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< 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 !!! 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 Dr Mihail Morosan University of Essex iGGi Alum Computational Intelligence and Game Balance. (Industry placement at MindArk) Game design has been a staple of human ingenuity and innovation for as long as games have been around. From sports, such as football, to applying game mechanics to the real world, such as reward schemes in shops, games have impacted the world in surprising ways. This process can, and should, be aided by automated systems, as machines have proven to be capable of finding innovative ways to complement human intuition and inventiveness. When man and machine cooperate, better products are created and the world has only to benefit. My research seeks to find, test and assess methods to apply computational intelligence to human-led game balance. Early research has proven that AI can successfully aid game designers in analysing the viability of various game rules and I intend to document this and polish the techniques that will result from my work. To achieve this, I am making use of cutting edge algorithms, powerful AI techniques and novel methods. Most of the current work done involves the use of evolutionary algorithms, as well as statistical analysis and evaluation of intelligent agents in various video games. Programmer (with a focus on optimisation and quick deliverables, mostly due to competitive experience), gamer (games are fun, relaxing and a great social experience), technology consumer (comes with the programmer bit) and all around happy guy stumbling through the world. Once ended up in a management internship at a bank thinking the application was for a programming position. And another time told an interviewer that "buying and eating a burger to solve hunger" is a legitimate problem-solving skill. Somehow received an invitation to the next interview stage. me@morosanmihail.com Email Mastodon Other links Website https://uk.linkedin.com/in/morosanmihail LinkedIn BlueSky Github Featured Publication(s): Automating game-design and game-agent balancing through computational intelligence Lessons from testing an evolutionary automated game balancer in industry Genetic optimisation of BCI systems for identifying games related cognitive states Online-Trained Fitness Approximators for Real-World Game Balancing Evolving a designer-balanced neural network for Ms PacMan Speeding up genetic algorithm-based game balancing using fitness predictors Automated game balancing in Ms PacMan and StarCraft using evolutionary algorithms Themes Design & Development Game AI Player Research - Previous Next

iGGi PhD Projects - listing iGGi PhD Projects 2023 Game Data This page displays the supervisor-proposed PhD projects on offer under the above stated theme: If you are interested in any of the projects listed and would like further details and/or to discuss, please email the project supervisor. Please note that you can also frame your own project independently granted that you have secured a supervisor's support. For a list of available supervisors please see the accepting students section of our website. While iGGi has checked that the project descriptions listed below are within iGGi's scope , we wish to highlight that you are still responsible for ensuring that your proposal, too, is in line with this scope, and we would further like to point out that supervisor-framed projects are not prioritised in the application selection process: they are judged by the same criteria as applicant-framed proposals. For guidance to make sure that the proposal you submit (regardless of whether it has been supervisor-framed or created entirely by you) sits within iGGi's scope please refer to this link: https://iggi.org.uk/iggi-scope Navigate to other Themes on offer: Game AI Design & Development Player Research Game Audio Game Data Immersive Technology Creative Computing E-Sports Applied Games Back to ALL Projects Game Data Building Player Profiles in Mobile Monetisation: A Machine Learning Approach This project aims to use machine learning techniques to segment and profile mobile gamers in terms of their in-game spending. Price Game Data Duration David Zendle Read More Game Data Understanding ongoing mental states using video games: applications to mental health research. This project 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. Price Game Data Duration Alex Wade Read More Load More

