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< Back Dr Tara Collingwoode-Williams Goldsmiths iGGi Alum Tara is an IGGI PhD student from Goldsmiths University taking her Mphil/PhD in Intelligent Games/Game intelligence with a focus on Avatar Embodiment and Interaction within Virtual Reality. Before this she graduated with a Bsc in Creative Computing. Over the years, her interdisciplinary profile has enabled her to work as a Technical Support and Researcher with many organisations in relation to her research, such as UCL, Great Ormond Street Hospital, George Mason Serious Games Institute in the United States where she also co-lectured a XR Games Module and, more recently as an Associate Lecturer in Goldsmiths University teaching Unity based XR experience development. Currently, she is contracting for USTech as an Assistant UX researcher at Facebook whilst completing her PhD program. With this rise in demand for Head Mounted Displays (HMDs), so is the need to create Embodied Shared Virtual Environments (ESVE) where users may experience authentic social interactions. Tara’s research presents an exploratory examination of Embodiment - meaning the subjective feeling of owning a virtual representation in VR, and specifically Consistency in Embodiment - relating to how we prioritize and syncronise objective attributes of embodiment (i.e avatar representation) in order to create ESVEs which supports more intuitive social interaction. The goal is to understand how different technical setups could have a psychological impact on participants' experiences in ESVE. This research hopes to inform development of successful social interaction in a variety of applications in VR, ranging from training to gaming. Tara presently holds a position as Lekturer in VR at Goldsmiths, Universtiy of London. tc.williams@gold.ac.uk Email Mastodon Other links Website https://www.linkedin.com/in/tara-collingwoode-williams-81141776/ LinkedIn BlueSky Github Featured Publication(s): Delivering Bad News: VR Embodiment of Self Evaluation in Medical Communication Training The impact of self-representation and consistency in collaborative virtual environments G487 (P) Is clinician gaze and body language associated with their ability to identify safeguarding cues? Evaluating virtual reality experiences through participant choices A discussion of the use of virtual reality for training healthcare practitioners to recognize child protection issues A study of professional awareness using immersive virtual reality: the responses of general practitioners to child safeguarding concerns The effect of lip and arm synchronization on embodiment: a pilot study Themes Applied Games Player Research - Previous Next

< Back Dr Alan Pedrassoli Chitayat University of York iGGi Alum Available for post-PhD position Alan is a researcher that focuses on audience experience within esport broadcast. His Machine Learning background allows him to extract complex patterns from game and game related data in order to derive meaningful insights that can be utilised in broadcast. Having worked in the esport industry, both as a software engineer as well as researcher, Alan has experience with both technical and research problems. His research aims to explore the factors that improve the audience experience within esports. This is catered to esport broadcast of all levels, from highly produced professional tournaments to regular streams by content creators and it could be in the form of: Measuring and representing different forms of audience engagement. Exploring the different ways to visualise and utilise Machine Learning to enhance and integrate existing broadcast pipelines. Investigating how community-led narratives can be generated through data. alan.pchitayat@york.ac.uk Email https://linktr.ee/alanpchitayat Mastodon https://alanpchitayat.com/ Other links Website https://www.linkedin.com/in/alan-pchitayat/ LinkedIn BlueSky Github Supervisors: Dr James Walker Prof. Anders Drachen Featured Publication(s): How Could They Win? An Exploration of Win Condition for Esports Narratives Applying and Visualising Complex Models in Esport Broadcast Coverage From Passive Viewer to Active Fan: Towards the Design and Large-Scale Evaluation of Interactive Audience Experiences in Esports and Beyond Beyond the Meta: Leveraging Game Design Parameters for Patch-Agnostic Esport Analitics Data-Driven Audience Experiences in Esports Metagaming and metagames in Esports What are you looking at? Team fight prediction through player camera Echo Suite of Software (Showcase Brochure) Automatic Generation of Text for Match Recaps using Esport Caster Commentaries WARDS: Modelling the Worth of Vision in MOBA's DAX: Data-Driven Audience Experiences in Esports Themes Design & Development Esports Game Data - Previous Next

