The Glasgow School of Art

Dr. Sandy Louchart, s.louchart@gsa.ac.uk, is Head of Undergraduate Programmes at the School of Simulation and Visualisation at The Glasgow School of Art. His research investigates the domains of Interactive Storytelling (IS) via the development of the Emergent Narrative concept and Serious Games Design from the perspective of Serious Games Mechanics.

Sandy’s research in Interactive Digital Narratives (IDN) has, thus far, been heavily oriented towards the domains of Artificial Intelligence, Synthetic Actors and Interactive Narratives. From a technical perspective, Sandy’s work involves the design of Autonomous Synthetic Characters and their affect-based action/selection mechanisms to simulate characterisation within an interactive drama scenario. Sandy’s current interest in the Interactive Digital Narratives area are about:

1) Bridging the knowledge gap between Artificial Intelligence constructs for IDN, authors and writers (http://www.riders-project.net/)
2) The conceptualisation, production and development of IDNs from the perspective of Environmental Storytelling and extra-diegetic choices.

From a Serious Games perspective, Sandy has been interested in understanding the relationships between traditional entertainment game constructs/mechanics (digital games and board games) and their contextual representations in learning and education. Serious games challenge a lot of established perceptions as to how people learn whilst opening new theoretical and creative avenues. Sandy’s recent interests in the domain have, so far, focused on investigating Serious Games Mechanics (SGMs) in an attempt to concretely identify patterns between pedagogical theories and implemented games mechanics. Sandy has also designed a workshop series as part of the Games and Learning Alliance (http://www.galanoe.eu/) EC Network of Excellence (NoE) in which Serious Games are analysed from the perspectives of their purpose, processes and structure.

Selected publications:

Louchart, S, Truesdale, J, Suttie, N & Aylett, R (2015), Emergent Narrative, Past, Present and Future of an Interactive Storytelling Approach. Chapter in Interactive Digital Narrative: History, Theory and Practice Hartmut Koenitz, Gabriele Ferri, Mads Haahr, Diğdem Sezen, Tonguç İbrahim Sezen. Routledge, 2015 - Computers - 302 pages pp. 185-200. ISBN: 1317668677

Sivanathan, A, Lim, T, Louchart, S & Ritchie, JM (2014), 'Temporal multimodal data synchronisation for the analysis of a game driving task using EEG' Entertainment Computing, pp. 1-12., 10.1016/j.entcom.2014.03.004

Truesdale.J, Louchart. S, Suttie. N and Aylett. R (2014) – Off the Beaten Track! The Infinite Scotland Serious Game Design Approach – Proceedings 5th International Conference, SGDA 2014, Berlin, Germany, October 9-10, 2014. pp 163-175. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-11623-5_14

Friedrich EVC, Suttie N, Sivanathan A, Lim T, Louchart S and Pineda JA (2014) Brain–computer interface game applications for combined neurofeedback and biofeedback treatment for children on the autism spectrum. Front. Neuroeng. 7:21. doi: 10.3389/fneng.2014.00021

T. Lim, S. Louchart, N. Suttie, J. Baalsrud Hauge, I.A. Stanescu, I M. Ortiz, P. Moreno-Ger, F. Bellotti, M. Carvalho, J. Earp, M. Ott, S. Arnab (2014) Narrative Serious Game Mechanics (NSGM) – Insights into the narrative-pedagogical mechanism – 4th International Conference on Serious Games, GameDays 2014, Darmstadt, Germany, April 1-5, 2014. Proceedings

S. Arnab and T. Lim and M. B. Carvalho and F. Bellotti and S. de Freitas and S. Louchart and N. Suttie and R. Berta and A. De Gloria (2014) Mapping learning and game mechanics for serious games analysis British Journal of Educational Technology - 10.1111/bjet.12113. ISBN 1467-8535 - 2014