Students

Videogame Correlates of Real-Life Cognitive Traits

Identifying the role of attention and cognition within videogame immersion using neuroimaging methods Immersion is a state in which players are engaged to a degree of total absorption that inhibits the ability to correctly report one’s surroundings or time. Present theory on immersion has developed a coherent model that provides sufficient evidence to distinguish itself from other cognitive concepts such as presence, attention, selective attention, absorption and flow....

Abstraction-Based Monte Carlo Tree Search. (Industry placement at PROWLER.io) Monte Carlo Tree Search is a popular artificial intelligence technique amongst researchers due to the remarkable strength by which it can play many games. This technique was prominently used as the basis for AlphaGo, the AI by Google DeepMind that became the first of its kind to beat professional human players at the game Go....

AutoGraff: A Procedural Model of Graffiti Form. (Industry placement at Media Molecule) The purpose of this study is to investigate techniques for the procedural and interactive generation of synthetic instances of graffiti art....

Game analytics and player psychology: creating reliable models of player motivation Motivation can be loosely defined as a process of the brain and the mind, capable of driving and deeply shaping human behaviour. Motivational processes are embedded in many everyday life situations, exerting their effects via a wide range of incentive mechanisms and objects....

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....

Measuring the experience of playing self-paced games (Industry Placement with Spiral Productions) Most research into games looks at fast paced action games. But there are lots of games like Angry Birds and Candy Crush Saga which hold player’s attention without needing fast reflexes or good co-ordination. Not all of these games are casual titles....

Creation of accessible tools for the use of procedural audio in video games The aim of this research is to investigate and provide new tools to developers for the use of procedural audio into video games. Procedural approaches could address different issues that commonly afflict game audio. In music, generative systems are not only less repetitive, but offer more adaptability as well....

Learning and Strategy Acquisition in Digital Games Given the success and impact of games and the gaming industry, it is unsurprising that it has become the centre of a significant body of academic research and other literature....

Intrinsic Motivation in Computational Creativity with Applications to Games. (Industry placement at Splash Damage and Microsoft Research) This research investigates how we can engineer artificial systems that are creative in their own right. Christian addresses this challenge with computational models of intrinsic motivation (IM). Intrinsically motivated agents perform an activity for its inherent satisfaction rather than for some instrumental outcome....

Personalised Aesthetics for Games The worldwide games industry is a huge market and as the spectrum of people who spend time playing games increases, there is more and more competition to create games that capture the attentions of a wide audience. Whilst games have been traditionally designed with specific cultural demographics in mind, a game that could dynamically match the cultural values of a range of demographics would maximize its potential market....

Affect and Emotion using Immersive Sound in Intelligent Games. (On Industrial Placement with Remedy Entertainment) Recent advances in high definition video displays and 3-D headsets, coupled with motion tracking and biosensor technologies, have enabled video games to reach unprecedented levels of visual immersion and interaction....

Identifying Immersion in games using EEG and other measures (Industry placement at Sony SIE)

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)....

Automated Story Generation for Games Emily is researching automated story generation for video games, focusing on the use of Planning for real-time, dynamic generation. Ideally, the stories created will reflect choices made by the player during gameplay and will update continually throughout gameplay. The aim of this research is to create a system that could be easily utilised in the development of more adaptive games....

Applications in game development for programming language theory and AI Modern game development is highly iterative. Iteration is usually discussed in terms of a team completing design iterations, but can also be considered at the level of an individual developer attempting to complete a task, or experimenting with some ideas. At this level, the feedback loop provided by the tool becomes critical. Programming environments in particular often have a very poor feedback loop....

AI for game design: learning from designers For my PhD I am investigating how AI can help developers by learning to generate content in a similar fashion to the developers themselves.  I envision a framework based on reinforcement learning, where an AI can learn a design policy for some content domain (e.g., FPS maps or platformer levels) by observing human designers.  The AI would learn to take particular design actions in certain kinds of content states.  Recent res...