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< Back ​ Madeleine Frister University of York ​ iGGi PG Researcher ​ ​ Madeleine joined the IGGI programme in 2020, after obtaining a master’s degree in psychology and cognitive neuroscience from the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany. Her PhD focuses on how visual characteristics influence gameplay and player experience. In 2021, she co-founded UX studio Vanilla Noir where she works as an independent designer and developer on website, app and game projects. Video games rely heavily on central aspects of human information processing, including perception, attention, and memory. The human mind is severely limited in the amount of information it can process, and a key factor for successful information processing is resisting distraction. Consequently, most user experience guidelines recommend eliminating any unnecessary information to avoid cognitive overload. Yet, in the case of video games, the presence of task-irrelevant items does not seem to compromise player experience, considering that there is an abundance of popular video games that are very high in visual complexity. On the contrary, inducing demand in the form of perceptual distraction may even be desirable in order to introduce challenge which can in turn increase enjoyment. The current project aims to deepen our understanding of perceptual distraction and its effects on game difficulty and player experience, with a specific focus on perceptual similarity between target and distractor items. ​ mf1255@york.ac.uk Email Mastodon https://vanilla-noir.com Other links Website https://www.linkedin.com/in/madeleinefrister LinkedIn Twitter Github Supervisors Prof. Paul Cairns Dr Laurissa Tokarchuk Dr Fiona McNab Featured Publication(s): An appraisal-based chain-of-emotion architecture for affective language model game agents Examining the effects of video game difficulty adaptation on performance and player experience Examining the influence of perceptual distraction on performance in a working memory game A data-driven approach for examining the demand for relaxation games on Steam during the COVID-19 pandemic Themes Design & Development Player Research - Previous 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. Microsoft Research Limited

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. University of Waterloo (Canada)

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. Nemisindo

< Back ​ Dr Adrian Bors University of York ​ Supervisor ​ ​ Adrian G. Bors is an Associate Professor at the University of York and has published more than 150 papers in international journals and conferences in the areas of his research interests. He is interested in supervising projects related to the application of novel artificial intelligence methods and computer vision in Game AI. One of the areas of interest is in the modelling of game characters (intelligent agent) continuously learning from their environments, able to transfer their knowledge from one stage to the next, while accumulating the information, like human/animal beings and enabling to continuously adapt to their environments. Another topic of interest is represented by conditional image and video generation for developing game environments. The conditional video/image generation will depend on certain factors that can be pre-established or be the result of self-learning by an (intelligent agent). Most existing games relying on no movement representation lack in representing realistic and continuous movement. In this direction of research, we will aim to generated video which would be consistent with realistic movement of game characters. Specific attention will be paid to modelling the interaction of the generated movement with the environment or other actors (game characters). In another direction of research, Adrian G. Bors will supervise projects in digital watermarking of 3D graphical characters. Codes will be invisible embedded and retrieved from the 3D graphics representations. The code embedded, like the DNA in human/animals, will enable the character to act in specific ways, defining behavioural traits in similarly looking graphics characters. ​ adrian.bors@york.ac.uk Email https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Adrian-Bors Mastodon https://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/adrian/ Other links Website https://www.linkedin.com/in/adrian-bors-32a3668/ LinkedIn Twitter https://github.com/AdrianBors Github ​ ​ Themes Game AI - Previous Next

< Back ​ Dr William Smith University of York ​ Supervisor ​ ​ William Smith is a Reader in the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition research group in the Department of Computer Science at the University of York. He is currently a Royal Academy of Engineering/The Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellow and an Associate Editor of the journal Pattern Recognition. His research interests span vision, graphics and ML. Specifically, physics-based and 3D computer vision, shape and appearance modelling and the application of statistics and machine learning to these areas. The application areas in which he most commonly works are face/body analysis and synthesis, surveying and mapping, object capture and inverse rendering. A wide variety of tools and areas of maths are often useful in his research such as: convex optimisation, nonlinear optimisation, manifold learning, learning/optimisation on manifolds, computational geometry and low level computer vision (e.g. features and correspondence). He leads a team of five PhD students and one postdoc and has published over 100 papers, many in the top conferences and journals in the field. He was General Chair for the ACM SIGGRAPH European Conference on Visual Media Production in 2019 and is Program Chair for the British Machine Vision Conference in 2020. Research themes: Game AI Game Design Computational Creativity Graphics and rendering Content creation ​ william.smith@york.ac.uk Email Mastodon https://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/wsmith/ Other links Website https://www.linkedin.com/in/william-smith-b5421a70/ LinkedIn https://twitter.com/WillSmithVision Twitter https://github.com/waps101 Github ​ ​ Themes Creative Computing Design & Development Game AI Player Research - Previous Next

