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Back Off Me Booty Wins Audience Choice Award at IndieCade 2024

The University of Utah’s The Division of Games (Utah Games) program is proud to celebrate the success of Back Off Me Booty, a student-developed game that captured the hearts of players at IndieCade 2024, earning the coveted Audience Choice Award. This prestigious honor highlights the talent, creativity, and dedication of the University’s budding game developers. […]

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Guest Lecture: In Defense of a Sociality First Account of Playing Games Together in Friendly Contexts

March 28, 2024 | 3:30-5pm in CTIHB 101 Description: Everyone knows that we play games for all sorts of reasons. We play to blow off steam, to have a little fun, to increase our ranking, and even to win. Sometimes we play alone, but often we play games together. And sometimes our goal is partly […]

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Guest Lecture: Designing Player-AI Interaction: Engaging Players to Understand AI Through Play

Monday, March 25 @ 4pm in PTAB 109 Abstract: Helping people understand AI is an essential effort in the field of HCI. Among the fast-growing body of work, HCI researchers have explored interactive explanations and visualizations as a means to help people build up an understanding of AI systems through exploratory interaction with the system. […]

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Utah Games Jumps to #1 Worldwide Among Public Schools in 2024 Princeton Review Rankings

“The University of Utah’s Division of Games landed the #1 spot worldwide for public institutions for its undergraduate programs and #2 for its graduate programs, based on the 2024 Princeton Review rankings released today. The U’s undergraduate program climbed two spots this year, and the graduate program climbed three ranks. Professor Michael Young, the chair of […]

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Guest Lecture: Understanding Social Interactions in Immersive Virtual Reality Games

Thursday, March 14th at 3:45pm in PTAB 109 Talk Abstract: Three-dimensional virtual applications mediated via head-mounted displays (i.e., virtual reality applications) are growing in popularity as a medium for the facilitation of both ludic and serious activities. An essential component of these applications is their ability to afford users successful interaction, both social and non-social. However, interaction […]

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Utah Games Launch 2024

Come celebrate our students games with us! April 24th, 2024, 2-7pm  Utah Games Launch is the end of year games launch event for the Division of Games, a celebration of student and faculty work where we give graduating students (from our undergraduate and graduate programs) a chance to show their work. Games shown at Launch […]

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Guest Lecture: Supporting and Enhancing Learning in, through, and around Complex Gameplay

Monday, March 11 at 4pm in PTAB 109 Abstract: Complex games have demonstrated real-world benefits that illustrate their value as innovative and engaging tools for learning, either by leveraging entertainment games in educational contexts or by developing novel gaming environments for the purpose of teaching. However, complex games are also notoriously difficult, which limits their […]

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Utah Games Direct 2023

Join us December 8th, 2023 and see what we’ve been up to as we announce 12 new student-made games in production! We invite you to both the live stream at 9am, which will show off some of our students progress on their projects, and an in-person event that starts at 1pm where you’ll be able […]

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