Projects & Research

	Life Preservers is a National Science Foundation funded learning game created to meet educational, game design, and research goals. The game is designed to teach middle and high school science standards on adaptation and evolution, to appeal to girls, and to accommodate competitive and exploration play styles.
	Interactive Drama Architecture (IDA) is an ongoing research project in the issues involved in creating an interactive drama. IDA's uses a real-time story director agent, which coordinates the game world in response to authored story content, player actions in the world, and an intelligent hypothesis of future player behavior.
	The Fantastic Food Challenge (FFC) contains a series of digital games designed to teach key concepts from basic food-nutrition curricula in a fun, engaging manner, thereby increasing the participants’ interest and motivation in learning. FFC is being used in research to test the efficacy of various health care information delivery approaches.
	Interactive Storytelling Architecture for Training (ISAT) explores artificial intelligence techniques for providing individualized training experiences in a dramatic setting using computer game technology. ISAT dynamically alters the game environment to provide training content that is tailored to the individual trainee's needs.
	Mudcraft is a real-time strategy game that foregoes the violence associated with most RTS games. Mudcraft illustrates it is possible to create games with greater quality and complexity than those found on the web today and the Internet is a viable delivery medium for independent games which explore new aspects of current game genres.
	The Cognitive Games project goal is to create and research a series of web-based computer games designed to exercise various cognitive functions (attention, memory, language, visual/spatial functions, executive functions) for individuals hoping to preserve neurocognitive functions as they move from middle to late adulthood.
	Voyage Beijing simulates a first business trip to Beijing, China. It utilizes the advantages of digital games, such as engagement, motivation and interactivity to teach players crucial information about business travel to China.
	Playtester Insights About Play Styles: Interviews are being conducted with 25 experienced playtesters of commercial and educational games to collect and synthesize anecdotes and insights about player types and play styles.
	Video Game Player Types and Quality Evaluations: Player motivations that define player types and video game evaluation criteria are integral to understanding video game players. By linking specific player types to quality indicators, both researchers and developers will gain key insight into what is important to different groups of people and how games may affect these groups differently.
	Does Playing Violent Video Games Induce Aggression? This study aims to advance the media effects debate concerning violent video games. In a novel, event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, 13 male research participants were observed playing a latest-generation violent video game. We discuss the applicability of neuroscience methodology in media effects studies, with a special emphasis on the assumption of virtuality prevalent in video game play.
	FUGA is a European Commission funded project on the human experience of video game enjoyment.
	Mobile Alternate Reality Games for Learning: Mobile phone-based alternate reality games and simulations using SMS and mobile phone cameras are being developed to enhance and expand informal science learning activities for field trips to the Michigan 4H Children’s Garden and to study their impact on child engagement and learning.
	Girls As Game Designers: This suite of studies, funded by the National Science Foundation, looks at gender and games through quantitative and qualitative research including 1.) observational data of game play attitudes and play style; 2.) content analysis comparing games envisioned by girls and boys; and 3.) an experiment to test whether girls and boys prefer games designed by others of their same gender, even if they are not told the gender of the design team.
	Character attachment in video games: In this research we develop the new concept attachment to a video game character (CA) and propose CA as a moderator for various video game effects. Research will be conducted to first validate the character attachment instrument itself and then to demonstrate a link between game success and video game player’s self-esteem as moderated by character attachment.
	Worldbuilding Initiative: Exploring the art, science, and process of creating fully detailed fictional storytelling realities that act as “sandboxes” in which any number of multiplatform stories can be told.
	Time-based, high resolution content analysis of violent computer games: This project is interested in how people play specific violent video games, i.e. how exactly player interact violently in a violent video game. Intra-player and intra-video games content analyses are needed to better understand the effects they may have on video game players. To answer this question we conducted an inductive, time-based content analysis of a modern violent video game. 14 players played the multiplayer-ego-shooter “Tactical Operations” for about one hour.