Alexander E. Zook
576 Oak Glen
Irvine, CA 92618
a.zook@gatech.edu
Research Interests
Games are increasingly used to improve existing tasks, from engaging students to motivating employees or even collecting real-world data. However, games are challenging to design and many
fall short of achieving their goals. In response, my research asks: how can intelligent systems
augment the game design process? I have focused on applications of artificial intelligence
and machine learning to three intertwined problems: modeling game players, supporting human
game designers, and automating routine parts of game design. To model players I gather, analyze, and visualize data from people playing digital games to develop techniques to model gameplay
preferences, skills, and in-game social and economic behavior. To support human designers I
study how people design games and develop intelligent systems that people can use to build games
through mixed–initiative interactions. To help automate game development I have built systems
to efficiently and automatically playtest games to tune them and techniques to model player skills
and tailor games to players.
Education
Georgia Institute of Technology
Ph.D. Candidate, Human-Centered Computing
Thesis title: “Automated Iterative Game Design”
Advisors: Dr. Mark Riedl and Dr. Brian Magerko
University of Chicago
B.A., Biology (neuroscience)
August 2010—May 2016
June 2009
Publications
Refereed Journal
J2 Zook, A. and Riedl, M. O. “Temporal Game Challenge Tailoring.” IEEE Transactions on
Computational Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence in Games, forthcoming.
J1 Zook, A.E., Eklof A., Jacob, U. and Allesina S. (2010) “Food webs: ordering species according
to body size yields high degree of intervality.” Journal of Theoretical Biology 271 (1): 106-113.
Refereed Conference
C15 Zook, A., Harrison, B., and Riedl, M. O. Monte-Carlo Tree Search for Simulation-based
Strategy Analysis. Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on the Foundations of
Digital Games, Pacific Grove, California, 2015. Nominated for Best Paper.
C14 Treanor, M., Zook, A., Eladhari, M. P., Togelius, J., Smith, G., Cook, M., Thompson, T.,
Magerko, B., Levine, J., and Smith, A. AI-Based Game Design Patterns. Proceedings of the
10th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, Pacific Grove, California,
2015.
C13 Das, S., Zook, A., and Riedl, M. O. Examining Game World Topology Personalization.
Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Note,
Seoul, Korea, 2015.
C12 Zook, A. and Riedl, M. O. Automatic Game Design via Mechanic Generation. Proceedings
of the 28th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Québec City, Québec, Canada, 2014.
Refereed Workshop
C11 Zook, A., Fruchter, E., and Riedl, M. O. Automatic Playtesting for Game Parameter Tuning
via Active Learning. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on the Foundations of
Digital Games, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, 2014. Exemplary paper.
C10 Siu, K., and Zook, A., and Riedl, M. O. Collaboration versus Competition: Design and
Evaluation of Mechanics for Games with a Purpose. Proceedings of the 9th International
Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, 2014.
C9 Jacob, M., Zook, A., and Magerko, B. Viewpoints AI: Procedurally Representing and Reasoning about Gestures. Proceedings of the 6th Digital Games Research Association Conference,
Atlanta, Georgia, 2013.
C8 Riedl, M. O., Zook, A. AI for Game Production. Proceedings of the IEEE 2013 Conference on
Computational Intelligence in Games, Niagara Falls, Canada, 2013.
C7 Davis, N., Zook, A. E., O’Neill, B., Grosz, A., Headrick, B., Nitsche, M., Riedl, M. O.
Creativity Support for Novice Digital Filmmaking. Proceedings of the 2013 ACM SIGCHI
Conference on Human Factors in Computing, Paris, France, 2013.
C6 Zook, A. E. and Riedl, M. O. A Temporal Data-Driven Player Model for Dynamic Difficulty
Adjustment. Proceedings of the 8th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive
Digital Entertainment, Palo Alto, California, 2012.
C5 Li, B., Zook, A. E., Davis, N., and Riedl, M. O. Goal-Driven Conceptual Blending: A Computational Approach for Creativity. Proceedings of the 2012 International Conference on Computational Creativity, Dublin, Ireland, 2012.
