Theme: Innovation and Gamification

The event will feature two speeches by Ian Livingstone CBE and Dr Sam Devlin. They will share their thinking around innovation and the game industry’s main challenges.

Ian will give an entertaining and visual account of his struggles as an entrepreneur in the 1970s when he and Steve Jackson set up Games Workshop, launched Dungeons & Dragons in Europe, and wrote the multi-million selling Fighting Fantasy gamebooks series. From analogue to digital, he will give a brief history of computer games, past, present and future, including the story of Lara Croft:Tomb Raider. He will conclude with how video games and game-based learning promote life skills, and how games contextualise computing and digital-making skills in schools.

Dr Sam Devlin will be speaking about Collective Game Intelligence. It is knowledge gained through the analysis of data generated by players worldwide whilst playing games. Given the increasingly ubiquitous presence of an internet connection, the analysis of vast quantities of gameplay data is now possible. In this talk I will discuss the innovative ways data from digital games has been used to solve open scientific problems, to engage citizen scientists in data labelling and to extract scientific insights from people playing games originally developed purely for entertainment purposes.

Durham Business School
Millhill Lane
Durham, Durham, County, DH1 3LB
United Kingdom

Ian Livingstone

Ian Livingstone is one of the founding fathers of the UK games industry. He co-founded iconic games company Games Workshop in 1975, launching Dungeons & Dragons in Europe and the Games Workshop retail chain. He co-authored The Warlock of Firetop Mountain with Steve Jackson in 1982. He designed Eureka!, the first computer game published by Domark in 1984. He joined the board in 1992 as a major investor, overseeing a merger that created Eidos plc in 1995 where he served as Executive Chairman until 2002. He co-authored the influential Livingstone-Hope Next Gen review published by NESTA in 2011, recommending changes in ICT education policy. Following publication, he chaired the Next Gen Skills campaign, working with government to introduce the new Computing curriculum in schools in 2014. In the Wired 100 list for 2012, he was ranked the 16th most influential person in the UK’s digital economy. He was listed in the 2015 Debrett’s 500 as one of the most influential people in UK.

Sam Devlin

Dr Sam Devlin received an MEng degree in Computer Systems and Software Engineering from the University of York, UK, in 2009. In 2013, he completed his PhD on multi-agent reinforcement learning at the University of York and visited Oregon State University funded by a Santander International Connections Award. His research interests are focussed on machine learning, multi-agent systems, artificial intelligence and game theory. He is currently a Research Associate in the York Centre for Complex Systems Analysis (YCCSA), and is working on data mining/analytics.