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< Back ​ Zoë O’Shea Goldsmiths ​ iGGi PG Researcher ​ ​ Zoë O’Shea is an Irish freelance games designer and artist, working on her thesis in game design and player psychology. Her previous qualifications include 3D Generalism, and an MA in Digital Game Design and Theory. She is endlessly curious about the meaning and value that technology can bring to the world, exploring the human experience as a core principle of her work. She firmly believes in the importance of creating a more joyful and inclusive world. Zoë has previously worked with a range of clients and companies including A Brave Plan, Surgent Studios, Transport for London (TfL) and LEGO. In 2019, Zoë was awarded a Digital Fellowship from the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in collaboration with Magic Leap. Zoë worked with other creatives for a year to explore the future of theatre and Spatial Computing (Mixed Reality). The programme completed in Feb 2020, through the generous support of Magic Leap, the RSC, their technologists, industry partners, i2 Media Research and the University of Portsmouth. Currently, Zoë is working on completing her thesis while offering consultancy services for games and start-ups looking to expand their knowledge in soft aesthetics, tend & befriend game design and immersive technology. A description of Zoë's research: Tend & Befriend: A New Perspective on Player Psychology in Digital Games Many are familiar with the term "fight-or-flight" - a stress response activated when animals come into conflict with a stressor or threat. Less commonly known is "tend & befriend", an alternative theory of stress response which suggests that engaging with tending and affiliative behaviours under duress can soothe and protect us. This thesis investigates this phenomenon in digital games, with a focus on empirical data and design. Results demonstrate a consistent niche in the games industry for "tend & befriend" centric design and the value in synthesising previous design frameworks to create a intentional and polished experience for players. ​ z.oshea@gold.ac.uk Email Mastodon Other links Website https://www.linkedin.com/in/meowmentai/ LinkedIn https://twitter.com/meowmentai Twitter Github Supervisor(s): Prof. Richard Bartle Featured Publication(s): The impact of self-representation and consistency in collaborative virtual environments Themes Design & Development Immersive Technology Player Research - Previous Next

< Back ​ Florence Smith Nicholls Queen Mary University of London ​ iGGi PG Researcher ​ ​ Florence Smith Nicholls is a game AI PhD researcher based in London. They worked as an archaeologist and heritage consultant for 7 years prior to their doctoral research. Building on their heritage background, they have contributed to the field of archaeogaming through experimenting with archaeological approaches to titles such as Elden Ring and Nier: Automata. They coined the term “generative archaeology games” for their doctoral project on the archaeological recording of procedurally generated content. Their work is motivated by contributing to wider research on games preservation, ethics of game AI and procedural narrative. They are also interested in queer approaches to games, having written about queerness and documenting glitches. They are also a freelance narrative designer, previously a member of the writers' room at the indie studio Die Gute Fabrik. During a placement at the British Library they worked on enhanced curation methods for narrative mobile apps, and were commissioned to produce gameplay footage for the Library's Digital Storytelling exhibition. ​ f.c.smithnicholls@qmul.ac.uk Email http://florencesmithnicholls.itch.io/ Mastodon https://florencesmithnicholls.com/ Other links Website LinkedIn https://twitter.com/florencesn Twitter Github Supervisor(s): Dr Mike Cook Dr Laurissa Tokarchuk ​ Themes Creative Computing Design & Development Game AI Game Data - Previous 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 Twitter 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 Visual Referential Games Further the Emergence of Disentangled Representations Link ​ Author(s) K Denamganaï, S Missaoui, JA Walker Abstract ​ More info TBA ​ Link

Principled and Scalable Exploration Techniques for Reinforcement Learning Theme Game AI Project proposed & supervised by Paulo Rauber To discuss whether this project could become your PhD proposal please email: p.rauber@qmul.ac.uk < Back ​ Principled and Scalable Exploration Techniques for Reinforcement Learning Project proposal abstract: Reinforcement learning has received significant attention due to its success in training agents that play popular games such as Go , Starcraft II , Dota 2 , and others. Inefficient exploration, one of the earliest problems recognized in the field, still limits the success of reinforcement learning approaches that do not require domain knowledge. Although techniques like posterior sampling convincingly solve hard exploration problems in simple domains ( https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/11891201 ), scalable exploration techniques remain elusive. In this project, you will develop principled and scalable exploration techniques based on reducing model uncertainty ( https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.04436 ). Besides benefiting from games as excellent testbeds, this project has the potential to radically improve automated playtesting. Supervisor: Paulo Rauber Based at:

