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Elizabeth Stringer, Ph.D.

Director, Academics; Faculty, AT&T Virtualization Center
estringer@smu.edu 214-768-5134 Office: 306D
Elizabeth Stringer
Elizabeth Stringer comes to SMU Guildhall at with over 12 years’ experience in project management and business development in the games industry. After graduating from USC, she began making games and has shipped over 30 titles in her career. She helped grow an independent development company, led internal studios for publishers and has expanded franchises with external development.
 
She started her career as a Producer at an independent developer, Xatrix Entertainment, and created games for the PC and LBE. As Executive Producer at an internal studio of games publisher Activision, she worked on many franchises such as Zork, Star Trek and Heavy Gear. She also served as Director of Development for Atari on some of their most successful original and licensed properties including Blues Clues, Thomas the Tank Engine, Dora the Explorer and the Backyard Sports franchise.
 
In her role as faculty member and Director of Academics at SMU Guildhall, she continues to consult as designer and content creator for educational games funded by the National Science Foundation and DARPA on varied topics including math instruction, teacher training, and leadership and conflict resolution. She is currently working extensively in the field of VR/AR to develop projects for both the SMU Department of Psychology and the SMU Simmons School of Education and Human Development.
 

Elizabeth also serves as a Faculty member at the AT&T Virtualization Center.

Professional Experience:

  • Director of Development— Atari
  • Executive Producer – Activision
  • Producer – Xatrix Entertainment

Education:

  • M.Ed. - Southern Methodist University
  • B.A. Communications – University of Southern California
  • Ph.D. in Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication – University of Texas at Dallas

Games Shipped:

  • BeyBlades PS2 2003 - Atari
  • BeyBlades GBA 2003 - Atari
  • BeyBlades PC 2003 - Atari
  • Scrabble PC 2003 - Atari
  • Scrabble PSP - Atari
  • Thomas the Tank Engine: Thomas Saves the Day PC 2003 - Atari
  • Dora the Explorer: Animal Adventures PC 2003 - Atari
  • Blue’s Clues: Blues Takes You to School PC 2003 - Atari
  • Backyard Basketball PS2 2003 - Atari
  • Backyard Basketball 2004 PC 2003 - Atari
  • Backyard Baseball GameCube 2003 - Atari
  • Backyard Hockey PC 2002 - Atari
  • Backyard Football GameCube 2002 - Atari
  • Backyard Football GameBoy Advance PC 2002 - Atari
  • Backyard Baseball GameBoy Advance PC 2002 - Atari
  • Backyard Basketball PC 2001 - Atari
  • Backyard Soccer PlayStation PC 2001 - Atari
  • Backyard Football 2002 PC 2001 - Atari
  • Backyard Soccer MLS Edition PC 2000 - Atari
  • Backyard Baseball 2001 PC 2000 - Atari
  • Total Annihilation Kingdoms: The Iron Plague PC 2000 - Atari
  • Star Trek Armada PC 2000 - Activision
  • Heavy Gear II PC 1999 - Activision
  • 4 title compilation Mediamatics 1998 - Activision
  • Zork Grand Inquisitor DVD ATI 1998 - Activision
  • Zork Grand Inquisitor DVD Gateway 1998 - Activision
  • Zork Grand Inquisitor DVD Creative Labs 1998 - Activision
  • Zork Grand Inquisitor DVD Hollywood Plus 1998 - Activision
  • Zork Grand Inquisitor DVD 1998 - Activision
  • Top Shot PC 1998 - Activision
  • Zork Grand Inquisitor 7L PC 1997 - Activision
  • Vertical Reality LBE 1997 –Sega GameWorks
  • Cyberia2PC 1996 – Virgin Interactive
  • Cyberia PC 1994 - Interplay

 

 

Q&A:

Can you share the backstory behind what brought you to a career path in game development?
 
As a fresh graduate of USC, I worked with a head hunting agency on interviewing at the major studios in LA. In completing a profile at the agency, my personal family background of building computers and playing the early computer games on them came up. The agency then connected me with a commercial production company in Burbank that had started developing their first PC game, Cyberia. I started there as a PA (production assistant), but with my college degree in Communications, my role expanded to Producer, working with both the development team and the publishing team. I never looked back.
 
I continued to produce computer games for Activision and Atari before being recruited to guest lecture in a new program at SMU called Guildhall. As project management of game teams is my primary area of expertise, I mentored their early cohort and was then asked to adjunct in the game development courses. The living laboratory at SMU Guildhall and the passionate graduate students in attendance provided even more opportunity for me to study team dynamics and investigate different processes in order to enable creative software development projects to ship consistently for ever-changing consumer entertainment tastes. I brought my professional experience and my research findings together to add a fourth specialization to the program, a master’s in Production (Producers). This meant coming on full-time and shortly thereafter assuming some administrative management responsibility for the faculty and academics of the overall program.
 
