Papers, PhD researchers, talks and roles since I joined the University of York in 2022.
2026
Hosted ACM CHI PLAY 2026 in York as General Chair.
Joined the SIGCHI Publications Committee.
Attended BiGGi Con 2026, the iGGi conference on research and innovation in games, at Queen Mary University of London.
Presented our paper comparing proactive and reactive difficulty adjustment in running exergames at IEEE CoG 2026 in Madrid, Spain.
Two papers out in PACM HCI (CHI PLAY 2026), on agency in video games with Xuechen Xu and on games as coping systems with Sahar Mirhadi.
Attended Dagstuhl Seminar 26261, Harms in Digital Games: Sociotechnical Solutions for Prevention.
Our qualitative research synthesis on generative AI in game development was published at CHI 2026 in Barcelona, Spain.
Sally Sheppard started her PhD on personality-driven models of player motivation.
2025
Gave an invited keynote at the IEEE Conference on Games (CoG 2025) in Lisbon, Portugal.
Attended DiGRA 2025 in Valletta, Malta.
Attended Dagstuhl Seminar 25292, New Frontiers in AI for Game Design.
Congratulations to Sittikrai Chorrojprasert on passing his PhD viva.
Our paper at CHI 2025 in Yokohama, Japan, shows that emotionally challenging games can satisfy older adults' psychological needs.
Attended Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop 25102, The Future of Games in Society, and co-authored the resulting manifesto.
Became an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies.
2024
Two papers at CHI PLAY 2024 in Tampere, Finland, on indie developers' playtesting challenges and on how games help people through difficult times.
Attended Dagstuhl Seminar 24261, Computational Creativity for Game Development.
Promoted to Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) at the University of York.
The Basic Needs in Games Scale (BANGS) was published in the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies.
2023
Three-week research visit to Melissa Rogerson at the University of Melbourne, Australia, funded by its FEIT Visiting Fellows scheme.
Two-week research visit to Pejman Mirza-Babaei's lab at Ontario Tech University in Oshawa, Canada, where I gave an invited talk and we wrote our Interactions article on a diverse and democratised games industry together.
Attended CHI PLAY 2023 in Stratford, Ontario, Canada.
Alex Flint, Luca Resti, Xuechen Xu and Yiping Han started their PhDs.
Attended iGGi Con 2023, the iGGi conference and showcase for research in digital games, at Queen Mary University of London.
Attended the Foundations of Digital Games conference (FDG 2023) in Lisbon, Portugal.
Two papers at CHI 2023 in Hamburg, Germany, on detecting challenge from physiological signals and on comparing the CORGIS and VGDS questionnaires.
Co-organised Dagstuhl Research Meeting 23033, Game Measures and Player Experience.
2022
Attended the Foundations of Digital Games conference (FDG 2022) in Athens, Greece.
Attended the International Summer School on Artificial Intelligence and Games in Chania, Crete, Greece.
Keep Calm and Aim for the Head, on heart-rate-driven difficulty in a horror game, was published in IEEE Transactions on Games and later nominated for its Outstanding Paper Award.
Joined the Department of Computer Science at the University of York as a Lecturer.