< Back Prof. Nick Bryan-Kinns Queen Mary University of London Supervisor Nick Bryan-Kinns is Professor of Interaction Design and Director of the Media and Arts Technology Centre at Queen Mary University of London. He is Distinguished Professor at Wuhan University of Technology, and Guest Professor at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China. He is Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Fellow of the British Computer Society, Senior Member of the Association for Computing Machinery, and leads the Sonic Interaction Design Lab in the Centre for Digital Music. He has published international journal papers on cross-cultural design, participatory design, mutual engagement, interactive art, and tangible interfaces. His research has been exhibited internationally and reported widely from the New Scientist to the BBC. He chaired the Steering Committee for the ACM Creativity and Cognition Conference series, and is a recipient of ACM and BCS Recognition of Service Awards. He is interested in supervising students with HCI, Interaction Design, or AI backgrounds on research into the intersection of Sonic Interaction Design, play, and AI. Especially project which involve designing and evaluating computer mediated experiences for human participation and collaboration. Research themes: Game Audio and Music Games with a Purpose Computational Creativity Player Experience Gamification n.bryan-kinns@qmul.ac.uk Email Mastodon https://eecs.qmul.ac.uk/~nickbk/ Other links Website LinkedIn BlueSky Github Themes Applied Games Creative Computing Game Audio Player Research - Previous Next

< Back Tom Wells University of York iGGi PG Researcher Available for placement Tom has an interest in niche alternative and indie games which evoke strong emotions and are narratively immersive. He studied Experimental Psychology as an undergraduate in Oxford, specialising in conscious brightness perception in specific optical pigments. His Masters was in Computational Neuroscience, Cognition and AI from Nottingham, and focused on Computer Vision (specifically facial recognition) and Visual Attention. He enjoys heavy metal, strength sports and literature. A description of Tom's research: With the rise of digital art, Uncanny Valley has emerged from an esoteric robotics concept into an infectious memetic phenomenon, with specific memes such as 'Uncanny/Canny Mr. Incredible', or more generally uncanny faces being used as reaction images for humor. Critics and players will now refer to specific media being 'Uncanny' rather than using more general words as 'off-putting', demonstrating uncanniness cementing itself in the public consciousness as examples increasingly abound; ergo digital artists should be aware of evoking the uncanny even with modern rendering technology, as audiences become increasingly discerning of the Uncanny. This is most pertinent in videogames, where rendering is performed in real-time, meaning rendering constraints must be implemented. This potentially confines characters to the Uncanny Valley, as it may not be possible to increase graphical fidelity, thus artists may be left to either accept the uncanny or demaster their work (both undesirable options). This project aims to learn about the Uncanny Valley pertaining to modern skin rendering techniques, using artificial intelligence (specifically GANs) to directly map skin rendering parameters onto user assessments of uncanniness and realism. This can then be reverse engineered to provide automated tools for generatively rendering realistic non-uncanny skin, and predicting audience responses to skin realism, expediting QA testing. The primary experimental stage is to generate a face database with photorealistic skin to be assessed using psychometrics by participants. This is additionally one of few studies looking into the novel phenomena of training AI's to generate human-oriented psychologically salient content. tw1700@york.ac.uk Email Mastodon Other links Website LinkedIn BlueSky Github Themes - Previous Next

< Back Steph Carter University of York iGGi PG Researcher Available for placement Steph is a psycholinguistics graduate from the University of York with a background in language teaching and SEND teaching. Their research focuses on second language acquisition, human-computer interaction, and gamification. Their research interests also include accessibility in games, disability representation, and games with a purpose. Outside of research, they have worked as a freelance accessibility consultant and occasionally take part in game jams with their colleagues. Steph’s project explores how game design can improve participants’ experiences in second language learning experiments while still enabling the collection of high-quality, controlled data. Although games and gamification are increasingly used in educational contexts, particularly for language learning, their potential in experimental design for second language acquisition research remains underexplored. This project investigates how incorporating game elements into psycholinguistic tasks can impact the participant experience and maintain data quality. The findings aim to inform the design and development of gamified data collection tools for both language learning and cognitive research, while also providing some practical guidance for researchers interested in gamifying their experimental methods. steph.carter@york.ac.uk Email Mastodon https://linktr.ee/steph_carter Other links Website https://www.linkedin.com/in/steph-carter-742891123/ LinkedIn BlueSky Github Supervisor(s): Dr Abi Evans Themes Accessibility Applied Games Design & Development Game Data Player Research - Previous Next

