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iGGi PGR Talks
iGGi Talks: Game Design
Wed 16 Sep 11:20-12:00
Session chair: tba
Alex Flint
Alex Flint
>> Birds of Play:
How Gamification Took Flight in Birdwatching
Abstract: Birdwatching was never designed as a game, yet many birdwatchers engage with it through game-like structures. Birders maintain life lists, compete to spot rare species, complete app-based challenges, and receive notifications that influence where and when they birdwatch. At the same time, digital games allow players to simulate birdwatching entirely. These developments raise a key question: What happens when a nature-based hobby becomes increasingly shaped by game design?
To address this question, the talk introduces a framework for analysing birdwatching as a continuum of game-like structures rather than a simple distinction between 'gamified' and 'non-gamified' activities. The framework maps practices across two dimensions: whether game-like structures are implicit or explicit, and whether they emerge through community practices or are intentionally designed into systems. It serves both as a taxonomy for understanding birdwatching activities and as a critical lens for examining their effects. The talk argues that these game-like structures are increasingly acting as core systems rather than simply add-on engagement tools, meaning that ecological knowledge is shaped both by the natural world and by how users’ attention is directed.
Bio: link to iGGi profile
Talk 1
Doruk Balci Talk
Doruk Balcı
>> Playerly and Designerly Games:
Structural Interpretation and Play
Abstract: As games continue to develop as a cultural medium, the question of how they are interpreted gains urgency. Yet existing frameworks for understanding player engagement often lack the precision to distinguish between different kinds of interpretive agency.
This talk introduces structural interpretation as a framework for understanding how players engage with the rule structures, affordances, and procedural possibilities of games. We divide it into two forms: constructive interpretation, how players understand and operate within game structures, and transformative interpretation, how players reshape those structures through practices like modding, rule invention, and metagame creation. By reframing appropriation as interpretation rather than resistance, we bridge HCI and game studies approaches to interpretation and agency. To articulate how games invite different modes of structural interpretation, we extend Barthes' distinction between readerly and writerly texts into games through the concepts of playerly and designerly games.
Playerly games foreground constructive interpretation, organising engagement toward mastery. Designerly games foreground transformative interpretation, positioning players as co-producers of game structures. We propose these as qualities games exhibit to different degrees, offering a vocabulary for how game design can intentionally support interpretive agency.
Bio: link to iGGi profile
Talk 2
iGGi Talks: Players
Wed 16 Sep 14:00-15:00
Session chair: tba
Nicole Levermore Talk
Talk 3
Nicole Levermore
>> What We Can Learn About the Brain
:Through Tetris
Abstract: The classic video game Tetris has enormous potential for research on cognition and mental health. It is an engaging, long-duration task that participants can perform with little prior training, and requires a variety of cognitive abilities to play. A Python version of the classic NES Tetris (‘Meta-T’) with millisecond-scale logging, was created by Linstedt and Gray (2015), and we have used this to collect behavioural and neuroimaging data on a wide range of subjects in the lab. We have also generated a Javascript version of Meta-T that can be deployed at scale on the web.
In my talk, I will outline how Tetris can be used to study how our attention shifts between long-term cognitive states like ‘engagement’ and ‘flow’ and how these switches might differ in participants with ADHD. I will demonstrate some examples of the Tetris behavioural data I obtain from my experiments, what attention is, and how combining neuroimaging with Tetris is a new direction in understanding the brain and ADHD.
Bio: link to iGGi profile
Dominik Jeurissen
Dominik Jeurissen
>> What should I do? An Experimental Onboarding
:Advisor for "Total War: Pharaoh"
Abstract: Learning to play complex strategy games like Total War can often be overwhelming for new players. Because these games have many deeply interconnected systems, designing tutorials that adequately cover all of them without overwhelming the player is difficult, and updates to the game can quickly render any existing tutorial outdated.
In this talk, we explore how to augment existing onboarding systems with an on-demand advisor powered by a small language model (SLM), enabling players to better understand game mechanics, learn systems more effectively, and receive strategic guidance when needed.
We begin by outlining the advisor’s architecture, including how we evaluate and constrain its outputs to align with designer intent. We then discuss how we integrated the system to feel like a natural part of the game experience, before exploring the technical challenges of working with small language models and the approaches we used to mitigate their limitations.
Bio: link to iGGi profile
Talk 4
Lauren Winter
Talk 5
Lauren Winter
>> The Jingle of Contrasting Constructs:
Comparing Measures of Immersion and Challenge from the PXI and IEQ-SF
Abstract: Player experience provides an important metric for both game developers and researchers to understand how players are interpreting the game. Whilst previous work has highlighted that some questionnaires are measuring similar concepts with different names, such as immersion and engagement, more work is needed to identify whether constructs with the same names from different measures are comparable in their results. The current work takes survey results from 138 players of League of Legends, and contrasts their scores on immersion and challenge from the Player Experience Inventory with those from the IEQ-SF.