C4 Zook, A. E., Riedl, M. O., Holden, H. K., Sottilare, R. A. and Brawner, K. W. Automated
Scenario Generation: Toward Tailored and Optimized Military Training in Virtual Environments. Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games,
Raleigh, North Carolina, 2012.
C3 Zook, A. E., Riedl, M. O. and Magerko, B. S. Formally Modeling Pretend Object Play.
Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Creativity and Cognition. Atlanta, Georgia, 2011.
Nominated for Best Student Paper.
C2 Zook, A.E., Riedl, M. O. and Magerko, B. S. Understanding Human Creativity for Computational Play. Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Computational Creativity,
Mexico City, Mexico, 2011.
C1 Hartsook, K., Zook, A.E., Das, S., Riedl, M.O. Toward Supporting Stories with Procedurally Generated Game Worlds. Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE Conference on Computational
Intelligence in Games, Seoul, South Korea, 2011.
Refereed Workshop
W5 Cook, M., Smith, G., Thompson, T., Togelius, J., and Zook, A. Hackademics: A Case for
Game James At Academic Conferences. Workshop on Game Jams, Hackathons, and Game
Creation Events, Pacific Grove, California, 2015.
W4 Zook, A., Riedl, M. Generating and Adapting Game Mechanics. Proceedings of the Workshop
on Procedural Content Generation in Games, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, 2014.
W3 Zook, A., Riedl, M. Game Conceptualization and Development Processes in the Global Game
Jam. Proceedings of the Inaugural Workshop on the Global Game Jam, Chania, Greece, 2013.
W2 Davis, N., Zook, A., Kirschner, F., Nitsche, M., Riedl, M. Techniques for Evaluating NoviceOriented Creativity Support Tools. Proceedings of the 2013 ACM SIGCHI Workshop on Evaluation Methods for Creativity Support Environments, Paris, France, 2013.
W1 Zook, A. E., Lee-Urban, S., Drinkwater, M., and Riedl, M. O. Skill-based Mission Generation: A Data-driven Temporal Player Modeling Approach. Proceedings of the Workshop on
Procedural Content Generation in Games, Raleigh, North Carolina, 2012.
Alexander E. Zook
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Other
Other
O6 Cook, M., Eladhari, M. P., Smith, A. M., Smith, G., Thompson, T., Togelius, J., and Zook, A.
AI-based Games: Contrabot and What Did You Do? Demonstration at the 10th International
Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, Pacific Grove, California, 2015.
O5 Zook, A., Champandard, A., Cook, M., Smith, A. M., Smith, G., and Thompson, T. Contrabot.
Dagstuhl Seminar 15051: Artificial and Computational Intelligence in Games: Integration,
Dagstuhl, Germany, 2015.
O4 Treanor, M., Cook, M., Eladhari, M. P., Levine, J., Magerko, B., Smith, A. M., Smith, G.,
Thompson, T., Togelius, J., and Zook, A. AI-based Game Design. Dagstuhl Seminar 15051:
Artificial and Computational Intelligence in Games: Integration, Dagstuhl, Germany, 2015.
O3 Zook, A., Bidarra, R., Cook, C., Liapis, A., Smith, G., Thompson, T., and Van Krevald, M.
Procedural Content Generation and Formal Design. Dagstuhl Seminar 15051: Artificial and
Computational Intelligence in Games: Integration, Dagstuhl, Germany, 2015.
O2 Barnes, T. and Bown, Oliver, Buro, M., Cook, M., Eigenfeldt, A., Muñoz-Avila, H., Ontañón,
S., Pasquier, P., Tomuro, N., Young, R. M., and Zook, A. (2015) “Reports of the Workshops Held at the Tenth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital
Entertainment.” AI Magazine, 36 (1): 99–102.
O1 Liapis, A., Cook, M., Smith, A. M., Smith, G., Zook, A., Si, M., Cavazza, M. and Pasquier, P.
(2014) “Workshops Held at the Ninth Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and
Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE): A Report.” AI Magazine, 35 (2): 65–68.
Invited Presentations
• “AI for Game Production.” at Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment
conference Workshop on AI and Game Aesthetics, October 15, 2013.