< Back ​ Dr Tom Cole ​ ​ iGGi Alum + Supervisor ​ ​ Games should be studied as interactive systems, but are more often studied using techniques reserved for non-interactive media. As developers, we are ‘selling ourselves short’, and not exploring the creative and expressive potential of digital games to their fullest. Out of the myriad of affective experiences possible, we generally only design and experience a fraction of what could be offered. Tom hopes to help address this by studying how game mechanics, gameplay systems and control methods can be used and interpreted to create meaning and elicit a wider range of emotional responses than is commonly seen in digital games at present. Broadening and deepening emotional engagement with an emphasis on mechanics and systems. (Industry placement at Bossa Studios) Video games, with their unique properties such as interactivity, agency, control mechanics, feedback loops and gameplay systems, have the potential to impart deep emotional experiences – some already do of course. However, study of this emotional engagement remains lacking. Reliance on techniques and theory appropriated from film, literature and cultural studies yields limited results. There is relatively little understanding of how procedural elements such as control mechanisms and gameplay systems can be leveraged (or synergised with narrative and/or audio-visual elements) for emotional affect. Tom was previously at Supermassive Games where he was a designer on the BAFTA award-winning horror game Until Dawn and artist on Killzone Shadow Fall. Tom got his BSc in Biology with Industrial Experience from Manchester. After teaching science in secondary schools for a while, he decided games were more interesting and got his MA in Digital Games Theory and Design at Brunel. After time at Goldsmiths, University of London and the University for Creative Arts, Rochester, Tom is now Lecturer in Games Development at the University of Greenwich where he teaches games development, design and production. From 2016 to 2024 he led the organisation of Adventurex - the Narrative Games Convention, a sold out international conference which grew from 100 to 650 people during his time leading it. ​ tom@tommakesgames.com Email Mastodon http://www.tommakesgames.com Other links Website https://uk.linkedin.com/in/tom-cole-87043a38 LinkedIn https://www.twitter.com/@tommakesgames Twitter Github ​ Featured Publication(s): Emotional exploration and the eudaimonic gameplay experience: A grounded theory More than a bit of coding:(un-) Grounded (non-) Theory in HCI Eudaimonia in Digital Games Thinking and doing: Challenge, agency, and the eudaimonic experience in video games "Moments to Talk About": Designing for the Eudaimonic Gameplay Experience Grounded Theory in games research: making the case and exploring the options Grounded Theory in Games Research: Making the Case and Exploring the Options Emotional and functional challenge in core and avant-garde games The Tragedy of Betrayal: How the design of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus elicits emotion Themes Design & Development Game AI - Previous Next

< Back Multi-Modal Livestream Highlight Detection from Audio, Visual, and Language Data Link ​ Author(s) C Ringer Abstract ​ More info TBA ​ Link

< Back Adapting and Enhancing Evolutionary Art for Casual Creation. Link ​ Author(s) S Colton, J McCormack, S Berns, E Petrovskaya, M Cook Abstract ​ More info TBA ​ Link

< Back Utilising VIPER for Parameter Space Exploration in Agent Based Wealth Distribution Models Link ​ Author(s) OJ Scholten, RJ Spick, KA Hawick Abstract ​ More info TBA ​ Link

< Back Using Generative AI as an Artistic Material: A Hacker's Guide Link ​ Author(s) T Broad Abstract ​ More info TBA ​ Link

< Back Introducing real world physics and macro-actions to general video game AI Link ​ Author(s) D Perez-Liebana, M Stephenson, RD Gaina, J Renz, SM Lucas Abstract ​ More info TBA ​ Link