Undergraduate Dissertation
Light at the End of the Tunnel (Howell, P., 2010) 
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My Undergraduate dissertation was a research programme aiming to study the effects of game world lighting on player decision making within a First-Person-Shooter scenario. This research was supported by a bespoke game level designed for Unreal Tournament 2004.
The .ZIP contains a reference video showing a play-through of the game level used for the study.
M.Sc Pilot Study
Copyright of Frictional Games, 2010
An exploratory study into implicit fear mechanisms in video games; how do they engage, immerse and affect the player's enjoyment of Amnesia: The Dark Descent? (Howell, P., 2010)
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This small study was intended to act as a 'proof of concept' for my further M.Sc study project. Using the newly released and critically acclaimed Amnesia: The Dark Descent (Frictional Games, 2010) I conducted interviews with a small group of players to determine what they found to be particularly effective at scaring them within the game, as well as their levels of immersion in and engagement with the game.
M.Sc Project Plan & Proof of Concept
Great Expectations: Designing Game Environments that Operate Against Player Schema, and the Influence of this on Perceived Levels of Fear (Howell, P., 2011)
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Download Proof of Concept Video (.ZIP)View Proof of Concept Video OnlineBefore transferring to my Ph.D, I completed the first semester of the M.Sc Computer Games Technology course at the University of Portsmouth. This document outlines my proposed research project, much of which I carried over as the basis of my initial Ph.D research.
Paper Presented at DiGRA 2011 Conference
Schematically Disruptive Game Design (Howell, P., 2011)
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This paper is the first publication stemming from my Ph.D research. It is intended to collate all of my initial theoretical work into the concept of going against player expectation and against schematic knowledge, offering some early examples of potential applications.
The ideas outlined in this work will be built upon through a development project intended to bring these theoretical concepts into a real development context, in order to test their usefulness and viability for deployment in industry.