Keynote Speakers
Caio José Ribeiro Chagas
Creative Director at Ilex Games & Researcher at UNESP
Maja Pantić
Chief AI Research Officer of Natwest Group
Tommy Thompson
Founder and director of AI and Games
Alena Denisova
Senior Lecturer at the University of York, UK
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Caio José Ribeiro Chagas is a Brazilian game designer, creative director, and researcher. Since 2018, he has been a partner at Ilex Games, where he directed Adventure of Samsara (published by Atari, 2025), P.O.N. (funded by EUNIC Global, 2023), and O.U.T.T. (publicly funded in Brazil, 2026). He holds a Master’s in Media and Technology from UNESP, where he researches game development as academic practice. Caio also mentors for Spcine and contributed to the methodology for its Playtest Lab. His work explores the overlap of indie game creation, symbolic design, and reflective research. |
Making Games, Making Knowledge: Creative Practice as Method in Indie Development
How can developing a game become more than just production—becoming instead a method for investigation, reflection, and innovation? This talk presents Lux Ex, an independently developed shmup that functions both as a commercial game and a research artifact. Designed during my master’s research on game development as a creative academic practice, Lux Ex integrates symbolic mechanics, narrative metaphors, and esoteric references to explore themes of self-knowledge and transformation. It is, at once, a game and a method—a site where creative intuition, technical execution, and critical reflection converge. Caio will share how his role as developer-researcher shaped the project: from documentation strategies like dev diaries and design logs, to how symbolic systems were applied to gameplay as more than aesthetics—as a cognitive framework. He’ll also reflect on how this process informed his practice as a creative director in the industry, influencing real-world projects published under major and institutional banners. By bridging indie sensibilities, symbolic design, and methodological rigor, this talk offers insight into how game development—when documented and reflected upon—can contribute to both commercial innovation and research discourse. It’s an invitation to see development not only as craft, but as inquiry.
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Professor Maja Pantić is the Chief AI Research Officer of Natwest Group, a UK-focused banking organisation which is at the forefront of integrating advanced AI into banking operations. Previously, she was a Generative AI Senior Research Director at Meta AI and a Research Director and Co-founder of the Samsung AI Centre at Cambridge. Professor Pantić has co-authored more than 500 papers with more than 57,000 citations and she has an h-index of 108 to date. Professor Pantić has received various awards for her work on automatic analysis of human behavior, including the 2020 IAPR Maria Petrou Award and the 2011 BritishComputer Society Roger Needham Award. She has served as an Associate Editor in top AI journals, including the International Journal of Computer Vision and IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. She is a Fellow of the UK Royal Academy of Engineering, an IEEE Fellow, and an IAPR Fellow. |
Conversational AI Agents and Deep Fakes
How far are we from talking to AI in truly natural language? How do current AI systems render photorealistic avatars? And how is generative AI being used to deceive humans, particularly in the creation of deep fakes? The talk will touch upon modelling and implementation of the AI embodiment in a photorealistic manner and it will end in discussion of possible applications and misuses of this technology, including Deep Fakes.
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Dr. Tommy Thompson is the founder and director of ‘AI and Games’; consulting with games studios on how to utilise AI in their projects: providing development support, research, and professional training. A former AI researcher and lecturer in game development, Tommy has become a trusted voice in the game AI community acting as a public speaker and industry advocate. His company arose courtesy of his successful YouTube series ‘AI and Games’ that began in 2014, with a weekly newsletter read by thousands of industry professionals. Since 2020 he has sat on the advisory board of the Game AI Summit for the Game Developers Conference (GDC). Meanwhile in 2024, Tommy became the co-founder and managing director of Game AI Events CIC – a non-profit organisation that organises networking events for game AI professionalsin Europe – with their flagship event, the AI and Games Conference, based in London. |
Days of Future Past: Celebrating 20 Years of IEEE CoG
In 2025 the intersection between artificial intelligence and video games has never been stronger. Frontier AI research frequently uses games as a platform, meanwhile games companies face the new challenges presented to them in an age of generative models, plus the still untapped potential of conventional machine learning. But in 2005, it was a very different story: of ‘simulations’ that hid their ludic origins, where machine learning was the sole domain of academics, and these explorations seldom aligned with corporate realities. To celebrate 20 years since the inaugaural IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games, we look back on how research in AI for games has evolved, how the industry evolved alongside it, and the challenges that face both sides of the coin in an era of AI proliferation.
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Dr. Alena Denisova is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Computer Science at the University of York, UK. Her research explores how players engage with video games, with a particular focus on designing for and evaluating experienced challenge in games. She is especially interested in how subjective player experiences can be better understood through novel research methods and tools. More recently, she has been collaborating with game companies, especially indie developers, to investigate their real-world practices and the unique challenges they face in evaluating game experiences effectively. |
Not all struggles leave data: Evaluating perceived challenge in video games
Challenge is a key part of what makes games compelling – whether it’s mechanical difficulty, emotional tension, or morally complex decisions. But evaluating these experiences remains difficult, especially when they are so personal and vary widely between players. This talk looks at ongoing research into how we understand and assess challenge in games: how it can be tailored to different player preferences, how some players find meaning or coping through it, and how emotional or morally ambiguous challenges affect experience. As games become more personalised and systems increasingly generate content dynamically, established evaluation methods often fall short. Drawing on recent work, including collaborations with indie developers, we will reflect on current practices, explore emerging approaches, and discuss what still needs to be addressed. While there is no universal solution for evaluating meaningful challenge, this talk outlines where we are, and where we might go next.