< Back Discrete versus Ordinal Time-Continuous Believability Assessment Link ​ Author(s) C Pacheco, D Melhart, A Liapis, GN Yannakakis, D Perez-Liebana Abstract ​ More info TBA ​ Link

< Back iGGi Con '22 Our annual conference iGGi Con '22 concluded last Wednesday. With around 150 attendees from academia, industry and organisations, the feedback received so far is overwhelmingly positive! Here are some of the highlights: 05 Sep - Internal Day In line with tradition, the first day of the 3-day conference was arranged as an internal event. After an informal start of the day with a year-group catch up and parallel staff meeting, a range of focus workshops addressed the different stages of "iGGi life" for the respective year groups (e.g., Year 1 Welcome, Thesis Writing, Knowledge Exchange, Post-PhD Career Planning, Academic Writing, etc.). A special Thank You goes out to all the supervisors who attended the iGGi Supervisor Community Session! This was followed by the iGGi Plenary Session - in-person for the first time since September 2019! The discussion centred much around the current cost of living crisis, and in summary: a lot more work still needs to be done to adequately address the situation! The evening and night were spent socialising in town (including optional subsequent partying!). 06 Sep - 1st iGGi Con Day The iGGi Con is a public conference and networking event (registration necessary) aimed at industry, organisations and academics who work in the field of digital games, as well as being an opportunity for the iGGi community to get status-updates on everybody's current research work. Posters - an informal session to discuss and talk about the current work of iGGi PG Researchers (PGRs) and some affiliated researchers who exhibited their posters in the foyer of the Ron Cooke Hub. Keynotes - the wonderful Rachel Kowert and the equally wonderful Tom Cole (who is also an iGGi Alumnus) gave their talks to a very inquisitive audience - a summary of which will become available via our YouTube channel . Talks - six talks by selected iGGi PGRs belonged to the categories "Game Psychology", "Game AI", and "Applied Game Design" - speakers were Elena Petrovskaya , Laura Helsby , Bobby Khaleque , Marko Tot , Prasad Sandbhor , Michael Saiger . Industry Panel - four representative from games industry (Rui Craveirinha, Nina Roussakoff, Tom Keane, Kish Hirani) held a panel discussion on "the perceived difference between academia-performed and industry-performed research" which saw vivid audience engagement. After a busy day, everyone chilled out over drinks. 07 Sep - 2nd iGGi Con Day The morning kicked off with four parallel tracks of workshops, namely a Roundtable on competitive gameplay integrity in Collectible Card Games (Sahar Mirhadi, Guilherme Matos De Faria, Sunny Thaicharoen) Qualitative analysis? In MY Excel? It's more likely than you think (Nathan Hughes) a Tutorial on Regret Minimization for optimal play in imperfect information games (Michael Aichmüller) Accessibility beyond access: Using an APX design approach to tackle real world accessibility issues (Callum Deery, Jozef Kulik) Lunch time coincided with the 1:2:1 Industry Meet Session in which ten fabulous individuals who work in the games industry were available for in-person chat. Participating companies included Earcom, Godolphin Games, Player Research, Safe In Our World, Sony/PlayStation, The Chinese Room, UKIE Talks - six talks by selected iGGi PGRs belonged to the categories "User Experience", "Player Decision and Agency", and "Creative AI" - speakers were Francesca Foffano , George Long , Nick Ballou , Nathan Hughes , Kyle Worrall , Amy Smith . Keynote - last but not least the audience had the pleasure to listen to energetic Sahar Asadi's talk titled "From research to production: the journey of content production automation". The conference concluded with closing remarks by general conference chairs Debbie Maxwell and James Walker. A massive Thank You! also to the PGR Organising Team comprising - Sahar Mirhadi, James Goodman, Prasad Sandbhor, Michael Saiger, Florence Smith Nicholls, Francesca Foffano - you did a fantastic job! See you again next year - this time in London! MARK THE DATE: 13+14 September 2023 ​ Previous 12 Sept 2022 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. COMIC Research

< Back " Hunt Takes Hare": Theming Games Through Game-Word Vector Translation Link ​ Author(s) Y Rabii, M Cook Abstract ​ More info TBA ​ Link

< Back A comparison of self-play algorithms under a generalized framework Link ​ Author(s) D Hernandez, K Denamganai, S Devlin, S Samothrakis, JA Walker Abstract ​ More info TBA ​ Link

< Back Decentralised Gambling Overview Link ​ Author(s) OJ Scholten, JA Walker, D Zendle Abstract ​ More info TBA ​ Link

< Back Novel Incentives for Phrase Detectives Link ​ Author(s) M Poesio, J Chamberlain, U Kruschwitz, C Madge Abstract ​ More info TBA ​ Link