Game Studies & Design 2023 Spring Showcase Friday, April 28th

Presentation Schedule (Fourth Floor Conference Room 4165)

12:00                    Welcome to the 2023 SpringShowcase, Judith Pintar

12:10                    Announcement of Graduating Seniors, Katryna Starks

12:20                    Invitation!  (To Eat, Play, Connect, Fly Kites) Lisa Bievenue

12:30-12:45        Neural Ninjas: A Swift Journey Through the Grid Game

                              Monica Rao, Abbey Paik, Maryam Jahadakbar, and Adam Taggart (Kinesiology)

Neural Ninjas invites you to embark on an electrifying 15-minute adventure that fuses martial arts and brain training programs into one dynamic and cognitively challenging experience. Our talk will provide an exhilarating overview of the game’s unique mini-challenges, which require participants to fully engage their cognitive-motor coordination skills, and demonstrate how the Grid Game promotes mental agility, strategic thinking, and physical dexterity. Be prepared to dive headfirst into a world where mind and body unite, as we unveil the secrets of mastering the Grid Game and evolving into a true Neural Ninja.

12:45-1:00          Influences of open-world games on interest, knowledge, and motivation

Matt Gadbury (Educational Psychology)
My research interests focus on the relationship between digital games and interest. I explore how digital games can be used to promote interest in varying domains, and particularly how popular games offer low barrier opportunities for learners to engage challenging content. Games can be used to build competencies and identities around domains ranging from Physics to civic engagement. Further, I am interested in how digital games can be used to present models of interest based on in-game data, such as exploratory patterns and use of tools in open-environment games, such as Minecraft. I want to know how pre-existing interests influence the ways in which learners explore and play games.

1:00-1:15             Considering Video Games’ Role in (Re)Shaping Tokyo’s Space: A Spatial Analysis of

Persona 5 Royal and Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth

                              Will Helmke (Institute of Communication Research)

Building on a definition of space as being made and remade in a continuing process of social production, shaping and reshaping space based around how space is used and understood, I assert that games that reproduce the layout, function, and audiovisual characteristics of “real” spaces function as a reproduction that is an extension of this process of spatial production: functioning as virtual spatial practice, a digital representation of space, and interactive representational space at the same time. As an example of this approach, I am discussing two titles: Digimon Cyber Sleuth: Complete Edition and Persona 5 Royal in the context of the city’s history and present process of spatial production, discussing how the game reinforces and/or challenges the existing trends of spatial production within the district. Games within this genre are uniquely positioned to redefine and/or reinforce the characteristics of the physical spaces they reproduce through player’s interactions with their virtual reproductions of space.

1:15-1:30             Embracing Modern Heritage: Wiki-Surveys and Gamified Informatics for Participatory

Research at Unité d’habitation

Colter Wehmeier (Informatics)

In this talk, I explore computation-aided research methods to address the unique challenges of modern heritage, focusing on Unité d’habitation (1952) as a case study. As a high-density housing prototype, Unite D’Habitation represents a vision of communal living that never fully materialized. By creating an experimental survey methodology to capture and deliberate on reflections from both residents and experts, we aim to examine the complexities of modern heritage and build an agenda for reclaiming lost futures.

1:30-1:45             Cyber-Ludic Pedagogies for Techno-deviance: Video Games in Education
                              Dora Kourkoulou (Educational Policy, Organization and Leadership)

My work asks how video games accommodate deviance, as freedom, unpredictability and disruption that would include dissent, resistance and defection from the game space. Analyzing policy, video games, literature, movies, social and mass media texts, it extends this question also onto how video games represent challenging, or not wanting to play the game (whichever the game is) anymore, the aesthetic, experiential and coded manifestations, and the repercussions of this denial. It considers the political and pedagogic implications of these encodings for the educational institutions we live in, and the space they leave for alternative self-determinations, inclusivity, and modes of humanity and existence. In addition, it asks how these (non-)representations constitute teaching moments, interact with policy developments, but also train into ways of working, learning, collaborating, and creating knowledge online.

