internet Gaming Disorder: core symptoms, antecedents and consequences as based on a qualitative analysis of Reddit posts. Prevalence and Salience of Problematic Microtransactions in Top-Grossing Mobile and PC Games: A Content Analysis of User Reviews Predatory Monetisation? A Categorisation of Unfair, Misleading and Aggressive Monetisation Techniques in Digital Games from the Player Perspective Designing Personas for Expressive Robots: Personality in the New Breed of Moving, Speaking, and Colorful Social Home Robots A large-scale study of changes to the quantity, quality, and distribution of video game play during the COVID-19 pandemic How do loot boxes make money? An analysis of a very large dataset of real Chinese CSGO loot box openings Defining the esports bettor: evidence from an online panel survey of emerging adults The Battle Pass: a Mixed-Methods Investigation into a Growing Type of Video Game Monetisation Casual Creators in the Wild: A Typology of Commercial Generative Creativity Support Tools Not all fun and games: The design and evaluation of a game to increase intrinsic motivation in learning programming Exploring the multiverse of analysis options for the Addiction Stroop "These People Had Taken Advantage of Me”: A Grounded Theory of Problematic Consequences of Player Interaction with Mobile Games Perceived as “Designed to Drive Spending" Themes Player Research - Previous Next

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. BiG

Novelty Optimisation Theme Creative Computing Project proposed & supervised by Jeremy Gow, Sebastian Deterding To discuss whether this project could become your PhD proposal please email: jeremy.gow@qmul.ac.uk < Back Novelty Optimisation Project proposal abstract: New levels, new characters, new items, new opponents: Novelty is a major game feature stoking sustained player curiosity and interest. Too much repetition, and players get bored. But is there such a thing as too much novelty? Games already do automatic difficulty balancing – finding just the right level of challenge. Can we do the same for novelty – identify and automatically balance the right amount of novel content we serve to players? This project would benefit from a computational methods background, such as computational psychology, cognitive science, machine learning, or procedural content generation, and an interest in player psychology. Supervisor: Jeremy Gow , Sebastian Deterding Based at:

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 Predictive models and monte carlo tree search: A pipeline for believable agents Link Author(s) C Pacheco, D Perez-Liebana 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. Spirit AI

< Back Perceived value of video games, but not hours played, predicts mental well-being in adult Nintendo players Link Author(s) N Ballou, M Vuorre, T Hakman, K Magnusson, AK Przybylski Abstract More info TBA Link

< Back iGGi Con 2023 – It’s A Wrap 13 Short Talks, 30 Posters, 12 Game Demos, 4 Knowledge Exchange Presentations, 6 coffee breaks, 3 Keynotes, 1 Drinks Reception, 4 Workshops, 4 Buzz Sessions, 2 Lunches, 1 Mini Expo and many hours of chat + networking later, AND IT’S A WRAP! We loved this year’s iGGi conference at Queen Mary University of London – thank you so much to everyone who could make it! Soon to come: Watch this space for pictures and highlights of the event. Twitter coverage of the event was via our dedicated conference twitter (aka “X”) here Footage of selected talks will also be published on our iGGi YouTube channel, in a few weeks. A special big THANKS goes out to the following: This year’s Conference Organising Committee, for their amazing work ( Laurissa Tokarchuk , Jeremy Gow , James Goodman , Nirit Binyamini Ben Meir , Peyman Hosseini , Yu-Jhen Hsu , Lauren Winter , Jozef Kulik , Susanne Binder ) Non-committee iGGi Admin who helped relentlessly with the preparations ( Tracy Dancer , Shopna Begum , Helen Tilbrook , Oliver Roughton) iGGi Con Sponsors Sony Interactive Entertainment for their generous donation towards food and drinks Our this year’s three Keynote Speakers (Vanessa Volz, Aleena Chia, Joe Cutting) for their insightful contributions Our iGGi Industry Partners who participated in the Expo All the iGGis who held Talks, Presentations or Workshops, and/or provided Posters or Demos And of course, the 200 attendees who turned the event into the success that it was. Last but not least, remember: The next iGGi Con will be 11+12 September 2024 at York! See you there! Previous 15 Sept 2023 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 Miles Hansard Queen Mary University of London Supervisor Miles Hansard is a computer vision researcher, working on geometric and statistical methods for 3D scene understanding and rendering. He is also interested in active 3D sensing technologies, including depth cameras, lidar, and millimetre-wave radar. His recent projects include GPU methods for real-time atmospheric effects, commodity radar localization of UAVs, and grasp planning for robotic manipulation. He has also worked on human perceptual processes, including eye-movements, geometric judgements, and binocular stereopsis. Miles Hansard is a Senior Lecturer in computer graphics, and a member of the Vision Group and Centre for Advanced Robotics, at QMUL. He is available to supervise projects in the following areas: Simulation of complex physical effects (e.g. the motion of cloth, fire, and fluids), using machine learning. Physically plausible character animation in complex environments (e.g. slippery terrain), using machine learning. miles.hansard@qmul.ac.uk Email Mastodon https://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/~milesh/ Other links Website LinkedIn BlueSky Github Themes Design & Development Game AI Game Data Immersive Technology - Previous Next

< Back Communication Sequences Indicate Team Cohesion: A Mixed-Methods Study of Ad Hoc League of Legends Teams Link Author(s) ETS Tan, K Rogers, LE Nacke, A Drachen, A Wade Abstract More info TBA Link

< Back Examining the effects of video game difficulty adaptation on performance and player experience Link Author(s) M Frister, P Cairns, F McNab Abstract More info TBA Link