• “Creativity Support for Novice Digital Filmmaking.” at Foundations of Digital Games conference Workshop on Intelligent Cinematography and Editing, May 14, 2013.
Posters
• Alexander Zook, Stephen Lee-Urban, and Mark Riedl. “Data-driven Content Tailoring for
Games” Georgia Tech Research and Innovation Conference, 2013.
• Alexander Zook, Chris DeLeon, Brian Magerko, and Mark Riedl. “Computational Play”
Georgia Tech Robotics and Intelligent Machines - Conference On Us, 2012.
Awards and Honors
• Nomination for Best Paper, Alexander Zook, Brent Harrison, and Mark O. Riedl. MonteCarlo Tree Search for Simulation-based Strategy Analysis. Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, Pacific Grove, California, 2015.
• Georgia Institute of Technology Foley Scholar, 2014.
• Outstanding Graduate Research Assistant Award, Georgia Institute of Technology,
2014.
• Georgia Institute of Technology Foley Scholar Finalist, 2013.
• Exemplary Paper, Alexander Zook, Eric Fruchter, and Mark O. Riedl. Automatic Playtesting for Game Parameter Tuning via Active Learning. Proceedings of the 9th International
Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, 2014.
• International Game Developers Association Game Developers Conference Scholarship, 2013.
• Nomination for Most Innovative project, Mark Riedl, Alexander Zook, Ken Hartsook,
Sauvik Das, Dallas McCall. AAAI 2011 Video Competition.
• Nomination for Best Student Paper Award, Alexander Zook, Brian Magerko, and Mark
Riedl. Formally Modeling Pretend Play. Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Creativity
and Cognition, 2011.
Alexander E. Zook
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Journal Reviewing
• National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program Honorable
Mention, 2011.
• Georgia Institute of Technology Presidential Fellowship, 2010.
• University of Chicago Dean’s List, 2005-2009.
• Phi Beta Kappa member, 2008.
Funding
Scientific Design of Human Computation Games
• Sponsor: NSF IIS
• Investigator(s): Mark Riedl (PI)
• Amount: $500, 000
• Period of performance: August 2015—July 2018
• I helped develop the research plan and made significant contributions to writing related work
and methodology. I was also involved in editing the complete document.
Research Projects
Automated Mechanic Generation
Entertainment Intelligence Lab
Mechanic generation supports novice designers making games for assessment, data collection,
and other purposes through a high-level language to define game designs and design goals. The
system combines constraint solving (Answer Set Programming) and a planner to automatically
generate and evaluate game mechanics to achieve given game design goals. This work extends
previous research on game generation to handle generation across a variety of game genres
while working from a low-level game specification.
Related publications: C12, W4
Automated Game Tuning
Entertainment Intelligence Lab
Automated game tuning efficiently adjusts game design parameters to achieve designer-specified
goals for a game, relieving designers of tedious and time-consuming manual tuning. The system uses active learning to choose game parameter values, tests those values by deploying
a game online that is played by humans, and uses the results of those tests to guide further
parameter choices. Design goals the system can address include both objective player behavior
and player subjective feedback responses. This work was recognized in an exemplary paper at
the International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games.
Related publications: C11, C10
GameTailor
Entertainment Intelligence Lab
The GameTailor system addresses challenges in predicting and adapting to player skill in
a computer game when little data is present for any given player. GameTailor uses collaborative filtering (specifically tensor factorization) to model and predict time-varying player
skills when facing a series of challenges. Given desired levels of difficulty, these predictions are
used to select opponents for a player to achieve the desired difficulty level at the desired point
in time. This work generalized previous research on dynamic difficulty adjustment to enable
proactive game adaptation at a large-scale when per-player data is sparse. GameTailor was
licensed to the Army Research Lab, Simulation and Training Technology Center.
Related publications: J2, C6, C4, W1
Service
Journal Reviewing
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IEEE Transactions on Computational and Artificial Intelligence in Games, 2012-present.
Entertainment Computing, 2013-present.
Advances in Human-Computer Interaction, 2014-present.
IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 2014-present.
Alexander E. Zook
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Conference Reviewing
Conference Reviewing
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7th Computer Science and Electronic Engineering Conference, 2015.