1:45-2:00             Design Heuristics for Simulations and Games: 10 Questions Answered

Alexis Kim (Informatics)

Design is an embedded practice in the development of games and gameful applications, but are we teaching design as it’s being done in the field?  In my research I investigate design practices of simulations and games in 6 different domains. By interviewing designers from various backgrounds and situated in diverse fields, I am exploring design heuristics and unspoken practices. These practices that take shape from prior experience and education help to illustrate that learning in an interdisciplinary manner is important for shaping future design students and games based-teaching and learning. This talk will focus on 10 key questions about the project as well as implications for design research within game studies.

2:00-2:15             City Settlers

Litong Zeng, and Taehyun Kim (Education/DELTA)

City Settlers is a simplified version of games like Civilization or Catan. In this turn-based game, students must collaboratively prosper their city while also competing with other cities. I’m researching how conflicts and negative emotions, such as anger, between students affect their understanding of the game and environmental systems. I’m particularly interested in when their anger transitions into tilted behavior.

2:15-2:30             ChromosoME

                              Taehyun Kim (Education/DELTA)

ChromosoME is an immersive virtual reality simulation that teaches middle and high school students about cell division. The main goal is to investigate how the gestures students make while interacting with the immersive virtual reality simulation can aid in their understanding of scientific concepts.

2:30-3:30            Faculty Roundtable: Teaching through Games
                              David Dubin (iSchool), Cynthia D’Angelo (Education), Ava Wolf (Informatics),

Laura Shackelford (Anthropology); Moderator: Judith Pintar (iSchool)

In this roundtable,GSD affiliated faculty will discuss the various ways in which they use games in the classroom, including benefits, challenges, and the techniques developed through experience, that make it work. After a brief presentation by each speaker, the conversation will be opened to questions as well as contributions from the audience. All GSD faculty are welcome to attend and participate in the discussion.

3:45                      Gamification of Security Training

Peter Stenger, Hassam Uddin, Minh Duong, Emma Hartman,  Anusha Ghosh (Computer Science)

SIGPwny is a student-run interest group at UIUC focused on teaching cybersecurity. It is the largest education-focused student group on campus with over 200 active members. One of SIGPwny’s main objectives is to make security education more accessible through the combination of lectures and gamified security challenges. SIGPwny covers beginner material in cybersecurity, such as the basics of cryptography, web security, digital forensics, binary exploitation, and reverse engineering. Members attend weekly lectures on a given topic and then are given challenges testing their mastery of the material, using a progression of different challenge difficulties. The challenge in gamification is creating a competitive environment without ruining a sense of community or belonging. We surveyed whether SIGPwny’s gamified approach improved students learning, and whether SIGPwny’s gamification had an impact on community belonging.

Demo/Playtest Schedule (4th Floor Multi-purpose Atrium)

12:00

Baking Fever
Erin Schimenti, Erica Yang, and Michelle Wu (GSD 103)

A 3-5 player card game in which players compete to bake the most delicious desserts!

Doggy Kingdom: Royal Battle

Vicky Lin, Yu Xia (GSD 103)

In this game, players take on the roles of dog breeds competing for power and control in a medieval kingdom. Players need to strategically attack their opponents and diminish their health points to zero.

Information Undercover – Miachen Zhang, Miantong Zhang (IS 101)

GSD 101: Introduction to Game Studies & Design Boardgames
• Weed ‘Em Out: Sarah Wiseman, Katie Young, Jim Shen, Yule Gu
• The Gladiator King: Melanie Seay, Jacob Sobel, Ellie Popoca, Tara Djukic, Alessandro Accattato
• Archer’s Wondrous Adventures: Danielle Merrifield, Jonathan Washington, Mikayla Cusac, Owen Livingston, Sam Alsayed
• Catch Me If You Can: Ewan Ward, Mattew Liu, Johnson Wu, Mingyi Lin
• Escaping NeverIsland: Wally Wu, Vicky Lin, Xiyu Yao, Marjorie Mei, Yu Xia
Race to the Summit: Alexis Williams, Jorden Cooperwood, Frank Nieto

12:30

Card Genie

               Zongheng Huang, Gabi Kaminski, Tianchen Wang, Frank Yang (GSD 405)

Card Genie focuses on deck-building, along with dungeon exploration. The player gets to pick one of three different colorful characters, and gets to travel around with a genie buddy.