< Back Sam Hughes University of York iGGi Alum Affect and Emotion using Immersive Sound in Intelligent Games. (On Industrial Placement with Remedy Entertainment) Recent advances in high definition video displays and 3-D headsets, coupled with motion tracking and biosensor technologies, have enabled video games to reach unprecedented levels of visual immersion and interaction. There is little research however on how the aural feedback of the player, which can help assess their emotional state, can be used to inform the game intelligence and affect the emotive impact of the game. Furthermore, improvements in domestic surround sound and binaural technology are paving the way for fully enveloping and realistic soundtracks that extend the gameplay beyond the visual and can significantly enhance the emotive experience. This research project therefore addresses how current sensor and tracking technologies can be enhanced through analysis of player aural reactions such that the game intelligence can in turn provoke a conditional response via the reproduced soundtrack. In other words, how can the emotional impact of a spatial soundtrack during gameplay be enhanced by the user aural response alongside other physiological detections such as heartbeat and movement? Sam is a sound designer and voice actor who founded the audio journalism site, The Sound Architect™. Sam was selected as one of the first to ever receive the Prince William Scholarship from both BAFTA & Warner Bros. to study MSc Post Production with Sound Design at The University of York where he graduated with a Distinction and a Departmental Award for achieving the Highest Overall Average Grade. Sam has been highly active in the community for years including writing for BAFTA Guru, sitting on the BAFTA Youth Board, running Game Audio North and being an active member of BAFTA Crew Games. Most recently Sam has worked regularly with game audio company Sweet Justice on a variety of titles that include mobile and AAA. Sam’s recent credits include Injustice 2 and Madden NFL 2017. Please note: Updating of profile text in progress Email Mastodon Other links Website https://uk.linkedin.com/in/thesoundarchitect LinkedIn BlueSky Github Themes Player Research - Previous Next

< Back Sahar Mirhadi University of York iGGi PG Researcher Available for post-PhD position Sahar Mirhadi is a final-year PhD researcher investigating how video games support during challenging times. Her contributions have been published in the Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, and she has presented at Devcom on transforming the complexity of turn-based games into a strategic advantage. She is also a passionate Magic: The Gathering player, collaborating with competitive Magic team Worldly Counsel to convert tournament insights into a deeper understanding of player motivations and team dynamics. Sahar is also a Safe In Our World Ambassador, a recipient of the Magic: The Gathering New Perspectives Grant for Marginalised Players, and a member of the Birds of Paradise collective. A description of Sahar's research: Sahar's PhD research project investigates the specific aspects of games that facilitate coping for players during difficult life experiences. Building on earlier work that mapped broad links between game aspects and coping strategies, Sahar’s first study showed that games can support a variety of coping strategies, including emotion-focused, avoidance, and meaning-focused coping. However, questions remained about how these effects occur across different gaming contexts. To address this, her second study employed in-depth interviews and a grounded theory approach with players of Disco Elysium, Darkest Dungeon and Stardew Valley. The findings led to the development of the Games as Dynamic Coping Systems theory, which posits that specific aspects of video games scaffold a diverse range of coping strategies for players facing personal difficulties. The model highlights the dynamic interplay between what the player brings (e.g., prior experiences, needs, skills) and what the game provides (such as Narrative, Game Environment and Character Interactions). Through this interaction, players develop coping strategies, and the outcomes from coping feed back into their ongoing gaming and life experiences. While the grounded theory offered a deeper understanding of how specific game aspects support various coping strategies, it also revealed a gap: the temporal dynamics of coping. Sahar’s ongoing work aims to explore how players transition between coping strategies over time and what factors shape these transitions. Her overall aim is to provide a deeper understanding of specific aspects within games that support coping, shedding light on the potential benefits and limitations of video games during times of difficulty. sm2904@york.ac.uk Email https://linktr.ee/saharmirhadi Mastodon Other links Website https://www.linkedin.com/in/saharmirhadi/ LinkedIn https://bsky.app/profile/saharmirhadi.bsky.social BlueSky Github Supervisors: Dr Alena Denisova Dr Jo Iacovides Themes Player Research Previous Next

< Back Dr Anne Hsu Queen Mary University of London Supervisor Anne Hsu’s research includes machine learning, artificial agents, natural language processing and learning, human decision making, interaction design, and well-being technology. Her interests include developing interactive systems that use machine learning and understanding of human psychology to improve human behaviour. She is particularly interested in supervising students with a machine learning, design, HCI, or behavioural sciences background on the following topics: understanding and designing for curiosity in games design for behaviour change motivational/educational games Research themes: Game AI Game Design Games with a Purpose Player Experience Gamification anne.hsu@qmul.ac.uk Email Mastodon Other links Website https://www.linkedin.com/in/anne-showen-hsu LinkedIn BlueSky Github Themes Applied Games Design & Development Esports Player Research - Previous Next

