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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. The National Videogame Museum

< Back ‘I Just Wanted to Get it Over and Done With’: A Grounded Theory of Psychological Need Frustration in Video Games Link Author(s) N Ballou, S Deterding 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. York Mediale

Understanding ongoing mental states using video games: applications to mental health research. Theme Game Data Project proposed & supervised by Alex Wade To discuss whether this project could become your PhD proposal please email: alex.wade@york.ac.uk < Back Understanding ongoing mental states using video games: applications to mental health research. Project proposal abstract: A player’s behaviour in a game is directly linked to their personality and gives detailed information on their decision making processes, showing how they approach risks, socialisation and problem solving. Analysing these behaviours may also provide information about mental health disorders and indicate how these change over time. Neuroimaging methods (EEG/MEG/fMRI) can be used to examine the neural responses and patterns of ongoing neuronal activity that occur while players are engaged in a game. By linking these data to modern theories of neural economics we can explore and potentially improve aspects of a player's decision making, such as: attention span, focus, risk taking and delayed reward. This PhD will use a combination of neuroscience and advanced data analysis methods to examine the link between video game play and the brain. We will use a combination of cutting-edge data analytic techniques applied to large, existing video game telemetry datasets and neuroimaging experiments designed to measure changes in ongoing mental states while people play simple video games. The PhD would suit a student with good data analytics skills and some experience in neuroscience. Supervisor: Alex Wade Based at:

< Back How does machine learning affect diversity in evolutionary search? Procedural content generation of video games levels has greatly benefited from machine learning. In such complex domains, generative models can provide representation spaces for evolutionary search. But how expressive are such learned models? How many different levels would they be able to produce? A new paper, co-authored by IGGI PhD researcher Sebastian Berns and Professor Simon Colton, looks at the limitations of generative models in the context of multi-solution optimisation. The work will be presented at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) and is nominated for a best paper award . The study shows that quality diversity (QD) search in the latent space of a variational auto-encoder yields a solution set of lower diversity than in a manually-defined genetic parameter space. The authors find that learned latent spaces are useful for the comparison of artefacts and recommend their use for distance and similarity estimation. However, whenever a parametric search space is obtainable, it should be preferred over a learned representation space as it produces a higher diversity of solutions. Alexander Hagg, Sebastian Berns, Alexander Asteroth, Simon Colton & Thomas Bäck. (2021). Expressivity of Parameterized and Data-driven Representations in Quality Diversity Search. In Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference. Pre-print available on arXiv https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.04247Accompanying code repository available on Github https://github.com/alexander-hagg/ExpressivityGECCO2021 Previous 27 Jun 2021 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. Splash Damage

< Back Festive Wishes from iGGi Festive Wishes from iGGi As another calendar year is drawing to a close, iGGi wishes you a happy & relaxing Festive Break and a good start into 2023 !!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvEsmt4no8k In other news: Selected recordings of the last iGGi Conference are OUT NOW and can be accessed via our iGGi YouTube channel: iGGi CON 2022 Talks here https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrhB7hwYCdScgdnGraofca1YhhL3BfGyd iGGi CON 2022 Keynotes here https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrhB7hwYCdScXSOX3vDlGwUzQLu1WciTd Subscribe to https://www.youtube.com/@iGGiPhD for further updates! We look forward to seeing you all in the New Year! Previous 21 Dec 2022 Next

< Back Twitchchat: A dataset for exploring livestream chat Link Author(s) C Ringer, M Nicolaou, J Walker Abstract More info TBA Link

< Back Searching for an (un) stable equilibrium: experiments in training generative models without data Link Author(s) T Broad, M Grierson Abstract More info TBA Link

< Back Dr Ozan Vardal University of York iGGi Alum Ozan studied undergraduate psychology at the University of Groningen, and holds a master's degree in Performance Psychology from the University of Edinburgh, where he wrote theses on the dynamics of psychological momentum in sport competition and the decision-making of expert applied psychologists respectively. He has long been fascinated with the psychological mechanisms underpinning complex skills, owing to his own background as a classically trained musician and his previous work as a performance psychology consultant with competitive athletes. His primary research interests involve the behavioural and neural factors surrounding human learning and skilled performance. A description of Ozan's research: Ozan views games as behaviourally rich environments for the study of complex skills and human learning. The competitive and immersive nature of games encourages millions of players to develop profound skill over hours, days, and even years of practice. Ozan’s work takes advantage of large data repositories generated by such players to study how different patterns of practice result in differences in learning outcomes. He also uses experimental methods in his work, and is currently using neuroimaging methods (MEG) and modelling techniques to identify how shifts between different behavioural and neural states affect performance as people play Tetris. By using games as a vehicle to study psychology, Ozan aims to develop scalable solutions to studying human learning. He hopes for a future where the science of learning is sufficiently advanced, such that (artificial) trainers can recommend optimised practice schedules for motivated learners, in any performance domain. Please note: Updating of profile text in progress Email ov525@york.ac.uk Website LinkedIn Mastodon BlueSky GitHub Other Link Featured Publication(s): Mind the gap: Distributed practice enhances performance in a MOBA game Themes Design & Development Esports Game Data - Previous Next

< Back iGGi Goldsmiths is located in New Cross, South East London, five miles from central London. iGGi is a consortium of four universities or sites: the University of York (York), Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), Goldsmiths, University of London (Goldsmiths), and the University of Essex (Essex). iGGi received funding in two phases: “iGGi 1” funded the first five cohorts of researchers across York, QMUL, Goldsmiths, and Essex and PGR intake spans from 2014 to 2018; “iGGi 2” started in 2019 with funding for a further five cohorts, this time only at York and QMUL. Due to either placement-related interruption of studies and/or switching to part-time studies, some of the "Goldsmiths iGGis" from the iGGi 1 funding round are still in the process of completing their PhD work. Goldsmiths is therefore still listed here as an active iGGi site, even though future iGGi main events such as the iGGi Conference and the iGGi Game Jam will take place at one of the iGGi 2 sites, i.e., either York or QMUL. iGGi Goldsmiths is part of Goldsmiths' Computing Department . You can find the Goldsmiths campus map in the gallery below. Goldsmiths, University of London (Goldsmiths) iGGi Goldmiths Gallery Main Building, Goldsmiths Campus Map, Goldsmiths Ben Pimlott Building, Goldsmiths Previous Next

< Back Prof. Simon Lucas Queen Mary University of London iGGi Co-Investigator Supervisor Simon Lucas is a professor of Artificial Intelligence and Head of the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London where he also heads the Game AI Research Group. He holds a PhD degree (1991) in Electronics and Computer Science from the University of Southampton. He is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Games and co-founded the IEEE Conference on Games. His research involves developing and applying computational intelligence techniques to build better game AI, use AI to design better games, provide deep insights into the nature of intelligence and work towards Artificial General Intelligence. He is the QMUL lead for the EPSRC-funded CDT in Intelligent Games and Game Intelligence (IGGI). He has supervised more that 15 PhD students to completion, most of them in Game AI. Research themes: Game AI Agents (RL, Monte Carlo Tree Search, Rolling Horizon Evolution) Learning Forward Models Automated Game Design, Procedural Content Generation Game AI for real-world problem solving Email simon.lucas@qmul.ac.uk Website LinkedIn Mastodon BlueSky GitHub Other Link Themes Game AI - Previous Next