Keynote speakers

Sebastian Deterding

Groundhog Day: Seeking Progress in Gaming for Health

These days, reading through the abstracts of any given conference proceedings or journal on serious games or gamification fills me with a profound sense of déjà vu: all (or most of it) is good and solid work, and yet – pilot after pilot, trial after trial, framework and review after framework and review, what have we really learned? In this keynote, I will draw on my experience as designer, researcher, and editor to speculate on some of the barriers to cumulative scientific progress in gaming for health, and chart some possible solutions.

Bio: Professor Sebastian Deterding is a translational designer/researcher working on wellbeing-driven experience design: creating motivating experiences that support human flourishing, often with games and play. He is broadly interested in how code shapes conduct: how software and games pervade everyday life, and what ramifications this holds for individuals, communities, ethics, and design. He holds a Chair at the Dyson School of Design Engineering at Imperial College London, and is founder and principal of the design agency coding conduct, working for clients including the BBC, BMW, Deutsche Telekom, Greenpeace, KLM, Novartis, Otto Group, RoX Health, and numerous startups. He is founding Editor-in-Chief of the journal ACM Games: Research & Practice. He is founder and organizer of the Gamification Research Network, and co-editor of The Gameful World (MIT Press, 2015), a book about the ludification of culture, and Role-Playing Game Studies (Routledge, 2018, 2nd edition 2024), a handbook on role-playing games co-created by more than 50 authors.He holds an M.A. in comparative literature, communication research and psychology from Münster University, and a Dr. phil. in media studies from Hamburg University, supported by a grant of the Hamburg Federal Initiative of Research Excellence. His PhD thesis looked into the unwritten norms of gaming. He remains incredulous that a youth of board gaming and dungeon keeping should have amounted to something in the end.

David Brown

MetaHumans, Virtual Reality and Privacy Preserving Algorithms to Support Children and Young People with Learning Disabilities and Autism.

Young adults with Down’s syndrome have a greatly increased risk developing a type of dementia that’s either the same as or very similar to Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). The retrosplenial cortex plays a significant role in spatial learning and memory and is functionally disrupted in the early stages of AD. Screening tools applicable to this group are scarce and rarely applied. Our research involves combining electroencephalogram data and VR based spatial navigation performance metrics to investigate whether we can create more robust and digital screening tools using a combination of neuroimaging and traditional assessment measures. Autism is characterised by ‘deficits’ in social communication and social inter-action, and repetitive behaviours. ‘Impaired’ facial emotion expression recognition (FEER) is a feature of Autism and Alexithymia. The use of mimicry tasks to train FEER and assess empathy in individuals with Autism and Alexithymia has been explored, including asking participants to mimic a facial emotion and identify the emotion. This is hypothesised to increase brain activity in the insula thereby boosting the effectiveness of training. We are currently developing a FEER training application that leverages the MetaHuman Framework. Many Autistic people also experience ‘Meltdown’ events - an intense response to an overwhelming situation, when someone is completely overwhelmed by their current situation and temporarily loses control of their behaviour. It is important to be able to anticipate such events, identify their causes and minimise frequency of occurrence. We are developing a privacy-preserving approach for ‘Meltdown’ detection in children with Autism using machine learning models which combine facial emotional expressions, involuntary gestures and physiological data such as heart rate variability, all extracted from a video signal, to infer the very early stages of Meltdown – the “rumble stage”, so that teaching staff, parents and carers can introduce evidence-based well-being interventions in a timely manner. (296).

