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< Back iGGi/AIM/C4DM Spring Writing Retreat 2025 Last week’s 2025 Spring Writing Retreat was a great success! And the warm & sunny weather certainly landed like the cherry on top! The event brought together 16 PG Researchers from iGGi and AIM CDTs, and the C4DM. The three days were spent at High Leigh Conference Centre in Hertfordshire. According to feedback survey, all respondents found the retreat useful, and an overwhelming majority (75%) deemed the duration and number of participants to be just right. (The remaining 25% are equally split both ways, so we conclude that what was on offer hit the sweet spot.) Here is what participants replied to the question " What was the primary benefit of being away with your and other CDT members?" Made some new friends, got to work on my research in a very focused manner. Vitamin D & focused writing time A change of scenery and structure I could focus entirely on my project Focus, socialise, change environment, and being inspired by other people's research and knowledge Balanced and structured days with focused writing sessions Very concentrated environment A constructive environment Focus. No need to worry about food I felt a really supportive and productive environment spending sometimes with my colleagues and new ones away from the usual workplace. Many participants enquired if there will be another writing retreat soon, so we better get planning! Previous 7 May 2025 Next

< Back *New Partner Alert* - Safe In Our World iGGi is proud to introduce our new partner Safe In Our World . The charity (which was founded in 2017 by a group of dedicated folks from games industry) wants to foster positive mental health wellbeing and deliver support not only for players but also developers, publishers, retailers and the other incredible folk and teams who make up the video games industry. The main goal of Safe In Our World is to create and foster worldwide mental health awareness within the video game industry; to eliminate the stigma surrounding mental health, to make it a natural topic of discussion, and to promote the dialogue surrounding mental health so people are not afraid to reach out for help if they need it. iGGi is definitely happy to get behind that goal! As part of our pledge, we are committing to address the following points over the forthcoming year and beyond: Continue to create awareness among iGGi Staff, Supervisors and Researchers in respect of mental health related matters Make sure that all iGGi Supervisors have completed some form of mental health training Offer access to Safe In Our World’s resources to all iGGi Staff and PGRs, including training on mental health first aid and similar Update our annual mental health newsletter which contains important local contacts and resources and other information relevant to the topic Campaign for the cause, disseminate and foster “best practice” and support Safe In Our World in its mission Collaborate with Safe In Our World via sharing mental health-related iGGi research/publications and via joint events such as workshops, talks, panels, etc. So, here’s an official WELCOME to the Safe In Our World Team! We look forward to working together on that mission. #LevelUpMentalHealth Please note: Safe In Our World will feature in our upcoming iGGi Conference (06+07 September in York, find the Registration Link here . Previous 24 Aug 2022 Next

