NYU Game Center professor Mitu Khandaker-Kokoris's talk, “The Loop: Playing with Virtual Intelligence and Artificial Realities,” will examine what will happen as games increasingly collide with VR and AR
Games have emerged from the intersection of our technological capabilities and our sense of playfulness. This has been true since the days of the earliest known dice games, to those technologies which dominate recent conversations both inside and outside of games: VR and AI.
In this experimental talk, NYU Tisch arts professor of game design Mitu Khandaker-Kokoris faces these topics head-on: what's next for game artificial intelligence (AI) – especially when it meets virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR)? Through this exploration, she discusses the long-standing tensions between our human sense of exploration and the mathematical machinations of building simulations. What do we as game designers have in common with AI researchers and cognitive scientists (and don't we), and most importantly: just when will our games become self-aware and destroy us all?
“The Loop: Playing with Virtual Intelligence and Artificial Realities” is free and open to the public and will be held Thursday, February 2 at 7 p.m. at the NYU Game Center at 2 Metrotech Center in Brooklyn. Register at the Game Center's website.
Mitu Khandaker-Kokoris is a game designer and programmer, founder of indie microstudio The Tiniest Shark. She is also an Assistant Arts Professor at the NYU Game Center. In 2013, she released Redshirt, a critically acclaimed satirical simulation game that uses science fiction tropes to explore social dynamics. In addition to social simulation, her research interests include the aesthetics of interactivity and its relationship to critical play, in which she has a Ph.D. from the University of Portsmouth, UK. She is now also CCO of Spirit AI, making tools to help developers use tech to make games more accessible and intriguing in various ways: from rich autonomous characters to procedural narratives to even mitigating online harassment.
The Game Center is the Department of Game Design at the Tisch School of the Arts. Its mission is to graduate the next generation of game designers, developers, entrepreneurs, and critics, and to advance the field of games by creating a context for advanced scholarship and groundbreaking work. The Game Center’s students, both undergraduates and graduates, are drawn from diverse disciplines including computer programming, visual art, sound and audio, animation, writing, and joined together by the central discipline of game design. They are located at MAGNET - NYU's interdisciplinary media and technology center in downtown Brooklyn. For more information, visit gamecenter.nyu.edu.