I Get By With a Little Help From AI is a research project that was awarded with a 3-year Starting Research Grant by FORTE in 2023. The project’s PI is Assoc. Senior Lecturer Alberto Alvarez, and it runs in collaboration with Assoc. Prof. Jose Font (MAU), Assoc. Prof. Julian Togelius (NYU – USA), and Postdoctoral fellow Raquel Robinson (UCSC – USA, ITU – Denmark). The project’s goal is to explore how people collaborate when developing games by actively involving the game industry with the goal to develop artificial intelligence supported tools to support collaboration.
Background
Recently, there has been rapid growth of remote work and the importance of AI-supported tools and systems in facilitating effective communication and organization in virtual workspaces. This project explores how collaboration takes place and outlines the development of AI-supported tools to facilitate collaborative group work environments for designers and developers in the games industry with a focus on the design elements and the creative process. The project will follow a human-centered design defining how AI tools can best support a variety of informal and formal groups within games domains such as game dev companies, game students, and game jam participants.
Focus and Goal
The goal is to address societal challenges related to working life, specifically, the inclusion of AI in the workplace, and its use to address limitations in the work environment and current design and collaborative pipelines. We plan to use AI as a tool, support, and mediator to help group collaboration; adapting to the individuals and groups. This project is divided into four phases:
- Phase 1: A comprehensive review to analyse the field and understand how collaboration works in the different target groups
- Phase 2: Co-design workshops
- Phase 3: prototype development and refinement, and test in game design work environments
- Phase 4: co-design workshops to discuss the role of AI as mediator and facilitator in group collaboration
The project takes a participatory approach that makes it possible co-designed tools, solutions, and prototypes be more inclusive and aligned with the target groups and end-user needs.
Collaboration
This project is open for collaboration and we are currently searching for more partners to collaborate and work together
- If you are a game development company, an indie solo developer, or a hobbyist that likes to participate in game jams and you find this project interesting
- or if you want to do research/academic collaboration regarding this project, participate as a guest researcher at the Games Lab, or as part of your Undergrad/master thesis
- or if you are just interested in hearing more about this project
Do not hesitate to put yourself in contact with Alberto Alvarez (alberto.alvarez@mau.se )
Activities
VIP Project
This project is currently advertized as one of the possible proejcts to work on for the course Vertically Integrated Project (VIP) course at Malmö University. If you are a student of Malmö University and you are interested in participating, do the following:
- Write an email to alberto.alvarez@mau.se with an expression of interest where you describe your experience working in groups and with game dev or other similar creative type of work (e.g., illustration, stories, interaction design, design work, etc.).