August 10, 2017

The International Conference of the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG) is a major international event in cooperation with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Software Intelligence ( SIGAI), ACM's Special Interest Group for Computer-Human Interaction ( SIGCHI), and ACM's Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, dedicated to the advancement of the continuing study of digital from a wide variety of disciplines. This year’s conference focuses on Celebrating the Player, challenging and expanding research that improves theories and methodologies around the interaction between players and games; how games are designed with the player in mind; how games are perceived by players; how novel technologies enhance the player experience; and how games affect players on a cognitive, behavioral and affective level.

Dr. Jichen Zhu, Program Director for Graduate Digital Media, is the Program Chair of the conference and is responsible for assembling a program committee, developing programming, allocating papers to reviewers, overseeing the double-blind peer review process, and making informed decisions about paper acceptance. "It was a great opportunity to further expose our students to world-class game research, and to draw people’s attention to the ground-breaking research we are doing at Drexel, " commented Dr. Zhu.

Westphal will be everywhere at the FDG, with five papers and posters accepted, all from the Games, Artificial Intelligence, and Media Systems Center (GAIMS). Out of the five papers, four have Drexel graduate students listed as first author: Timothy Day (Digital Media Ph.D. student), Bria Mears (Digital Media M.S. student), Josep Valls-Vargas (Ph.D. Candidate in Computer Science who is co-adivised by Dr. Zhu and Dr. Santiago Ontañón from Drexel's CCI), and Sam Snodgrass (Ph.D. Candidate in Computer Science).

In addition to the papers and posters, two student games have been selected by jury to participate in the FDG game competition. Steven Denisevicz (Digital Media M.S. student), Kristin Dechiaro (Digital Media M.S. student) and Giselle Martinez (GDAP student) will put forward their DIGM 350 course project, Homunculus Love: Playing with People’s Monsters,  while Bria Mears has her M.S. thesis project, Motherhood: Designing Silent Player Characters for Storytelling selected in addition to her poster presentation. 

Dr. Karina Karo, Westphal's first Post-doctoral Fellow at GAIMS, was part of the program committee to review submissions. Dr. Zhu worked with General Chairs Dr. Alessandro Canossa (Ubisoft) and Dr. Casper Harteveld (Northeastern University), and Program Chair Miguel Sicart (IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark). 

To learn more about our Digital Media program, click here.