Each year, MaxData recognizes the top students from each course in the Department of Informatics. The award is given during the Ciências ULisboa anniversary ceremony. This year, four LASIGE students were honoured for their academic achievements (MSc) and research contributions (PhD) during the 2023/2024 period.
David Gonçalves was awarded the MaxData Informatic Excellence award for his PhD research, which investigates digital gaming as a social and inclusive space.
His research focuses on gaming as a social vehicle, aiming to maximize its social benefits—such as family connectedness—while ensuring inclusivity for all players, regardless of their abilities, available time, or motivations. Throughout 2024, his work centered on operationalizing modularity (coupled with asymmetry) in game design to create more flexible multiplayer experiences. The final steps of his PhD aim to enable groups to freely combine different experiences into a compound game that better fits the needs of all players—similar to how players might choose their favorite characters or loadouts in a game, but instead of selecting small gameplay elements, they choose entire gameplay experiences designed to intertwine.
In 2024, he led one—and co-authored other three—distinguished publications:
- “The Trick is to Stay Behind?: Defining and Exploring the Design Space of Player Balancing Mechanics”, presented at CHI 2024, exploring player balancing mechanics to address skill disparity in a gaming group.
- “A Living Framework for Understanding Cooperative Games”, published at CHI 2024, focused on formalizing key concepts, mechanics, and design patterns for collaborative gaming.
- “Promoting Family Play through Asymmetric Game Design”, published at Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (CSCW 2024), leveraging asymmetry of investment and asynchronous interactions to promote social gaming within families.
- “I Want to Send a Message to My Friend: Exploring the Shift of Agency to Older Adults in HRI”, published at the International Journal of Social Robotics, exploring value-centered robotic approaches to extend the agency and communication of older adults.