Please join us March 6 at 12:30 PM in the Student center's Multi Purpose Room for a talk on video games and education.

Title: Games User Experience and Design Research
Speaker: Magy Seif El-Nasr, Associate Professor, Director of Game Educational
Programs and Research at Northeastern
Joint between College of Arts, Media and Design and College of Computer and
Information Sciences

Abstract:
Game design is an evolving field that is stimulated by interdisciplinary research in
different fields, including psychology, computer science, human computer interaction,
and media arts, including film, theatre, and animation. Currently the field as well as the
industry is realizing that by understanding their users' motivations, personality, emotions,
tenancies, and habits, they can, not only enhance their game designs, but also create new
designs that have the potential to appeal to a wider market. This is of particular
importance to game franchises, social and massively multiplayer games, as well as
educational and health-based social media environments and games. In this talk, I will
discuss three projects targeted at enhancing game design by understanding users’
preferences, emotions, and motivations. In particular, I will discuss two projects done in
collaboration with Electronic Arts’ EA Sports and Bioware’s design and user experience
teams with the goal of identifying problems with current designs triangulating data from
eye tracking, psycho-physiological sensors, qualitative responses, and telemetry logs. In
addition, I will also discuss a health social media and casual games environment currently
in development in collaboration with Igniteplay, a Vancouver-based company. I will
discuss how the social media environment, visualization motivational tactics, as well as
the embedded causal games were designed and developed based on results of studies on
player motivation conducted by my research team and others on game engagement.

Bio

Magy Seif El-Nasr is an associate Professor in the Colleges of Computer and Information
Sciences and Arts, Media and Design, where she directs the Game User Experience and
Design Research Lab. She is also the Director of Game Educational Programs and
Research at Northeastern, and Director of Game Design. Dr. Seif El-Nasr earned her
Ph.D. degree from Northwestern University in Computer Science and her Master of
Science degree in Computer Science from Texas A&M University. Magy’s award
winning research focuses on enhancing game designs by developing tools and methods
for evaluating and adapting game experiences. Her work is internationally known and
cited in several game industry books, including Programming Believable Characters for
Computer Games (Game Development Series) and Real-time Cinematography for
Games. Magy is currently working on collaborative projects with Electronic Arts, Bardel
Entertainment, and Pixel Ante. Dr. Seif El-Nasr has received multiple grants to support
her research. She has published over 60 international peer reviewed articles on her work.
In addition, her work has received several awards and recognition within the Game
Industry and Interactive Narrative Communities. Notably, she received Best Paper Award
at the International Conference of Virtual Storytelling 2003 and several citations in
industry books and magazines. Magy has also received Leadership Excellence Award and

Research Excellence Award from Texas A&M University. She is on the editorial board of
the Journal of Game Development, the International Journal of Intelligent Games and
Simulation, and ACM’s Computers in Entertainment; she has chaired and organized
several workshops including, American Association of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
Symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Interaction Entertainment, which became its
own conference: AIIDE (Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment).
Magy has offered and conducted many workshops on game design, including Game Dev
Camps (Middle and High School camps) and has taught game design courses at Penn
State University, Northwestern University, Master’s of Digital Media, and Simon Fraser
University. http://www.neu.edu/magy.