SMU is filled with incredibly smart and generous faculty who helped integrate our graduate game development program into the Dallas campus, support our research, and operate our degree at an elite level. We are incredibly ambitious and raised the standards for our graduates to take on leadership in the industry. Our mission is to grow the professionalism, the value of games, and the quality of life for the international video game industry.
 
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?
 
Starting at 22 years old at an indie start-up, I got to do pretty much everything at one point or another. There were no barriers, no boundaries, and no rules to follow yet. Everyone just did what needed to get done for the day, the week, the milestone, the project. We pulled resources from Hollywood, from specialty schools, and from other industries in order to mold them to fit the game development asset pipeline. It was my first “real” job, and so I did not know how unusual my experiences were. It was my norm. I then took all of those lessons and threw open to the doors to train others to join the field, one-at-a-time at first, but by the hundreds these days. It’s no longer a niche profession without a path for clear onboarding.
 
Moreover, at Xatrix, even though the median age of our team was very young, I was the youngest. When I assumed leadership responsibilities, some of the older (30-year-old) developers could have balked at my direction. But, it was already in my nature to research, plan, prepare, communicate, follow-up, give feedback, and have contingencies for life. So, by using this approach to my job, my age and experience level really did not become a factor. In fact, I became the most experienced full Producer hired at Activision at the time.
 
“First to arrive”, “last to leave”, and “give credit to others” have become my default behaviors and so it was always the work of the developers that was made visible and rewarded. This servant leadership style is what was the genesis of our Production specialization at SMU Guildhall, and remains relevant for modern game development teams. Removing all blockers from your team, supporting risks that lead to innovation, failing quickly, and consistently maintaining high visibility of all work have become the hallmark of a successful game development team that can deliver a fun product on a predictable schedule. 
 
How have you used your success to Change the World?
 
I became a leader for my team and for my studio at a relatively young age. I was managing production at 23. As I took on additional responsibilities in my career, I was able to work on a variety of titles that broadened my interactions with publishers, licensors and build a network. This led to an invitation to guest lecture at a university to a group of students in their first class as game developers. Sitting in the back of the room before my lecture, I was still younger than half of these students and they did not know I was the lecturer for that day.  They were discussing task progress and communication issues related to working as a team to build a game, and they sounded just like the professional developers I worked with everyday.  So when I got up in front of the class to start my lecture, I connected their experience to mine and to the industry overall. I realized that I had an opportunity to guide them with my expertise and they could grow their skills and team dynamics before they were on the job – where mistakes are costly and conflicts cause bugs. The original mentorship of students became the framework for the Professors of Practice as primary instructors in the first graduate game development program in the world with the four principle disciplines of a video game team. As a full-time faculty 20 years later, our graduate program has graduated over 1,000 alumni that have brought processes and practices to grow the video game industry and promote a sustainable work ethic in conjunction with a high quality product.
 
What technological innovations are you working on?
 
The living laboratory that is the team game production courses and supervised thesis research has contributed many innovations in process, organizational behavior, and games user research. One particular area related to the fundamental conditions for creative teams to thrive was researched by me with a VR simulation created for behavioral research. As many researchers will share, it is an event outside the control of the research design that can provide the conditions to study a variable. During the Covid-19 pandemic, our team game production courses moved to online and faculty interacted with students through Zoom and Slack instead of face-to-face two-way synchronous communication. In the normal mode of instruction, I introduced emotional intelligence in an active-classroom format with a series of improv exercises and a self-assessment.  Since SMU Guildhall faculty, students, and alumni had built several IVE’s (immersive virtual environments) in which two avatars were situated for dyadic real-time conversation, I moved the EI instruction into the VR lab.
 
The resulting quantitative data from the EI skills measured from the virtual version of the improv exercises along with the user experience data led to the development of a new theory of authentic interpersonal relationships that are enabled by dyadic virtual avatars, a hybrid orthosocial-parasocial relationship.  Even though the IVE I used had represented the current technological VR R&D of that moment, as VR hardware continued to improve fidelities, the IVE’s themselves looked dated.  However, instead of users deciding not to accept the avatar interactor due to its limited realism compared to modern expectations, the user experience was successful in making an authentic connection and the strength of this relationship was significantly associated with their self-assessment of their EI skills. I was able to draw stark contrasts to the experiences of performing the improv of an emotionally charged scene with a live partner and with a virtual partner. These results are being written up now and will be available for continued research with our university.
 