1:00

ASL Aspire

               Mona Jawad and Anisha Jog (Computer Science)

ASL Aspire is an online educational platform that teaches STEM vocabulary to deaf and hard of hearing people through minigames. Our platform consists of a teacher dashboard for educators to track the progress of their students and customize the experience that best fits their needs.

Agrivoltaics

Evan Shipley, David Hopping (Education)

As a part of Sustainably Colocating Agricultural and Photovoltaic Electricity Systems (SCAPES) grant, we’ve been developing an educational game to teach about the concept of Agrivoltaics — combining solar energy generation with agriculture to produce both crops and solar power on the same land. The game is a farming simulator that incorporates real data from the other branches of the SCAPES grant in order to teach about Agrivoltaics concepts.

River Fork

Kelly White (GSD 390)

 After receiving a mysterious link to a school faculty blog, your mission is to investigate the site and find out what happened to Samantha Brown. Each blog post will be password protected, and the passwords needed to unlock every post can be found in the reading.

As by your will, so below

Eline Morakotkarn (GSD 390)

The player exists as an entity which dictates the decisions of the main character, Aster Lee’s, life. The story revolves around Aster as he copes with the death of his best friend, Clay Van Ness, and you help or hurt him in the process of this.

I’ll be back in time

Sara Starecheski (GSD 390)

A middle schooler with time-travel powers is on a quest to find the perfect timeline.

AmongSus

               Sam Corley, Li Schwenk, Joseph Sun, Martin Chlopecki, and Ezra Schur  (GSD 103)

A social deduction board game based on the popular online game Among Us. Players travel around the spaceship completing tasks, racing to finish all three missions before the imposter can kill them!

Orange Dawn

Tom Jiang, David Zhu, Marta Kalfas, Yifeng Ni (GSD 405)

A top-down pixel zombie horde shooter. Players can kill zombies, pick up loot, and upgrade their character.

1:30pm – 3:00pm

GSD 101: Introduction to Game Studies & Design Boardgames
• Spizarnia: Iona Hopping, Nicolas Bless, Katie Thies, Kris Huang, Jack McCall
Dragon Clash: Hongming Kang, Evyn Cook, Duc Huynh, Steven Huang

2:00

Unveil

Philo Wang, Kelly Dai (Information Sciences)
Get ready for a challenging and educational experience in our virtual escaping room game, UNVEIL! In this game, you will need to be a detective to figure out the veracity of a text by collecting useful and credible clues through exploring the rooms. You’ll find yourself trapped in a virtual maze filled with clues with mixed qualities, including misleading information and fake news. Your goal is to navigate your way out of the locked room by identifying and avoiding false information while collecting credible and useful clues in your backpack that will help you escape, that is to verify the veracity of the text. In every room, you will learn one helpful skill to analyze the veracity of information, such as identifying fake news or misinformation. You will also need to decide which clues to keep since there is a volume limit in your backpack. Come and join this exciting and educational adventure!

High to the Orange (GSD 405)

Martin Chlopecki, Uliana Ovisiannikova, Joseph Sun, Harsh Waichal, David Whang

You seem to be alone in a foreign land shrouded by a veil of darkness. Beware the monster and figure out where you are and what to do next.

Operation: Build a Rocket (GSD 103)

Marta Kalfas

Description: An educational math game geared towards 4th through 7th graders, which can be adjusted for different educational levels. Players use a deck of numbered cards to mathematically reach a target number using addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.

