46 GENIUS INTERVIEW Dr Florian Block
FEED: Can you first tell us a bit about your background? Florian Block: My background is in HCI – human-computer interaction – which is concerned with creating and designing interactive experiences with users and for users, and optimising that relationship. I went to Harvard and for five years worked on how we can use data to engage non-experts. Specifically, I worked on creating interactive visualisations for museums in which people could fly through large amounts of scientific data and learn about, in this instance, biology (Harvard’s “Life On Earth” project). I’m very excited about data as a form of media that is for consumers, not just experts. That brought me, two and half years ago, to this post here at the Digital Creativity Labs at the University of York. FEED: And what work is being done at York’s Digital Creativity Labs? FB: We have an £18 million investment from various research councils, and our agenda is to deliver impactful research at the convergence of interactive media and games and the rich space in between. That, of course, includes broadcast, it includes storytelling. We’re mandated to work with industry. We want to enable the UK economy to be globally competitive and want to enable core technologies for that purpose. Within the Digital Creativity Labs, I lead the esports research group. We have five full time academics and research fellows and a couple of PhDs. We are a very interdisciplinary team, from data visualisation to human-computer interaction and user experience design, but also psychology and sociology. So we really look both at the tech and how the tech impacts. We have staff who work on inferring psychological traits of players by looking at their gameplay data. And we have students in machine learning and AI who analyse gameplay data to extract stories and insights for viewers and players. FEED: How is the Lab’s work being used by the esports sector? FB: Most of the data analytics in this space have focused on hardcore diagnosis and making pro teams and players better. Our key focus over the
past two and a half years – and it sort of makes us unique – is to translate esports data into meaningful stories for the audience. We are about looking at complex data, extracting meaningful patterns or events or exotic, extraordinary moments, and then converting that data into a format which the creative team can use to make editorial decisions. So they could have access to three or four interesting things happening in a game that may have been overlooked by the commentators, and they can push this to the audience. Our system automatically translates these data patterns into easy to read content for the audience – things they can meaningfully interpret within ten seconds, because that’s how long you can interrupt their viewing experience. They could be things like: “This hero is better than 95% of previous players with that same character.” It helps give people a context, because bear in mind the strategic space for some of these esports is super-complex, and even veteran viewers, who also play a lot, cannot appreciate the performances of each individual hero. There may be ten players running around a virtual environment, and it’s very hard for audiences to track this fully. FEED: And you have been working a lot with gaming network ESL. FB: We’re really happy to be working with ESL and with the esports industry. It’s really been key to our mission. To do relevant work, it’s important to be working with the industry and the audience and the players. And we have a raft of products now. We do commercial work to some extent to fund further research at the lab. We have products that can tap into the live performance data from an esports match and in real time compare it to historic matches. We have prediction technology that can give audiences a sense of who is leading or not. That’s not a trivial question in some of the complex esports. The numbers you see onscreen are not like a goal display you see in football. It’s much more complex than that. So we use prediction as a narrative element. And we look at products for the whole chain from analytics to authoring tools. Companies like ESL want to create individual stories and convert that
I’m very excited about data as a form of media that is for consumers,
not just experts
feedzine feed.zine feedmagazine.tv
Powered by FlippingBook