Game design, interactive arts, interactive media are a new emerging inter- and multi-disciplinary fields that combine different disciplines, including computer science, design, art, engineering, psychology, social science, science, and business. Members of the GUII Lab focus on this emerging areas with emphasis on contributions on developing new design mechanics, developing new methods to measure the user experience, expanding and applying new artificial intelligence algorithms, and engineering new engaging designs. Further, the lab also engages in the development of new applications towards broader impacts in education, health, and climate change.

The lab is currently focusing on different directions that involve exploring the development of new technological, methodological and design advancements towards developing artefacts that promote social impact and change through games. We thus focus on three areas:

• Enabling Technologies:

  • Open Player Models: how to model players' process of playing a game and how to make such models transparent, interpretable and explainable for other players to use to reflect and learn from.

  • AI with Social Intelligence: how to develop AI techniques to assist in both the game development process as well as assisting players in their gaming experience, through recommendation, coaching, training, reflection, or prediction. Our innovation in developing such AI models in such a way that they are socially and emotionally intelligent taking the players' and designers' needs into consideration.

  • Process Models of Players Experience: how to map, model and visualize the player experience as a process.

• Applications:

  • Games for Positive Mental Health: exploring the design and development of different types of games and their use to measure and influence users' mental health, in terms of increasing resilience, emotional regulation, coping through social structure and social play.

  • Games addressing climate change: exploring new designs to (a) raise awareness, (b) increase resilience to climate hazards, such as fire, floods, and water rise, and (c) engage stakeholders in developing solutions to the climate problem.

  • Games that teach programming: exploring new designs for teaching STEM subjects through a game. The work also explores the use of data-driven techniques for personalization and development of practice exercises towards better learning of CS concepts.

  • Esports: exploring new ways to explore the use of data and AI as a way to help train players for competitive play.

At any point in time, the lab is engaging with multiple projects led by different lab members. Check our projects and people websites for more information about the work we are currently doing.

The lab is also collaborating with several partners in the industry and academia. The lab has expertise in:

• Artificial Intelligence modeling methods, including Bayesian Networks, Hidden Markov Models, Symbolic and logic based methods, Reinforcement methods, and deep learning. We mostly focus on the use of these methods in modeling human behavior using data from games.

• Developing and using visualization methods, including D3, Tableau, and building our own.

• User Experience testing and measurements, using various methods from qualitative to quantitative to mixed methods and using tools including eye tracking, physiological sensors as well as video annotations.

• Serious Games and Gamification, including the development of serious games and assessment techniques as well as embedding visualization and gamification techniques in mobile and other applications.

• Game Tools, developing AI tools for game content development.

• Game Engines, including Unity and Unreal and location based game technologies.