Development and use of (Serious) Games in Research
Stephen Thompson
Centre for Advanced Research Computing
Today’s Talk
- (Re) Introducing Stephen Thompson
- Work to date - serious games to study key hole surgery.
- Opportunities to participate:
- A literature review on game development in research.
- Upcoming project - Exergaming: a serious game for dizziness disorder rehabilitation #1137.
Introducing Stephen
Senior Research Software Engineer Since October 2023
Background in augmented reality for keyhole surgery.
informus, education, EMAP, sense-base.
Human Interest 0 - Background
Human Interest 1 - My Summer 👎
- This summer: 👨👨👧👦 🏥🦴🧑🔧🚗 = less camping less water.
Human Interest 2 - My Summer 👍
Seals
![Photo of me in a sea kayak holding my right foot with my right hand.]()
![Photo of some Australian Fur Seals holding their back flipper with their front flipper.]()
Human Interest 2.1 - My Summer 👍
Games for Teaching and Research
- Research: how people learn to collaborate with intelligent machines.
- Simple tools: 🔪🔨 fairly easy to predict how they will be used.
- Intelligent tools 🤖 💻 ❓
- We can learn to collaborate with games.
SciKit-Surgery F.R.E.D.
![]( "alt-fig=\"Image of 2009 conference paper by Fitzpatrick titled Fiducial registration error and target registration error are uncorrelated. TLDR - The results show that no estimate of accuracy for a given patient that is based on goodness of fiducial fit for that patients gives any information whatever about true registration accuracy for that patient, and surgeons should stop using such measures as indicators of registration quality for patients on whom they are about to operate,\"")
- 2019 - SciKit-Surgery F.R.E.D.
- Developing an effective method to teach the statistics of point (fiducual) based registration (during covid lockdown).
- Uses a game for formative assessment.
SciKit-Surgery F.R.E.D. Results
![Column plot showing the game scores on from a cohort of 20 students. Students scored most highly when give the actual target registration error.]()
Publication - JMIR Serious Games
Phaser Game Engine:
![]( "alt-fig=\"Video of the Phaser game engine logo\"")
2024 Vessel Game Results 0
![Scatter plot showing a reduction in task performance time as the field of view increases.]()
Distraction Results
- Generally similar to past games but inconclusive.
- Difficult to recruit surgeons.
- Opensource analysis tools - streamlit
Distraction Results
![Screenshot of qualitative analsis results hosted on streamlit.]()
Summary of work to date
- Serious games can be used to create publishable data for surgical applications.
- Serious games make a fun and achievable MSc project.
- Recruiting sufficient surgeons is the main challenge.
Summary in ARC Blog.
Game Engines in Research
- Longer term: Build ARC knowledge base so we can deliver games for research effectively.
- Short term: What game engines feature in research outputs (publications)?
- Task: perform a systematic literature review of game engines use.
Get involved.
- Read some papers, submit reviews.
- Improve website design.
- Implement searches of other databases.
- Aiming for a publication sometime in 2026.
Upcoming gaming projects.
- October 2025 - Exergaming: a serious game for dizziness disorder rehabilitation #1137.
- A series of minigames using a Tobii eye tracker to aid peadiatric treatment.
- Hardware interface / game design. 50% FTE for 12 months.
With thanks to:
Aayushi Oza ![Aayushi Oza]()
Connor Creasy ![Connor Creasy]()
Phoebe Whitley ![Phoebe Whitley]()
Matthew Clarkson ![Matthew Clarkson]()