Bio: David is a highly experienced project manager (€5M as Principal Investigator), with over 150 high quality journal and conference publications. He is Chair of the International Conference on Disability, Virtual Reality and Associated Technology. He acted as PI on the EU H2020 MaTHiSiS and No One Left Behind projects; and PI on the Erasmus DiversAsia and AI-TOP projects; and is currently PI on the EU Horizon Europe PHASE IV AI project. He also acted as Co-Investigator on the EPSRC The Internet of Soft Things Project. His research focusses on the development and evaluation of enabling technologies for the cognitive and physical rehabilitation of users within the real world, and promotion of their mental wellbeing using highly immersive and explainable AI technologies. He is also Associate Editor for Frontiers: Virtual Reality in Medicine

Janet Read

Bringing Fun and Play into Serious Game Design

The design aims for a serious game typically include a need to educate or inform but without the right amount of fun, such games can fall short on player experience. Building on over twenty years of studying fun with children, and on exploring how children experience technology both for learning and play, this talk will encourage a new way of thinking about serious game design that incorporates serious fun and serious play as well as the seemingly serendipitous design of ludic experiences. The talk will be illustrated with examples from children’s own designs of serious games.

Bio: Janet Read is a full professor of Child Computer Interaction with over 350 published papers. She is well known for her work on evaluating fun with children where the Fun Toolkit is a product that is used in academia and industry; other influential work is her work on co-design with children where she has championed an inclusive approach. Her recent work on the ethics of working with children in HCI research has resulted in a chapter on that topic in a leading HCI text book and a newly published practical framework for ethics. Through EU projects she has participated in several serious games design activities and has also been involved in projects looking at accessibility – with a focus on children. UKRI funded work has included a study of how to design cool technology for teens and how to design across cultures and languages.

Sylvester Arnab

Purposeful Play: Community-Engaged by Design

This talk explores how purposeful play and community-engaged design can be harnessed to co-create impactful solutions for human development. Grounded in the award-winning GameChangers initiative and insights from Sylvester’s book, Game Science in Hybrid Learning Spaces, the presentation draws on work with underserved communities across Southeast Asia and Europe, from educators and students to disabled artisans and community leaders. Through projects like CreativeCulture, ACES, DALI, I-HEDU, and FAiR, we’ll examine how empathy, agency, creativity, and frugality shape the co-design of playful resources, learning spaces, and professional practices. While rooted in education and socio-economic impact, these approaches extend to wider human-centric domains including health, wellbeing, and digital inclusion. The talk will introduce a mechanics- and values-mapping framework that enables communities, not just designers, to co-create playful, culturally relevant interventions. This talk invites reflection on how play, when guided by values and mutual engagement, can become a powerful driver of inclusive innovation and sustainable change.

Bio: Sylvester Arnab received the B.Sc. degree in computer science from the University of Manchester, UK in 1998, M.Sc. degree in distributed multimedia systems from University of Leeds, UK in 2001, and a PhD in engineering from University of Warwick, UK in 2009. He is currently a Professor in Game Science (Applied Games) at Coventry University, where he is leading the Ludic Design research group within the Centre for Post digital Cultures. Sylvester cofounded the multi-award winning GameChangers initiative in 2015 that focuses on empathic play and game design that has been adapted in various countries, including Malaysia, Indonesia, and Vietnam. He also published a book on Game Science in Hybrid Learning Spaces in 2020 based on his 10-year research in serious games and game-based learning.

Kristina Niedderer

‘Board games fixing the world’: Co-designing for wellbeing through mindful story telling with and for people with dementia

In her keynote, Professor Niedderer will explore the role and co-design of games for people with dementia, using the example of the All about Us mindful life-story-telling game developed as part of the MinD project, and published in 2022. The MinD project utilised the concept of mindful design to investigate innovative design solutions to enable wellbeing and confidence building of people living with dementia. One of these solutions took on the form of a board game designed to help people consider their aspirations after the dementia diagnosis to promote wellbeing. Professor Niedderer will introduce the All about Us game and speak about its design, including the conceptual considerations and co-design input underpinning the game design. She will reflect on the need for both, evidence-based design development and evidence-based evaluation of design-based care interventions, and what this means in the interdisciplinary space between health care and design. She will further elaborate on the role of game play in the care context in relation to traditional games and therapeutic approaches, and how their integration can help support wellbeing through emotional and social engagement and democratisation of the care situation. The game is available through company Relish and has been included in the BBC World Service Series ‘People fixing the World’.

