My name is Joseph Krall and I am a Ph.D. student at the West Virginia University. I'm studying Computer Science with a research interest in gaming, psychology of entertainment, software engineering, data mining, and search based software engineering. I am developing and expanding upon a thesis that I call "The Theory of Fun", in which I outline key components to fun and address problems of creating fun video games, and provide ways to mitigate risk involved in development.
I began my Ph.D. studies in Fall 2010. My earliest research project was an attempt to break "Fun" into four dimensions - Story, Originality, Gameplay, and Replayability. Since then, I have expanded on what it means for a person to have "Fun" by studying cognitive psychology and have outlined the core of my thesis: "Fun" is a desirable state of mind and entertainment is the medium which helps a player reach "fun". When a person is in this desirable state of mind, they are immersed into a different world in which the rules of nature and believability are different. So we can newly address the problem of providing fun as two things: 1) Playability - helping a player reach the fun state of mind, and 2) Replayability - keeping a player at the fun state of mind.
To study games however, it is difficult to collect data. We turn to Search Based Software Engineering to aid with this problem. I was pointed to an existing project known as POM - which is a software project emulator. The goal was that POM could be used to simulate a real world software project in mere seconds instead of months and years. Such a simulation could be used to study the effects of real world parameters such as culture (how much a project changes), team sizes and more. But as simulations go, we'd like to prove any claims in the real world as well. Although we learn using POM, it requires thousands of simulations to find optimal solutions. Our latest research focuses on vastly reducing the number of simulations needed, from thousands to hundreds. This in effect helps our study on games in the same way.
Quick "About me" resume of sorts: http://ai-at-wvu.blogspot.com/2012/10/who-is-joe.html
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