< Back Dr Nick Ballou Queen Mary University of London iGGi Alum Hi there! I’m a psychology and human-computer interaction researcher interested in two main topics: how games affect wellbeing, and how we can reform the research ecosystem to be more trustworthy and efficient (aka “open science” or “metascience”). I’m originally from the US, and have bachelor and master’s degrees in linguistics, a topic that prepared me well for social science research, but whose use is relegated to excitedly sharing language fun facts at this point. In my free time, I play tennis, cook and bake, read—and of course play games (mostly deckbuilders, roguelikes, and AAA RPGs). A description of Nick's research: Psychological need frustration—experiences of feeling controlled and coerced, failure and self-doubt, or loneliness and exclusion—is a promising framework for understanding how players engage with video games. Grounded in self-determination theory, one of the most robust psychological theories, need frustration might help explain how and why players (dis)engage with a game and how gameplay impacts well-being. To realize this aim, however, we’re missing key building blocks: 1) a better grasp on when and why need-frustrating situations arise during play; 2) a questionnaire that can assess how much need frustration people experience in games quantitatively; and 3) studies that combine data on need frustration with carefully tracked behavioral data over time, rather than relying on simple self-reports like “how much time did you spend playing video games last week?” My thesis attempts to address all of these one step at a time and is underpinned by a strong emphasis on open and transparent methods. Results so far are promising—contact me to hear more! nick@nickballou.com Email Mastodon https://www.nickballou.com Other links Website LinkedIn BlueSky Github Supervisors: Prof. Sebastian Deterding Dr David Zendle Dr Laurissa Tokarchuk Featured Publication(s): Reliving 10 years old: Descriptive Insights into Retro Gaming UKRN Local Network Lead Guidebook Claims for no evidence also need evidence From social media to artificial intelligence: improving research on digital harms in youth The Basic Needs in Games (BANG) Model of Video Game Play and Mental Health (PhD thesis) The Basic Needs in Games (BANG) Model of Video Games and Mental Health: Untangling the Positive and Negative Effects of Games with Better Science The Relationship Between Lockdowns and Video Game Playtime: Multilevel Time-Series Analysis Using Massive-Scale Data Telemetry Affective Uplift During Video Game Play: A Naturalistic Case Study No evidence that Chinese playtime mandates reduced heavy gaming in one segment of the video games industry A manifesto for more productive psychological games research Four grand challenges for video game effects scholars: How digital trace data can improve the way we study games Perceived value of video games, but not hours played, predicts mental well-being in adult Nintendo players Development of the Brief Open Research Survey (BORS) to measure awareness and uptake of Open Research practices The Basic Needs in Games Scale (BANGS): A new tool for investigating positive and negative video game experiences How does Juicy Game Feedback Motivate? Testing Curiosity, Competence, and Effectance Registered Report Evidence Suggests No Relationship Between Objectively Tracked Video Game Playtime and Well-Being Over 3 Months How do video games affect mental health? A narrative review of 13 proposed mechanisms 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 Cross-cultural patterns in mobile playtime: an analysis of 118 billion hours of human data Pinpointing the problem: Providing page numbers for citations as a crucial part of open science A large-scale study of changes to the quantity, quality, and distribution of video game play during the COVID-19 pandemic Reforms to improve reproducibility and quality must be coordinated across the research ecosystem: the view from the UKRN Local Network Leads ‘I Just Wanted to Get it Over and Done With’: A Grounded Theory of Psychological Need Frustration in Video Games A Manifesto for More Productive Psychological Games Research Understanding whether lockdowns lead to increases in the heaviness of gaming using massive-scale data telemetry: An analysis of 251 billion hours of playtime If everything is a loot box, nothing is: Response to Xiao et al. Awareness of and engagement with Open Research behaviours: Development of the Brief Open Research Survey (BORS) with the UK Reproducibility Network Do People Use Games to Compensate for Psychological Needs During Crises? A Mixed-Methods Study of Gaming During COVID-19 Lockdowns Self-Determination Theory in HCI: Shaping a Research Agenda Themes Game Data Player Research Previous Next

< Back Dr Dino Ratcliffe Queen Mary University of London iGGi Alum Teaching AI agents transferable skills for game playing My research focuses on the ability of an AI agent to be able to evaluate the various skills it would need to master a game, such as in an FPS (first person shooter) like doom. If the agent can learn to cluster actions that may split into strategies such as attacking enemies, gathering ammo/health and avoiding enemy fire this information could then be used in similar games. This information would also provide a base for being to evaluate players on a skill level, giving a much more granular view of their strengths and weaknesses in any of these games. This could then be used for better matchmaking in team games, placing players into teams whose skill sets complement each other. Other applications include being able to guide the player into situations that give them more experience in the areas they are weakest. Dino started a MSci in computer science at the University of Essex in 2011. During the next 4 years, he focused on modules that involved improving technical skills and Artificial Intelligence. He was the winner of the K.F Bowden Memorial prize in two separate years. Dino worked at the London startup Signal Media during the summer of 2014 and continued to work for them part time during my masters year. He graduated with a 1st class degree. Please note: Updating of profile text in progress Email Mastodon Other links Website LinkedIn BlueSky Github Featured Publication(s): Cross-lingual style transfer with conditional prior VAE and style loss Author's declaration Win or learn fast proximal policy optimisation Domain Adaptation for Deep Reinforcement Learning in Visually Distinct Games Clyde: A deep reinforcement learning doom playing agent Themes Game AI - Previous Next

< Back Mark the Date! iGGi Con 2024 - 11+12 Sep The iGGi Conference is the annual showcase of our 60+ PhD Researchers, allowing a birds-eye view into their work, and a chance to bring academic research, innovation and the games industry together. Following the success of the conferences in 2022 and 2023, the iGGi Con 2024 will take place at the University of York. More information to follow in a few months. Previous 20 Oct 2023 Next

