Parliamentary Secretary for Financial Services, Digital Economy and Innovation Silvio Schembri will be inaugurating the new premises of the Institute of Digital Games – University of Malta at the start of a full-day celebration of games research, education, and the industry in Malta on Wednesday at the Institute of Digital Games.
The event will be a non-stop exploration of digital games, games and artificial intelligence, the impact of games research, and visions of the future for Malta.
The launch provides the institute with the opportunity to showcase the research done by their faculty, as well as the University of Malta more broadly, in the area of digital games: a critical area for economic development as evidenced by the national video games and eSports strategy. One of the institute’s main research areas is AI, therefore also overlaps with aspects of the national AI strategy. The institute will explain the key focus-areas of their education and research including game design and development, artificial intelligence, and game studies.
Gabriel Robert, the lead gameplay programmer at Ubisoft, will be speaking on the impacts research has on innovation in games.
A series of workshops covering musical behaviour in games, the player-avatar relationship in virtual reality and affective computing (emotion AI) will be open to the public in the afternoon.
These will be followed by quick-fire talks on digital game-related work and research done throughout the University of Malta as a whole, from the English Department to Media and Knowledge Sciences all the way to the Department of Computer Sciences with everything in between.
The day will close off with presentations by local game industry studios including Dorado Games, Exient, Playmagic and Might Box. They will be presenting the exciting projects they are working on at the moment and will be available for questions regarding the more practical aspects of career guidance, such as what skills and roles they are looking for and what it is actually like to work in the games industry.
“We’re excited to see a growing and dynamic games industry in Malta that our students can participate in and contribute to. Our inauguration gives us an opportunity to highlight this and we’re proud to show the educational and research role of our institute to the public,” said Prof. Georgios Yannakakis, director of the Institute of Digital Games.
The event is also open to the public from noon onwards. Registration is required as space is limited. A detailed programme and registration form are available at: um.edu.mt/digitalgames and at um.edu.mt/newspoint/events/umevents/2019/09/idglaunch.