Students

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.

Software Engineer interested in (both users and AI) behaviour. Working on taking existing AI algorithms and changing their heuristics to have goals that go beyond winning to analyse how agents behave.

Using Applied Games to Motivate Speech Without Bias (Industry placement Lightspeed Research)

Exploring vignette game dynamics, and sharing agency in personal narrative through play This research questions how and why vignette games are used so effectively as a tool to convey personal, often challenging, stories. It examines the use of scene, perspective and mechanic to understand better the conversation between player and author, and the notion of player agency as collaboration and commitment within play....

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....

Player experience researcher exploring decision-making in open world games, with a specific focus on when and why players deviate from the ‘main quest’

Improving Game AI Design Using Adversarial Agents This project proposes a novel method for improving the quality of behaviour of human authored agents by pitting them against trained agents and observing what bad behaviours/exploits the trained agents reveal....

Evolving evolvable representations of neural networks

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.

Games industry veteran and researcher with a bridging foot solidly placed in each camp. Gorm currently works on procedural content generation, virtual reality and mixed-initiative co-creative interfaces. He also has an interest in game design, participatory design, game jams and computer graphics.

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....

Researcher working towards a programming model that can provide a reliable instant feedback loop. The goal is to facilitate better programmable tools for simulation, visual art, music and game development.

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...

Developing Agents with Human Gameplay Artificial Intelligence has been widely used in video games as agents for non-player characters. This has compelled many researchers to develop and study algorithms and techniques to create agents to compete against humans and defeat them or simply aid them in several tasks. But some have opted for creating agents that have tried to pass the Turing test rather than simply winning....