< Back Gorm Lai Goldsmiths iGGi PG Researcher Inspired by the works of Karl Sims and William Latham as well games such as a Spore and No Man's Sky, Gorm's main work is focused on using artificial intelligence and machine learning to generate creatures for use in video games. Combining this with his background as a virtual reality pioneer, his full doctorate is looking into how mixed-initiative co-creative interfaces in vr can assist in creating procedural generated creatures for use in video games. As a stalwart of the game development community, Gorm ran the Danish chapter of the International Game Developer Association (IGDA) for 5 years, started the London Indie Game Developers meetup group which currently features almost 3000 members, co-founded the Nordic Game Jam, as well as the Global Game Jam. The Global Game Jam has been recorded into the Guinness Book of World Records, and has more participating countries than the Winter Olympics. Gorm is a games industry veteran who has worked on 17 commercial video games since 2004, and has spoken at numerous games industry conferences such as GDC, Nordic Game & Develop Brighton. Gorm is a student at Goldsmiths, University of London, where is he is supervised by William Latham and Frederic Fol Leymarie. lai.gorm@gmail.com Email Mastodon https://gormlai.github.io Other links Website https://www.linkedin.com/in/gormlai/ LinkedIn BlueSky https://github.com/gormlai Github Supervisor(s): Prof. William Latham Featured Publication(s): Formal Constraints and Creativity: Connecting Game Jams, Dogma ’95, the Demo Scene, OuBaPo, and Renga poets What Is a Game Jam? The Dark Side of Game Jams On Mixed-Initiative Content Creation for Video Games Two decades of game jams Virtual Creature Morphology‐A Review Towards Friendly Mixed Initiative Procedural Content Generation: Three Pillars of Industry Introducing: the game jam license Trends in organizing philosophies of game jams and game hackathons The global game jam for teaching and learning Gplayer A compression method for spectral photon map rendering Themes Creative Computing Design & Development Game AI - Previous Next

< Back iGGi Game Jam 2023 The iGGi Game Jam has kicked off on 11 January 2023 and this year’s theme was TRANSFERENCE - check out what the jammers came up with! Here’s a quick summary of the submitted games (in no particular order): Prison of the Endless by James Goodman, Prasad Sandbhor, George Long Agony Haunt by Callum Deery, Sahar Mirhadi, Amy Smith, Florence Smith Nicholls, Sunny Thaicharoen Pseudo Judo by Toby Best, Bobby Khaleque, Dimitris Menexopoulos, Oliver Withington Trip to the Moon by Charline Foch, FrancescaFoffano, Carlos Gonzalez Diaz Outbalance by Yu-Jhen Hsu, Peyman Hosseini, Nirit Binyamini Ben-Meir, Dominik Jeurissen Move The Groove by Dan Cooke, Nathan John-McDougall Pitch ‘it by Michael Saiger Nick Cage's Face Off 2 by Adrián Barahona-Ríos, Matt Whitby Mind Shift by Remo Sasso, Michelangelo Conserva, James Gardner *hacker voice* I’M IN. –– A Hacking Mechanic Supplement by Younès Rabii I know that person by Madeleine Frister, Maximilian Croissant Harlan by Luke Farrar, Tom Wells, Lauren Winter, Evgenii Kashin General audio support to various games was lent by Erin Robinson. And links to all of these games can of course be found via the iGGi GAMES page here or alternatively also via this page on itch: https://itch.io/jam/iggi23/entries There even was a Mini Contest on the last jam day!! Prizes went to the following teams and categories: Agony Haunt won MUCH WOW Nick Cage's Face Off 2 won BUT… WHY? Harlan won LESS IS MORE Outbalance won GIT GUD Pseudo Judo won IT’S A FEATURE Many Congrats to the winners! Yet, it needs to be said: With so many little game gems, it’s nigh impossible to pick favourites! The Game Jam wrapped on Friday afternoon - see twitter thread: Previous 13 Jan 2023 Next

< Back Dr Chris Madge Queen Mary University of London iGGi Alum Turning Difficult Scientific Problems into Easy Games: Crowdsourcing Solutions via Gamification The aim of the research is to exploit, on a large scale, the idea introducing game elements in a non-game context (gamification) and make use of a large population of non-expert users to solve scientific problems (crowdsourcing). The proposed research follows the increasingly popular concept of splitting a large, complex task into small easily digestible tasks that lend themselves to division, distribution and game representation. This research will begin by taking advantage of the University of Essex’s expertise in the field of Natural Language Engineering. Multiple games will be created to attempt to encourage people to participate in training natural language models. This will be achieved by splitting these tasks into smaller problems that can be represented as games, and easily solved by players that could not easily be solved computationally. Alongside this, the success of different gamification methods and game design choices will be evaluated to determine their effect on the information gathered and the accuracy achieved. This evaluation will be used to guide the development of future games in the research with a view to producing better quality models for solving natural language problems, and improving gamification. Prior to starting my PhD with IGGI I completed a BSc in Computer Science and MSc in Advanced Computer Science. During both of those I took multiple computer game and AI courses in addition to text analytics and natural language engineering courses. During my BSc I was fortunate to work at Signal Media as an intern on text analytics related problems. Before starting my BSc I worked as a software developer for 5 years, primarily in web application development. I’ve had a passion for games from a very young age and continue to play on PC, mobile and consoles today. Please note: Updating of profile text in progress Email Mastodon Other links Website LinkedIn BlueSky Github Featured Publication(s): Gamifying language resource acquisition Progression in a language annotation game with a purpose Incremental game mechanics applied to text annotation Making text annotation fun with a clicker game The design of a clicker game for text labelling Crowdsourcing and aggregating nested markable annotations Testing TileAttack with Three Key Audiences Experiment-driven development of a gwap for marking segments in text Metrics of games-with-a-purpose for NLP applications Testing game mechanics in games with a purpose for NLP applications TileAttack Novel Incentives for Phrase Detectives Themes Player Research - Previous Next