< Back Joshua Kritz Queen Mary University of London iGGi PG Researcher Available for placement Graduated in Applied Mathematics in computer science, however my love for games pushed me to dedicate myself for studying them. This led me to brave many areas of knowledge, such as: psychology, design, education, production and entrepreneurship. My work as a teacher allowed me develop many of these skills in practice, besides invoking a new perspective about the world. On a personal level, I love new experiences that can teach me new knowledge and, most important, I am very open minded and easy to talk to! I believe discussion leads to enlightenment. A description of Joshua's research: Card games, in particular Trading Card Games (TCGs) thrive on using the synergy between the cards to create emergent and interesting gameplay. However, these games usually have hundreds of different cards to create such rich experience, with some older TCGs featuring thousands of different cards. With such a huge amount of different cards playtesting these games present a big challenge. In example a new set of Magic the Gathering takes over 3 years of development to be fully designed. But even considering simpler exemplars like Dominion or Assencion can be difficult to balance, and both games are known to need a few expansions of experience to indeed provide a well balanced experience. One way to make this task faster and easier is to use automated agents to playtest the game exhaustively and provide much needed data. Whilst this would assist card game development, it is not used in practice, the playtesting of card games is still completely done by players. Even with systematic playtesting there is a limit of how much of the possibilities humans can test. However, implementing playtesting of card games have two big challenges, which are the main reason it has not been implemented in practice yet. First: Automated agents are not great when playing a game with too many variables (different cards) Second: The possible combinations of cards used in a deck or set of a single game is huge. My research aim to address the second issue by using a theory of synergy between cards to reduce the search space necessary to properly evaluate a card game. j.s.kritz@qmul.ac.uk Email Mastodon Other links Website https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshua-kritz-38808379/ LinkedIn BlueSky Github Supervisor: Dr Raluca Gaina Featured Publication(s): A FAIR catalog of ontology-driven conceptual models A Conceptual Model for the Analysis of Investigation Elements in Games A Vocabulary of Board Game Dynamics Unveiling modern board games: an ML-based approach to BoardGameGeek data analysis When 1+ 1 does not equal 2: Synergy in games Towards an Ontology of Wargame Design Themes Applied Games Design & Development Game AI Previous Next

< Back Permalife of the Archive: Archaeogaming as Queergaming Link Author(s) F Smith Nicholls 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. Women in Games Jobs (WIGJ)

< Back Prof. Anders Drachen Supervisor Anders Drachen, PhD, (born 1976) is a Professor at the Department of Computer Science, with Digital Creativity Labs and Weavr at the University of York (UK). His work in games research is focused on user behavior, user experience and audience engagement and the application of data science, information systems modelling, business intelligence, design and Human-Computer Interaction in these domains. His research and professional work are carried out in collaboration with companies across the Creative Industries, from big publishers to indies. He is recognized as one of the most influential people in his domains of work and have authored over a hundred publications with international colleagues across industry and academia. Having lived and worked on four different continents, Anders Drachen has had the mixed pleasure of fending off three shark attacks in Africa and Australia. He is also the youngest Dane in history to publish a cooking book – dedicated to ice cream. Research themes: Data Science, Analytics, Machine Learning in Interactive Media Big Data, behavior- and social media analytics in the Creative Industries Data Mining and Business Informatics in the Creative Industries Data-Driven Storytelling and Audience Engagement Games User Research and User Experience in Games Data-Driven Design and Development Human-Computer Interaction Esports and Sports Analytics Behavioral/Market Analytics and Business Intelligence Entrepreneurship in the Creative Industries Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies anders.drachen@york.ac.uk Email Mastodon https://www.andersdrachen.com Other links Website https://www.linkedin.com/in/drachen/ LinkedIn BlueSky Github Themes Design & Development Esports Game Data Player Research - Previous Next

< Back Active Divergence with Generative Deep Learning--A Survey and Taxonomy Link Author(s) T Broad, S Berns, S Colton, M Grierson Abstract More info TBA Link

< 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