CHI PLAY, 2015.
Intelligent Narrative Technologies 8, 2015.
Computational Creativity and Games Workshop, 2015.
Intelligent Narrative Technologies 7, 2014.
International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, 2014.
International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, 2014.
Workshop on AI and Game Aesthetics, 2013.
International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, 2011, 2013, 2014, 2015.
International Conference on Computational Creativity, 2011, 2012.
ACM Conference on Creativity and Cognition, 2011.
Other Service
• Co-organizer, Workshop on Experimental AI in Games at the 11th Annual AAAI Conference
on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, 2015.
• Organizer, AI Game Jam, 2015.
• Co-organizer, Workshop on Game Jams, Hackathons, and Game Creation Events at the 10th
Annual International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, 2015.
• Organizer, AI Game Jam, 2015.
• Co-organizer, Workshop on Experimental AI in Games at the 10th Annual AAAI Conference
on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, 2014.
• Doctoral Consortium Mentor, Foundations of Digital Games, 2014.
• Co-organizer, Workshop on Intelligent Narrative Technologies at the 9th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, 2013.
• Co-organizer, Human-Centered Computing annual seminar, 2013.
• Student representative, Georgia Institute of Technology School of Interactive Computing
faculty hiring committee, 2013.
• Reviewer, President’s Undergraduate Research Awards, 2013, 2015.
Work Experience
Blizzard Entertainment Senior Data Scientist
December 2015—present
Working on the Business Intelligence (BI) team I am segmented types of players in the World
of Warcraft MMORPG. I am also involved in building upcoming data-driven game services.
Blizzard Entertainment Data Scientist
May 2015—December 2015
Working on the Business Intelligence (BI) team I developed and analyzed models to understand
the causes of churn in the World of Warcraft MMORPG. I have also developed visualization
and analysis tools for understanding player behavior in 3D first-person shooter maps.
Blizzard Entertainment Data Science PhD Intern
Summer 2013, 2014
Working on the Business Intelligence (BI) team I proposed, developed, tested, and deployed
a system to segment the players of the World of Warcraft MMORPG into personas. The
system informs design and business decision-making based on the changing player population
and has been maintained by the BI team since. I have analyzed new player experience and
matchmaking systems in the Hearthstone collectible card game; these analyses led to changes
in the matchmaking systems and tools the design teams use to monitor the systems over time.
Other duties on the team involved projects assessing Hearthstone card balance and World of
Warcraft server population health.
Alexander E. Zook
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Popular Media Mentions
Bioware Austin (division of Electronic Arts) Analytics Intern
Summer 2011, 2012
Over two summers I worked on the analytics team to build visualization and monitoring tools
for the Star Wars: The Old Republic MMORPG. In 2011, I developed tracking systems for the
game economy, use of game regions, player-versus-player competition, player progression, and
social and economic networks. These systems were used to understand the game health and
player population during the game launch and after. In 2012, to supplement these systems I
developed a player population segmentation and used this to model the player lifecycle and
combined this with an analysis of game system utility to understand different player values.
This project received awards internally and was used by the lead design teams to inform
decisions about future content developments over game updates.
Popular Media Mentions
• “A World Just For You,” Gamasutra, July 22, 2013. http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/
MichaelCook/20130722/196678/The_Saturday_Paper__A_World_Just_For_You.php
• “¿Videojuegos inteligentes? ahora se adaptan a la destreza del usuario,” La Opinión, April
22, 2013. http://www.laopinion.com/Videojuegos_inteligentes_ahora_se_adaptan_a_
la_destreza_del_usuario
• “Big data used to alter video game difficulty,” Computing.co.uk, April 22, 2013. http://www.
computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2263212/big-data-used-to-alter-video-game-difficulty
• “Big Data Used to Customise Game Difficulty,” Spong.com, April 19, 2013. http://spong.
com/article/29365/Big-Data-Used-to-Customise-Game-Difficulty
• “Georgia Tech Uses ‘Big Data’ Algorithm to Customize Video Game Difficulty,” Georgia Tech
press release, April 18, 2013. http://www.news.gatech.edu/hg/item/207401
Alexander E. Zook
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