< Back Prof. Peter Cowling Queen Mary University of London iGGi Director Supervisor Peter Cowling has led teams that have won £45 million for research into games and digital creativity. After decades of experience in novel models and algorithms for AI decision-making, his research is now targeted on finding and promoting promising research directions in AI, games and digital creative technology, to benefit people and wider society. Playful ideas, curiosity and games have a central role! As Principal Investigator, he led the teams which won the grants for IGGI (2014 and 2019) and Digital Creativity Labs (2015). He is a member of the Programme Advisory Board which informs strategy in the Digital Economy area of UK research council funding. He has sat on several research council grant funding prioritisation panels, chairing two. He has presented ideas for the use of games as a tool to influence and understand the human condition at a number of venues, including TEDx and 10 Downing Street. He has published over 100 papers, winning 2 best paper awards at AIIDE. His research technology has over 5 million installs in commercial games – he was invited to talk at GDC about that. He would be interested to supervise students whose research uses games as a tool to gather opinion or promote understanding: to identify research directions and harness the future potential of games, creativity and AI to benefit people and society. He is particularly interested in how games and other curious, creative things can help us to understand a world of complex interacting agents, each living a world created by their own thought (!). Research themes: Research visions for games and AI Game design/development to influence, inform and understand people and society Game AI peter.cowling@qmul.ac.uk Email Mastodon https://www.petercowling.com/ Other links Website https://uk.linkedin.com/in/peter-cowling-3590962 LinkedIn BlueSky Github Themes Applied Games Design & Development Game AI - Previous Next

< Back Tania Dales University of York iGGi PG Researcher Available for placement Tania is an indie video game designer and developer, working with horror, science fiction and games which are a little strange, bizarre and uncomfortable. They adopt research through design methodology, utilizing game design artistic practices, and game development software in their studies. About Tania's research: "My research is situated within character design, specifically in humanoid characters that elicit complicated and nuanced emotional reactions in players. These emotional reactions are those that creep in, linger, and last beyond the moment of play, rather than instantaneous responses like jump scares. We often experience these reactions when engaging with games that explore themes of body, cosmic and existential horror. My research looks at why these reactions occur, how we design our characters with these reactions in mind, and what is the role of bugs and glitches during existential gameplay experiences." tania.dales@york.ac.uk Email Mastodon Other links Website http://www.linkedin.com/in/tania-dales-268912197 LinkedIn BlueSky Github Supervisor: Dr Ben Kirman Themes Design & Development Game AI Immersive Technology Player Research - Previous Next

< Back Dr Gaetano Dimita Queen Mary University of London Supervisor Gaetano Dimita is a senior lecturer in International Intellectual Property Law working on Games and Interactive Entertainment Law, Regulations, Transactions and esports law. He is the Director of the Institute for Interactive Entertainment Law and Policy, the founder and editor-in-chief of the Interactive Entertainment Law Review, Edward Elgar, and the organiser of the ‘More Than Just a Game’ conference series. Gaetano is also the Deputy Director of the Queen Mary Intellectual Property Institute (QMIPRI), The Director of eLearning, CCLS, the Deputy Director of Education, CCLS, and the Director of the LLM in Intellectual Property Law. Outside of Queen Mary, he serves as Executive Committee member of the British Literary and Artistic Copyright Association, the UK national group of the Association Litteraire et Artistique Internationale; as Board Member of the National Video Game Museum; as member of the British Copyright Council - Copyright and Technology Working Group; as member of the UK IPO Copyright Advisory Council, member of the UK Department for International Trade’s Intellectual Property Expert Trade Advisory Group (IP ETGA). He is also a member of Italian Bar Association (Rome), the Video Game Bar Association, the Fair Play Alliance, and the Higher Education Video Game Association. He is particularly interested in supervising interdisciplinary research on games and interactive entertainment law and regulation. Research themes: Game AI Games with a Purpose Computational Creativity E-Sports Player Experience g.dimita@qmul.ac.uk Email Mastodon https://www.qmul.ac.uk/law/people/academic-staff/items/dimita.html Other links Website https://www.linkedin.com/in/gaetano-dimita-06484544/?originalSubdomain=uk LinkedIn BlueSky Github Themes Applied Games Creative Computing Esports Game AI Player Research - Previous Next

< Back Dr Athen Ma Queen Mary University of London Supervisor Athen Ma is an innovator in interdisciplinary approaches to the study of communities and networked ecosystems. She is particularly interested in finding out how the structure and dynamics of communities evolve over time and what kind of mechanics that help underpin cohesion in communities. Her research has been published in world-leading journals, with recent works revealing the organisation of collaborative science in the UK (in PNAS highlight), uncovering how ecological networks rewire under drought (front cover of Nature Climate Change ), and how agricultural ecosystems are resilient to changes in farming management (in Nature Ecology and Evolution ). Online multiplayer games naturally form a platform for social relationships to develop, and deciphering the social structure and dynamics of the communities formed will provide insights into many aspects in games, ranging from users engagement and retention to team formation. For example, matchmaking enables users to find other players who share similar profiles, interests as well as skills and personality; has been seen as an important tool for establishing and maintaining a thriving gaming community. Athen is keen to explore novel ways to use advances in social network analysis to investigate player communities in games across multiple network scales, so as to better understand their formation and evolution. Findings from this research will help identify/predict the type of social interactions that will promote the level of engagement among players and community cohesion, paving the way for designing in-game activities that will foster long-time engagement and retention. athen.ma@qmul.ac.uk Email Mastodon https://sites.google.com/site/athenma2015/ Other links Website LinkedIn BlueSky Github Themes Game Data Player Research - Previous Next

