I am a PhD candidate at the University of California, Santa Cruz, working in the Expressive Intelligence Studio with Jim Whitehead.

Research Interests

My research interests are in procedural content generation, specifically focusing on level generation for platformers. Level design is a time-consuming and expensive process; my research is in creating the technology required for an assistive level design tool, which can assist in the creative process by suggesting new content, providing innovative methods for editing a level, and giving feedback to the designer on playability and difficulty. Platformers are a useful genre to begin work in this area because they have relatively simple game mechanics, yet there is a huge amount of variety in their levels. Current work on this project includes a preliminary framework for analyzing 2D platformer levels, and a rhythm-based level generator.

My other interests include gender and technology issues, especially women in games, and the use of games in education.

Hobbies

In my free time, I enjoy hiking, reading, playing games, and working on my many different craft projects.