How do you think this might disrupt the status quo?
 
Understanding the development of mediated authentic interpersonal relationships with avatars will certainly impact the characters in game designs to be played within the magic circle, but the research has application to other media as well.  The perception of the IVE as a UX opportunity for a space to rehearse a skill and learn new behavior with the conscious understanding that the virtual human avatar partner was not physically present in the same real-world space, and therefore are enabled to more fully engage in the expression of emotions without concern for the other persons reaction. There was a choice to return to VR for a “fun” experience to learn more skills and practice more behaviors. Additionally, there are some unique potential benefits to anthropomorphoids, the stylized cartoonish humanoid interactor avatar design heuristic, in dyads. The anthropomorphoid relieves some of the pressure and anxiety of real-world face-to-face communication. Yet, the social presence between the participant and the interactors’ avatars is sufficient to learn new behavioral skills that are directly applicable to real-life relevancy. Furthermore, situating an anthropomorphoid dyad in a potentially emotional state in a virtual space affords the participant the freedom to express authentic emotional responses without the follow-on ramifications with a unstructured and unscheduled living relationship in the physical world. Therefore, as the overall ecological validity for boundaries of hybrid orthosocial-parasocial relationships in a dyadic IVE is researched further, fidelity matched behavioral simulators could accomplish gains for individuals that find they prefer to engage with virtual human interactors on certain sensitive topics concerning their opinions or experiences.
 
Games are not simply entertainment, but they can be used for important purposes. In what ways does your work at SMU Guildhall impact people and society?
 
Change in behavior is theorized to occur through engagement. It would then follow that player engagement is state in which skills, attitudes, and self-sufficiency can be taught. A major contributor to fun and engagement in games is to provide an environment that will present obstacles that will challenge the players and motivate them to develop new skills and apply them to achieve their goals – all of which aligns with the constructivist theory of learning. Designing for player engagement is the key to Game-Based Learning… without it, the outcomes of GBL may not create lasting learning.
 
As game designers, we all know how to direct player behavior with the tools in our toolbox and leverage the data analytics to optimize achievement. Our approach to games user research, GUR, is to inform and advise those who wield them to use their powers ethically. GUR had already documented several forms of GBL outcomes. In my research we have zeroed in on a key contributor... If there is one finding l leave you with here, today, is the dominance of self-efficacy in GBL. Self-efficacy is described as how someone perceives their capability of completing a task. Our GUR has found the elements necessary for successful GBL contained within the construct of self-efficacy. It is the one tool to rule them all.
 
A person’s self-efficacy can be leveraged through mastery experiences, social modeling, social persuasion, and embodiment of a physical and emotional state. These then can become a game designer’s tools for GBL. And since self-efficacy is domain specific, a person’s beliefs in their abilities can vary depending on the context. Connecting self-efficacy to constructivist educational practices and using the situated theory of learning in order to describe best practices for designers has furthered the efforts of all in video game design.
 
How do you think games and gamification can be used to enhance education?
 
Playing to learn is nothing new and how to use gamification to achieve learning objectives can be applied to the digital form of play, video games… But, should we teach with video games? My answer is an enthusiastic “yes”, even though many educational games play like the equivalent of your mother “putting cheese sauce on your vegetables”. It is true that edutainment as a genre of games has had a series of hits and misses, more so than entertainment-based games. This is usually because edutainment games just overlay educational content with gameplay as an extrinsic reward to motivate engagement to the learning content, without connecting the content to the gameplay. Research has shown that without relating the gameplay to the learning content, dissonance can occur when students switch between disconnected contexts of the gameplay and the learning, which breaks the long-term state of full immersion and focus, a.k.a. player engagement. Gamifying lessons for the sake of gamification is not necessary for learning and can even working against long term learning. Understanding how gamification can impact learning is how game-based learning, GBL, can be effective. So the question we really should be asking is “how” should we teach with digital games?  Proponents of digital game-based learning have argued that well-designed games embody educational and learning theory and are in line with some of the best practices of education.
 
However, it is the role of the game developers to ultimately balance the design of compelling game experiences to create long-term engagement. And there are many aspects of the design of a videogame that can impact the game’s appeal. For example, game developers make decisions regarding the game’s core mechanic and pillars, the visual representation of the game content, the emotional design of the narrative, the game’s incentive system, and social aspects of play. But to root a game in educational theory, learning scientists are the experts with the instructionally appropriate learning opportunities. Thus, a more complete understanding of how to successfully design and sustain the state of player engagement for GBL can be disseminated with research, training and cross-disciplinary collaboration.