Students

I study the satisfaction and, increasingly, frustration of basic psychological needs in video games. My focus is on how the interaction of personality, contextual, and game design factors affect player experience and longer-term psychosocial outcomes.

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....

Use of Artificial General Intelligence techniques, with particular focus on Statistical Forward Planning, for automatic playtesting through the exploration of the skill/strategic space of the game.

Researcher in Virtual Reality exploring the psychological impact of the technical setup of embodiment, with a focus on shared virtual environments for learning, health, and productivity.

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....

Year 1 game researcher with a background in audio engineering, interested in flow and player experiences in music-based games. Specifically, on designing dynamic difficulty adjustment systems to improve these experiences.

Former humanities student now researching the implications and applications of failure in video games. Especially interested in human-computer interaction, game design, and unusual gaming experiences.

Human-Computer Interaction researcher focusing on what players enjoy about their opponents in strategy games, whether human or AI, and applying that to game design and AI construction.

Multidisciplinary researcher applying Multiagent Deep Reinforcement learning and Game theory to generate gameplaying AI agents for a wide variety of games.

Interaction and technical designer looking at how new players learn to play games and how best to support learning of games. Focusing on learning and supporting learning in Esport games.

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....

Game design researcher looking at stage magic principles for extracting design inspiration for evoking motivating uncertainty. Specifically applying the forcing principle of equivoque for creating decision uncertainty in narrative games.

Affect-aware procedural game generation My proposed research lies at the intersection of affective computing and machine learning with the intelligent design of games, and in particular, procedurally generated and player- adaptive game content....

Gifting in video games (Industry collaboration with BT) Lisa’s research is an exploration of gifting behaviour in video games. In the fields of social science and positive psychology, a considerable amount of research has found out how being generous, and its incarnation in gifting can benefit one’s subjective well-being. However, when it comes to the digital space, little do we know about how people can become happier through gifting....

Using digital games to understand productive team dynamics. Especially interested in understanding how to develop cohesion in within newly formed virtual teams in competitive esport games..

Application of Neuroevolution to General Video Game Playing In the field of artificial intelligence, great advancements in developing AI capable of playing specific games has been made over last few decades. Over the years, the potential of General Game Playing (GGP) AI, was realized, and thus a new area of research was spawned, focusing mainly on turn-based board games....