Annika Wærn

I am interested in all aspects of research concerned with gaming. However my main interests lie with work on techniques and interfaces for games that are built on emotions, improvisation, drama etc. I also work for Gamefederation, a company that builds platforms for gaming services for both broadband and mobile games. I lead and organise the work on Gametheme at SICS.

Karl-Petter Åkesson

I have lots of different interests. With the help of in-built systems, fuse together the physical world with an idealised game world. Look at tools to support a game leader perform in a game, not only in traditional games but also in new types of games. To look at techniques as a tool for creating magic! or the opposite to look at magic as a conceptual structure to explain something incomprehensible and complex. An early idea is described here

Jonas Söderberg

Jarmo Laaksolahti

Gaming is interesting because it is not "good for something" in the meaning that, for example, a word processor is. Research often ignores that people are not just workers, and that they also want to relax and have fun. If we forget about Lutheran thoughts that in order to produce useful things, then we can begin to think about new important questions, e.g. what is fun and how do you measure it? At the same time can also become more creative in our own work! Personally I am a confirmed game player who, in the past few years, has mostly played role-playing and adventure games, and most recently Never Winter Nights (but I am interested in nearly everything relating to gaming!). I am also interested in interactive narrative, especially narratives that challenge players on an emotional and social level. I want to build technologies for storytelling where social and emotional interaction are necessary to make sense of what is going on. As well as having quick fingers, I also want the game player to be able to use everyday knowledge she/he has about being human within the game environment. Concrete question that interest me include, how can you combine interactivity with narratives (a classic), which role do emotions and social behaviour have in stories and games and how they are implemented. For the time being I am involve in an EU project called Magicster where I amongst other things work with the above questions.

Adrian Bullock

After some initial experience playing Space Invaders on a Sharp MZ-80K in the early 1980s, it was playing nethack while an undergraduate and early in my postgraduate career that piqued my interest in gaming. Despite it's impoverished interface I've yet to see a game that matches nethack for depth and playability. I have previously worked a lot with collaborative virtual environments and telepresence systems, and the collaborative challenges of on-line gaming are of interest to me.

Kristina Höök

I am not really interested at all with traditional computer games. At all. What I am interested in is narrative - especially interactive narrative. I am also interested in emotions and interaction, which have an obvious application within the gaming area. I think new dolls that you use to interact with and can use to express emotions are especially fun - e.g. for a game but maybe even for interactive drama? I have evaluated/done user studies on many systems that concern games: Agneta & Frida, SenToy and FantasyA (see the video) and Influencing Machine. Some papers can be found at the Safira web site. "Game Play" is an interesting notion that I really want to understand better!

Magnus Boman

I like and have played a whole host of multi-player games. I began with Mud, Valley and Maze Wars in the 80s. Right now I like Tibia. My research interest in agents has grown from amongst other things chatterbots and robot football players. I was team captain for the Swedish national side (both simluated and four-legged leagues) for a couple of years at the end of the 90s. I dont like Quake, but have supervised fascinating Masters project work about it, including AI-bots. The best computer game of all is the 80s game Marble Madness (that you can download for free as a ROM for the MAME32 emulator for a PC) and that is a completely agent free one player game!

Pär Hansson

I have worked at SICS within the ICE lab with many diffeent types of interaction, for example KidStory. I have previously worked in some pilot projects (ITsP and EERIE - see the research section) that touched upon technical support in ... situations where it has been interesting to see how different means - mobile technologies, external moveable/embedded technologies - strengthen the participant's experience of a fictional game world.

Emmanuel Frécon

My main interest is in the techniques and infratsructures behind on-line games. I want to see many people playing together at the same time. I have been previously involved in the PING project (see the research section).

Fredrik Espinoza

I have played quite a lot of Quake in my time. I was ranked in the top 1000 of 30000 active players worldwide in the heyday of Quake3 a few years ago. A little later Markus Bylund and I built a contect simulator based on the Quake game engine. It simulated a position and connected it with a context toolkit from Georgia Tech and reported simulated position information to the GeoNotes system. Quakesim is described in CACM January 2002 Volume 45 Issue 1. I am interested in games that build on social mechanisms (for example after each deathmatch round in Quake, when the results are given the players can chat with each other. This is the most popular moment of the game. Why? and why are team games (where all players have different roles and cooperate towards a shared goal) so popular?)

Marie Sjölinder

Jari Koister

Peter Lönnqvist

Ali Ghodsi

Lars Albertsson

Mads Dam

In FDT we work with "dry" things such as program specification - verfifcation - and security matters mostly at a programming level. For the moment we are participating in an EU project VERIFICARD, where we are looking at how allow "postissuance" loading of Java (card) applets in a secure way. I believe that there are areas within the gaming industry where things like this could be of interest. I'd like to suggest a mobile game with profit/winnings aspects that could be delivered as a game client, unsecure, maybe in j2me or something like that, together with a purse application that could be downloaded from a SIM card. Is this possible? Can we find an architecture that allows this with commercial components in all parts? (operators, service-providers, gamers)? Another question - less relevant for us but very important for the gaming inductry I believe - concerns client-side security for the public at large. How will we ensure that only authorised client code is executed? and not some fake that might ignore fog-of-war and the like. The obvious solution is to use encryption, but how can we do this effectively? - especially given that the authorisation problem (who can see what) becomes very fine grained. It should be very interesting to take a closer look at this. Maybe it should be possible for players with low real-time requirements, for example turn-based strategy games. But for many games it is not yet possible to implement and use such a model, so what should be do instead?

Ylva Fernaeus