< Back iGGi 2021 CON The iGGi 2021 Conference concluded last week and we look back on two days that were fully packed with Talks Keynotes Panels Workshops the customary iGGi Buzz Talks knowledge exchange + networking and not to forget, a much-needed dose of socialising + fun If you've missed some or (hopefully not) all of it - we've compiled selected recordings, so that you can catch up via YouTube at your own leisure. A MASSIVE THANK YOU to the team of conference organisers: Nick Ballou , Timea Farkas , Dan Gomme , Joe Hesketh , Bobby Khaleque , Charlie Ringer , Michael Saiger , Evelyn Tan , Marko Tot , Kyle Worrall - this could not have happened without your dedication, effort, and creative input!This year's IGGI 2021 CON took place online on gather.town : with customisable avatars and an engaging conference map it felt like the next best option to an in-person event. Having said that, we can't wait to run IGGI 2022 as a face-to-face experience again, and we are very much hoping to see you there!! Previous 17 Sept 2021 Next

< Back Laura Helsby University of York iGGi PG Researcher Laura Helsby is a HCI researcher with a background in psychology, currently examining how features of games might be beneficial to wellbeing and mood. She is particularly interested in how people with persistent low mood play and experience games, and what this might mean for their wellbeing. So far, she has conducted one interview study asking people with low mood what they play and why, and one diary study investigating the 'in the moment' effects and motivations for gaming. Future plans involve making more direct measures of the impact of particular games on wellbeing, as well as looking further into the FPS and simulation genres to unpack what about these games might make them appealing to people with persistent low mood. Laura has achieved an MSc in Foundations in Clinical Psychology from Newcastle University and a BSc in Psychology from the University of York. In her spare time, Laura enjoys denying she is a computer scientist at all. Her hobbies include reviewing books professionally, board game nights and of course, playing video games. laura.helsby@york.ac.uk Email Mastodon Other links Website LinkedIn https://bsky.app/profile/laurahelsby.bsky.social BlueSky Github Supervisors: Prof. Paul Cairns Dr Jo Iacovides Featured Publication(s): "Leave our kids alone!": Exploring Concerns Reported by Parents in 1-star Reviews Do People Use Games to Compensate for Psychological Needs During Crises? A Mixed-Methods Study of Gaming During COVID-19 Lockdowns Themes Applied Games Player Research - Previous Next

< Back Luiza Gossian Queen Mary University of London iGGi PG Researcher Available for placement Luiza is a multidisciplinary researcher, game designer and developer interested in translating real world concepts into engaging game mechanics. She is passionate about creating games that can encourage an understanding of ourselves and the socially connected world we live in. Luiza is also an experienced painter, graphic designer and photographer and uses her visual skills and psychology background to prototype experimental game designs, design game documentation and craft atmospheric experiences. A description of Luiza's research: How can a subject as serious as genocide be successfully and respectfully translated into a casual game? Difficult subjects are often implemented with polar opposite approaches in games: either they are made to be highly emotional, socially conscious games that portray the gravity of a situation, yet are only played by those already informed and aware; or they are pure entertainment games that turn these subjects into wild amusement parks that appeal to broader gamer audiences yet do nothing to appropriately address the themes they glorify. Within this polarity there exists the potential to create games that tackle more serious subjects yet do so in a way that is more lighthearted and entertaining, and therefore more likely to reach the audiences who stand to gain the most. In her research, Luiza is exploring how to design games about genocide that break away from traditional approaches and embrace the ludic potential of games. Drawing on theories of intergroup and cultural psychology, as well as her own experiences, she is exploring how these difficult themes can be explored in engaging, effective and informative ways. Currently, she is developing a hypercasual game that abstracts the ten stages of genocide to be used as an educational primer, a Tetris-esq game that uses social media and government sources to present the realities of refugees fleeing their homes, and a cosy mystery-adventure game which enables players to uncover historical crimes in a far away land. l.gossian@outlook.com Email Mastodon http://www.gossianblurs.com/ Other links Website https://www.linkedin.com/in/lu-goss/ LinkedIn https://bsky.app/profile/lugossian.bsky.social BlueSky Github Supervisors: Prof. Sebastian Deterding Dr Anne Hsu Themes Applied Games Design & Development - 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