Hello. I’m Ziwen Song. I’m a games user researcher with a Master’s in Games User Experience (GUX) at the University of Skövde, Sweden.

The life of a GUX Master’s student is exhilarating. I had the opportunity to work in the industry with a local indie studio Green Tile Digital on their first title Strobophagia, investigating the onboarding experience of the game with a deferred think-aloud method our group invented. On the academic front, I proposed a new approach drawing inspiration from the field of behavior intervention to design intervention against the plaguing problem in competitive multiplayer games—cyberbullying. But GUX alone is far from the whole picture of my Master’s life as I also explored various topics in Game Studies: A two-month ethnographic study at the indie dev co-living community Spelkollektivet, “Heaven is Furnished by IKEA”, as one report put it. And a beginner’s look into the proposed holy grail to solve the ludonarrative dissonance—emergent narrative.

Besides having games user research as my profession, I’m also super excited about the craft of designing game levels: be it designing a single-player level with memorable narrative and encounters or multiplayer maps that allow for all ways of play. It also helps me talk in the language of the game designers and come up with more targeted research goals when doing user research.

You can download my CV here.