The results found that immersion from the PXI only strongly correlated with real-world dissociation, moderately correlated with involvement and did not correlate with challenge from the IEQ-SF. This talk aims to take the reader through popular player experience measures and highlight the similarities and differences between the individual items, to highlight where results may overlap.
Bio: link to iGGi profile
iGGi Talks: Live-service Games
Thu 17 Sep 10:00-10:40
Session chair: tba
Lauren Winter 2
Talk 6
Lauren Winter
>> Why Pugging in World of Warcraft is Awful
(and what you can learn from it)
Abstract: Pugging, the term used to refer to matchmaking in World of Warcraft with people you don't know, is a generally miserable experience for players. Players feel they do not achieve their potential in these groups and often progress takes much longer.
This talk will cover the literature behind ad hoc groups, why these players may feel negativelyabout these groups, and also analyse the measures Blizzard have taken to identify some of the behavioural difficulties and why they may not work. Suggestions will be given for developing matchmaking teams, alongside the theoretical justification.
Bio: link to iGGi profile
Tamsin Isaac
Tamsin Isaac
>> Playing Against the Clock:
A Cross-Platform Taxonomy of Limited-Time Events"
Abstract: Limited-time events (LTEs) have become a defining feature of contemporary live-service games, shaping when players engage, what they prioritise, and how ongoing game experiences unfold. From seasonal celebrations and battle passes to limited-time collaborations and daily login systems, these events structure play around urgency, routine, and anticipation. Despite their widespread use across both mobile and PC games, LTEs remain inconsistently defined within academic research, limiting systematic comparison between games, genres, and platforms.
This talk presents a cross-platform taxonomy of LTEs developed through qualitative content analysis of 2,674 top-charting games across Google Play and Steam. The taxonomy identifies five key dimensions of LTE design: event type, duration, recurrence, reward structure, and monetisation model. Alongside presenting broader patterns across platforms and genres, the talk reflects on what LTEs reveal about contemporary game design and how time-based systems increasingly shape player engagement and experience within live-service games.
Bio: link to iGGi profile
Talk 7
iGGi Talks: Game AI
Thu 17 Sep 13:30-14:10
Session chair: tba
Dien Nguyen
Talk 8
Dien Nguyen
>> JSON-Bag:
Game-agnostic Automatic Feature Extraction
Abstract: Pugging, JSON Bag-of-Tokens model (JSON-Bag) is a method to generically represent game trajectories by tokenizing their JSON descriptions and automatically extract game features.
Using a prototype-based nearest-neighbor search (P-NNS) and Jensen-Shannon distance (JSD) as distance metric, we evaluate the validity of JSON-Bag on six tabletop games---7 Wonders, Dominion, Sea Salt and Paper, Can't Stop, Connect4, Dots and boxes---each over three game trajectory classification tasks. We also demonstrate a practical usage of JSON-Bag as a value function for game-playing agents and how to further enhance JSON-Bag performance with feature selection using Random Forest.
Bio: link to iGGi profile
Toby Best
Toby Best
>> ‘Journeys in the Dark’:
Exploring Procedural Content Generation for Descent
Abstract: This talk demonstrates the implementation of the one-versus-many asymmetric dungeon crawler board game ‘Descent: Journeys in the Dark’ (Second Edition) within the Tabletop Games Framework, and the exploration of how procedural content generation can simulate the creation of custom ‘homebrew’ content found in many tabletop role-playing games. Creating homebrew content can be a time-consuming task, and a challenge to ensure balance between all players whilst remaining fun and enjoyable.
Here, we showcase the feasible-infeasible two-population evolutionary algorithm used to create new quests and board layouts for Descent, as well as sample batch runs and playtests, with a final live demonstration of the algorithm in action and playtest with the computer agents in the TAG implementation.
Bio: link to iGGi profile
Talk 9
Organisers:
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General Chairs: Laurissa Tokarchuk, Jeremy Gow
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Programme Chair: Filip Sroka, Toby Best, Ruizhe "Jay" Yu Xia
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Outreach & Marketing Chair: Prakriti Nayak
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Poster & Workshop Chair: Dien Nguyen
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Local Chair: Karl Clarke
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Tech/Media Chairs: Karl Clarke, Prakriti Nayak
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Alumni Chair: Nicole Levermore
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General Management: Susanne Binder, David Hull
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Admin Support: Shopna Begum, Helen Tilbrook, Oliver Roughton
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Website/Industry Liaison: Susanne Binder
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