By Gwendolyn Schanker

Associate Professor Magy Seif El-Nasr is the embodiment of interdisciplinary research at Northeastern. A faculty member with joint appointments in the College of Computer and Information Science (CCIS) and the College of Arts, Media, and Design (CAMD), Seif El-Nasr is a pioneer in the world of game design.

In February of this year, she was selected to become one of 31 fellows for the Higher Education Video Game Alliance (HEVGA), a community of leaders in game design that facilitates discussion of the development of collegiate game design programs.

“There’s an interest to align different game programs and game researchers around the world,” Seif El-Nasr said. “There’s now about 300 programs across the U.S. HEVGA drives an effort to connect these programs together, but also to bring together researchers who are focusing on game research for other purposes.”

The primary goal of Seif El-Nasr’s research is to explore how games and interactive narratives can be used as a tool to understand human behavior. Through funding from government organizations like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), she’s studied the ways that people play games and interactive narratives, and how that can be applied to everything from military strategies to standardized testing skills.

She’s authored more than 100 peer-reviewed articles, but Seif El-Nasr’s research is still rife with unanswered questions.

“We’re using a very rich, multidimensional dataset that has a lot of variants,” Seif El-Nasr said. “It’s exciting because it’s [game research] a new area of research. Every time we open one door, there are all sorts of new things that we have to work on.”

Successfully achieving these diverse goals is dependent on developing a successful educational program. The former director of Northeastern’s Game Design Program, Seif El-Nasr works with students in both CCIS and CAMD who want to build games that are both entertaining and functional. She also helped to develop Northeastern’s master’s program in game science and design, which allows students to explore both the creative and scientific aspects of game design.

“It builds the bridge between the design side of the work as well as the scientific side,” Seif El-Nasr said of the master’s program.

In her own lab, Seif El-Nasr works with a group of 5-6 computer science graduate students and two research scientists to develop tools that can improve the functionality of virtual environments like those used in games, and to find ways to measure how these environments can contribute to solving national problems, such as education and mental health.

“Using games to help resolve some of these issues is very important to me,” she said. “I want to know how we can make the lives of people who are using these virtual environments better.”

That’s a challenging goal to pursue in a field that is, for all intents and purposes, still in its early developmental stages. Seif El-Nasr says that the technology for building games has improved immensely throughout her career, but researchers still don’t know much about the psychology or the impact of the technology.

As part of HEVGA’s new fellowship program, Seif El-Nasr will participate in an ongoing discussion to find ways to bring members of the gaming community together and build on the existing knowledge base through educational programs and interdisciplinary conferences.

“I’ve been part of conferences that have been converted from four people who started the program to now 200 or more who come to the conference regularly,” she said. “Seeing attendance grow is really great.”

The field of game design is a work in progress, both at Northeastern and on the national level. Seif El-Nasr’s work – as a professor, a researcher, and now a HEVGA fellow – will play an invaluable role in helping propel the field forward.

“As the gaming community starts to become more established, having an organization like HEVGA helping leaders in the field to come together will be important,” she said.