EAE Faculty member Rogelio Cardona-Rivera will speak at the Salt Lake Public Libraries' Tech Talks series on Thursday, April 18th, 2019 at 7PM.

Cardona-Rivera's talk's, titled Toward a Science of Game Design, will cover the following:

Game development is costly, technically challenging, and poorly understood. Increased demand for games as a form of entertainment has motivated research into technology to help ameliorate the burden involved in development. This technology unfortunately has the potential to create more problems than it solves. In this talk, I will argue that this increased demand should motivate more research into human-centered game design, involving both artifact and person. This research requires computationally modeling our human intelligence, as part of an agenda that seeks to codify the precise interplay between a person's cognition (an inner environment), the game's controls (an interface), and a fictional universe (an outer environment); the interplay is concerned with attaining design goals by adapting the inner environment to the outer environment. I will present examples of this agenda as embodied through my own work and identify key challenges that I think need to be addressed in service of establishing what I call a "science of game design.”

Rogelio is an Assistant Professor in the Entertainment Arts and Engineering Program and in the School of Computing at the University of Utah, where he directs the Laboratory for Quantitative Experience Design. His research focuses on the design of games, systems where users direct an unfolding experience by taking on ludic/dramatic roles.

For more information on the event, see the Tech Talks web page.