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MaxData awards LASIGE’s PhD student David Gonçalves (2023/24)

Date: 19/05/2025

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: