Maximilian Croissant

University of York

I’m a psychology researcher, writer and game designer, exploring our emotional connection with games and creating games with purpose.

Coming from a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in psychology and neuroscience, I’m now at the intersection of emotion research, design, and human-computer interaction and try to build design-oriented solutions for adapting game content to affective data. My project will include theoretical groundwork, investigating the emotional relationship between player and games and from there build an affective fear-focused VR horror game with specific and practical solutions in terms of emotion measurement, modelling, and adaptation. The ultimate goal is to help fill knowledge gaps that currently hold us back on making commercially viable affective games and provide tools to design games for a deep emotional impact.

I’m also the Co-Founder of Vanilla Noir, a small studio working on applied games that aim to promote well-being and satisfying user experiences. For me, games are a great tool to explore psychological phenomena through interactions and the design and development of games based on applied psychology has great potential to help make the world a bit of a better place.