Audience Participation Games Research
at Carnegie Mellon University



From 2016 through 2018, I was the lead game designer on the audience participation game research project at Carnegie Mellon University, working out of HCII with Professor Jessica Hammer and a bunch of other extremely smart, talented people. We explored innovative game designs that harnessed twitch.tv in novel ways to let audience members interact with streamers in their games in real time while respecting and enchancing the streamer / audience relationship.

At some point I will get videos and media up of my game prototype, Gods of Socks and Spoons. In the mean time, our team wrote a paper based on the research project, and it can be found here. The paper was submitted to CHI PLAY 2018, where it was published and earned an Honourable Mention.

The paper does a good job covering the game design challenges we faced, as well as the technical architecture I rigged up to explore this fascinating game design space. There's a lot to say about this space; hopefully I'll get a chance to write more about it sometime soon.