DuelZone (GSD 103)

Yen Chun Huang

2:30

ChromosoME

               Taehyun Kim (Education/DELTA)

ChromosoME is an immersive virtual reality simulation that teaches middle and high school students about cell division. The main goal is to investigate how the gestures students make while interacting with the immersive virtual reality simulation can aid in their understanding of scientific concepts. Please note: this demo will follow a research presentation taking place at 2:15.

2:45

Dynamic Attraction/Repulsion System for Unreal Engine
Ezra Schur (GSD 405)

Presenting a powerful plugin for Unreal Engine that allows developers to create dynamic attraction systems with ease. The plugin introduces Attractor and Attracted components that may be modified at runtime, enabling a wide range of physics-based interactions in the game world. Providing customizable attraction settings, the Attractor includes: adjustable radius, acceleration, force, and inverse square law implementation. If the value is negative, it becomes repulsive. It also offers the option to target all actors simulating physics, or only actors with an Attracted component. Finally, the Attracted component is also designed to be compatible with characters, ensuring seamless integration into various game types.

3:00

Welcome Aboard

Sean Duffy, Eden Puchitkanont, Roger Sanstrom, Aidan Sawall  (GSD 405)

20 years ago, you narrowly escaped Earth moments before its destruction, headed on board a spaceship with some others to a faraway planet that you may be able to call your new home. After having sat around for this long, your fellow shipmates are getting depressed and the ship has fallen a bit into disrepair. You must take it upon yourself to lift their spirits, renew the ship, and grow a tiny but thriving community of people amongst the vast emptiness of space.

Tylos

Jacky Park, Nicholas Phillips, Ezra Schur, Iris Shang, Roger Wang (GSD 405)

Tylos is a minimalistic real-time strategy game for up to six players. Play as a god and control your followers. Convert dissenters and spread your influence across the land.

Tridice.

Rodrigo Morais & Philo Wang (IS 597)

Description: A 2-player strategy game where players move 4-sided dice on a triangular board.

Purge

               Noel Thomas, Jack Huang  (IS 597)

Purge is a terminal-like board game which requires a minimum of 2 players. The game is inspired by the ‘Pandemic’ board game. Players will work together to prevent cities being overrun by a disease. Each player will be given a specific class which will have different abilities to cure/contain the disease.

Sudoku+

Abhisha Tarimane & Luwei Li (IS 597)
This is a classic sudoku game in different sizes with a slight twist of variants. As the classic sudoku, each cell has exactly one value from 1 to 9. Each row and column have unique numbers from 1 to 9 as well each 3 X 3 cells if the size is 9X9. We are providing 3 sizes i.e., 4X4 , 9X9 and 16X16 As the difficulty level increases, variants like sandwich, thermos etc., are given as part of the rules. As part of sandwich sum of numbers between 1 and 9 is displayed. For thermos we display the patterns where the numbers are in ascending order. The initial number will always be 1-3.

Read the Stars

Brielle Feng (GSD 103)

2-4 player card game where you guess your opponents cards and build structures

Kingdom Siege

Nicole Zheng, Iris Shang, Howard Xia  (GSD 103)

Two player card game where each player must defend their kingdom and take out the opposing side with various card effects and luck-based attacks

SpaceWars: HyperLink to the Past

Havyarimana Charles (IS 101)

This is a space themed game that teaches historical figures and important concepts related to information collection, classification, and organization.. Players compete to see who can make it to the end the fastest.

GSD 101: Introduction to Game Studies & Design Boardgames
• The King of Atlantis: Cayla Risinger, Emily Barker, Gabby Kim, Jerry Guo
• Dyson Danger: Jackson Brown, Theo Brady, Elaine Yuan, Jack Larson, Jina Hong
• Raising Hell: Echo Huang, Joseph Sun, Nicolas Muszynski, Yue Chen
• Elemental Expansion: Mike Meissner, Dylan Fu, Aaron Taub, Nick Simons, Dre Abdullah
Castle Conquests: Yifan Yao, Yongpeng Fu, Xinyue Wang, Cheney Jiang, Ying Chen