Bio: Professor Kristina Niedderer (PhD, MA RCA) is Professor of Design at Manchester Metropolitan University. She is Research Environment Lead for Manchester School of Art and leads DoWell–the Design for Health and Wellbeing Research Group. She is an experienced researcher and supervisor who is recognised internationally for her work on using design to engender mindful interaction and behaviour change within health and sustainability. She has published two edited books on Design for Behaviour Change and Design for Dementia, Health and Wellbeing, 27 journal articles and chapters, 26 peer reviewed conference papers, 42 edited volumes and a number of design guides, toolkits and commercial designs. She has been project lead for several national and European research projects, including the Horizon 2020 MSCA RISE grant MinD 'Designing for people with dementia: designing for mindful self-empowerment and social engagement' (2016-2020, GA 691001), a Horizon 2020 MSCA individual fellowship (2020-2022, GA 895620) and an ESRC catalyst Grant (2023-24). The MinD project utilised the concept of mindful design to investigates innovative design solutions to enable self-empowerment and confidence building of people living with dementia. Kristina will speak about the research and design development with and for people with dementia, resulting products and insights, including the ‘All about Us’ mindful life-story-telling board game to help people after the dementia diagnosis to consider their aspirations.

Nicolas A. Morgenstern

ENHANCE VR: A NEUROSCIENCE-DRIVEN APP FOR COGNITIVE TRAINING AND MONITORING IN VIRTUAL REALITY

Cognitive health is a critical component of overall well-being, influencing our ability to learn, work, and engage with the world around us. Cognitive decline can occur due to various factors, including aging, neurological disorders, and mental health conditions. As the global population ages and the prevalence of cognitive disorders increases, there is a growing need for effective tools to assess and enhance cognitive function.
Medical conditions affecting cognition impact millions of lives around the world, highlighting the urgent need for effective interventions. While cognitive training has shown promise in mitigating cognitive deficits, traditional pen-and-paper and screen-based 2D tools have major limitations, particularly in their transferability to real-world activities. A key shortcoming is their neglect of the role of the user’s body during the cognitive processes.
Virtual reality (VR) has emerged as an innovative digital solution, providing immersive and embodied experiences in ecologically valid, safe, and controlled environments. At Virtuleap, we combine game design with neuroscience to develop VR-based tools for cognitive training and monitoring. Our flagship product, Enhance VR, offers a library of 15 gamified exercises targeting 7 abilities: memory, attention, information processing, problem-solving, spatial orientation, motor control, and cognitive flexibility. Beyond engagement, Enhance VR enables the collection of highly enriched gameplay data, offering unprecedented insights into cognitive performance. With over 72,000 registered users, our growing dataset and dedicated analysis pipeline allows us to generate personalized cognitive reports, monitor longitudinal user performance, and explore potential digital biomarkers for improved detection of cognitive conditions.
In this presentation, I will describe how Virtuleap leverages science-based game design to translate validated neuropsychological principles into fun and engaging VR activities, share Enhance VR applications in experimental and clinical settings, and showcase how our data-driven approach could shape the future of cognitive health.

Bio: Nicolas A. Morgenstern is the Lead Neuroscientist at Virtuleap, a company at the intersection of neuroscience and virtual reality, where he oversees R&D. Nicolas is a medical doctor with a Ph.D. in Neuroscience and over 20 years of experience in neuroscience research. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, investigating the role of aging and neurodegeneration in neuronal plasticity. After that, he led cutting-edge brain connectivity research at the Champalimaud Foundation in Lisbon, Portugal, pioneering innovative methods merging optogenetics and electrophysiology. His work has contributed to high-impact publications in neuroscience. At Virtuleap, Nicolas bridges science and technology, collaborating closely with the game design team to develop neuroscience-backed VR activities for cognitive training and monitoring. He is also responsible for data analysis, visualization, and interpretation, as well as providing scientific documentation and dissemination. His current research interests focus on neurotechnology, particularly the use of virtual reality and other emerging technologies for clinical applications in cognitive health.