Home About EIS →

Author Archives: Jim Whitehead

Jim Whitehead

Jim is Professor and Chair of Computer Science at UC Santa Cruz. He has research interests in procedural level generation for computer games, as well as automatic bug prediction. His favorite games are Radiant Silvergun and Civilization IV.

UC Santa Cruz seeks game developer and game designer staff

The Univ. of California, Santa Cruz is seeking applicants for two new full time staff positions, a Lead Game Programmer and a Lead Game Designer to work with myself, Michael Mateas, and Luca de Alfaro in support of the CHEKOFV project. CHEKOFV (Crowd-sourced Help with Emergent Knowledge for Optimized Formal Verification) is a research effort […]

Posted in Academics, Games | Tagged , , , | Comments closed

Now Hiring: Game Designer in Residence

The Center for Games and Playable Media at UC Santa Cruz is in search of a talented game designer with a portfolio of interesting games for a new position, the Game Designer in Residence. Like an Artist in Residence, the game designer will continue to work on personal projects as well as contribute to the […]

Posted in Academics | Tagged , , , , | Comments closed

Foundations of Digital Games arrives in Raleigh in 2012

The Foundations of Digital Games conference, which covers research on a broad range of computer game topics, will be held in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA from May 29-June 1, 2012. Magy Seif El-Nasr (Northeastern Univ.) is the conference General Chair, while Mia Consalvo (Concordia Univ.) and Steve Feiner (Columbia Univ.) are the Program Co-Chairs. The […]

Posted in Academics | Comments closed

Emergent properties: game testers are “stuffed”

Chris Lewis, a member of the Software Introspection Lab at UC Santa Cruz has his game testing work profiled in Science Notes 2011, in the article “Fixing Glitchy Games” by Donna Hesterman. Games increasingly have emergent properties brought about by the complex interactions between the player, AI-driven non-player characters, level geometry and items in the […]

Posted in Academics | Tagged , , , , , | Comments closed

Fantasy, Farms, and Freemium: What Game Data Mining Teaches Us About Retention, Conversion, and Virality

This past Saturday I had the pleasure of delivering a keynote presentation at the 2011 Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2011) conference (part of the pleasure being the location, Waikiki beach in Hawaii). My slides are available in pdf (1.3M) and ppt (13.5M). The talk explores how to use mined gameplay data to reduce the cost […]

Posted in Academics, Games | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments closed

IEEE Software on Engineering Fun

The journal IEEE Software will be running a special issue on the topic of “Engineering Fun” for its September/October 2011 issue. The call for papers is out now, with a deadline of February 1, 2011. Guest editors for the issue are Clark Verbrugge of McGill University and Paul Kruszewski of GRIP Entertainment. IEEE Software has […]

Posted in Academics | Tagged , , | Comments closed