< Back Sunny Thaicharoen Queen Mary University of London iGGi PG Researcher Available for post-PhD position Sunny is a passionate esports enthusiast, with a love of MOBA games. His background is in engineering and entrepreneurship, with a Master of Technology Entrepreneurship degree from University College London. He is the creator of YGOscope, a statistical game data platform for a competitive card game, Yu-Gi-Oh. Sunny is an avid player of competitive Dota in his spare time, and is also a keen theme park enthusiast. He is interested in modelling metagames of MOBAs through game data and player research, particularly how players adopt the most effective strategies when changes to the stable gameplay state occurs. A description of Sunny's research: The project focuses on how the META - most effective tactics available - of MOBA games shift during disruption (usually through gameplay updates) between states of ignorance and stability within the player space of these games, to deepen our understanding of how players adapt to the changes that these gameplay updates cause, and why. There is a large degree of variability of how new METAs develops, and currently there is little research on the meta and metagame front. Available research so far has been based on defining the phenomena and resulting effects of gameplay updates, but little modelling has been done to attempt bring these fragmented pieces of knowledge together and attempt to structure them. The study and structuring of this phenomena can be an ideal starting point in understanding how effective strategies develop not only in MOBAs or video games, but any other competitive games such as chess, trading card games or sports. t.thaicharoen@qmul.ac.uk Email Mastodon Other links Website https://www.linkedin.com/in/thaicharoens/ LinkedIn BlueSky https://github.com/thaicharoens Github Supervisors: Prof. Anders Drachen Dr Jeremy Gow Featured Publication(s): An ecosystem framework for the meta in esport games Themes Esports Game Data Player Research - Previous Next

< Back Dr Henrik Siljebråt Goldsmiths iGGi Alum Henrik has a background in IT/DevOps and a Masters in Cognitive Science from Lund University. Based on established neurobiological correlates of reinforcement learning (RL), I investigate animal learning and decision making using cognitive modeling techniques, such as probabilistic programming and machine learning. Animals somehow manage to create useful representations of incoming sensory information, representations then used for learning and decision making. How these representations of states of the world are integrated into task structure and models of the world is an open question, which I investigate using behavioural experiments with humans and bumblebees and modelling said behaviour using RL combined with hidden state models for representing states and task structure. The potential findings of these experiments have promise to not only elucidate the workings of the animal brain but also provide valuable contributions to artificial intelligence, where improved models of state representations could vastly improve data efficiency and generalizability over current generation systems. Please note: Updating of profile text in progress h.siljebrat@gold.ac.uk Email Mastodon https://henrik.siljebrat.se Other links Website https://www.linkedin.com/in/henrik-siljebrat LinkedIn BlueSky https://github.com/fohria Github Featured Publication(s): On State Representations and Behavioural Modelling Methods in Reinforcement Learning The Effect of State Representations in Sequential Sensory Prediction: Introducing the Shape Sequence Task Towards human-like artificial intelligence using StarCraft 2 Themes - Previous Next

< Back Dr Lina Gega University of York Supervisor Qualified both as a nurse and a psychological therapist, Lina is a senior member of the Mental Health and Addictions Research Group (MHARG) at the University of York, where she leads research under the Digital Mental Health Theme. She has published widely on computer-based therapies and virtual environments. Lina's work on technology-mediated interventions and training formed an impact case study was submitted to 2014 Research Excellence Framework as part of Psychology, Psychiatry and Neuroscience. Lina’s current work focuses on interventions to improve health and quality of life for children and young people with mental health problems. She has led the development and evaluation of a purposeful game to treat phobias in children, and of an innovative virtual environments system to assist psychological therapy and skills training. She co-leads the digital theme for the Closing the Gap (CTG) Network, funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). The Network’s digital theme explores how technologies, including gaming, can be used to improve the physical health of people with severe mental illness, especially schizophrenia and bipolar affective disorder. An experienced University teacher, supervisor and examiner, Lina welcomes students with a design, engineering or behavioural sciences background who are interested in applied games research in the field of mental health, with a focus on: development and ‘proof-of-concept’ studies of purposeful games to improve mental health outcomes and social communication skills in children and young people. adaptation and evaluation of gamified applications to improve physical health outcomes with people whose motivation and information processing are affected by severe mental illness. Research themes: Game Design Games with a Purpose Player Experience Gamified Mental Health Interventions lina.gega@york.ac.uk Email Mastodon https://www.york.ac.uk/healthsciences/our-staff/lina-gega/ Other links Website LinkedIn BlueSky Github Themes Applied Games Player Research - Previous Next