For Magy Seif El-Nasr, playing games is serious business. As a professor of computational media and the director of the Game User Interaction and Intelligence Lab at UC Santa Cruz, she studies how virtual environments can be used to understand people and foster connection and learning.
Since starting her education in computer science in the 1990’s, she has watched the field grow from nothing. Along the way, she has become a leading expert in the academic study of serious gaming (games that are created for reasons other than entertainment), virtual environments, and artificial intelligence.
In July 2024, she began her term as UC Santa Cruz’s Presidential Chair, a three-year appointment awarded to a faculty member who is developing a new interdisciplinary academic program or expanding an existing one. As part of this appointment, she is leading three initiatives to teach educators and students about AI and education. This includes hosting events, talks, and workshops that increase awareness of how AI works and how it can be effectively used as an educational tool.
Following the one-year anniversary as Presidential Chair, the UC Santa Cruz news team sat down with Seif El-Nasr to learn more about the work she is doing. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did you become interested in studying games and virtual environments?
Growing up, I was interested in playing games and used it as a way to connect with people, so I was interested in the narrative and engagement aspects of the games. Then, while I was in graduate school, I became more interested in AI, emotional connection, and interaction through experiences in game play.
I’ve done a lot of work in psychology, as well as in theater while I was doing my graduate research, and that got me more into AI and games.
What are some of your favorite games to play?
Assassin’s Creed is probably my favorite because I like narrative-based games. The environments are beautiful, and Ubisoft did a lot of really great work on their games. I also like community games, like Candy Crush, which helps me stay connected with my mom.
When you first started research in this area, games as a field did not exist. What has it been like to watch this field grow over the course of your career?
The gaming industry already existed, but there wasn’t any academic aspect to it. In the beginning, the field of gaming research was focused more on advancing the technology and less on the emotional or social impact, because it takes a long time to build a game.
The tools that currently exist for game development weren’t around yet, so engines and graphics were very important. Now, more people in the field are looking more closely at the content, narrative, and engagement, and then the impact of that.
Now there’s a whole serious game industry looking at how to build games for training, or health, such as teaching stroke patients movement therapy.
Did you have any trouble with people taking your work seriously, when you first start studying games?
It’s interesting because I didn’t notice anyone doubting the significance of my work at the beginning. I think I saw that afterwards, but when I first started, the reception was more positive; people thought it was cool that I play games and also work on them.
When I was doing my PhD, I got my mentor and several other people in the same research group interested in looking at interactive entertainment and virtual environments. It was a great time because there was a lot of excitement as we all wondered how this field would develop.
One of my questions in my PhD defense was where they would file my dissertation in the library, because it didn’t fit well in any of the existing categories — there wasn’t a games or interactive media section. So, my advisor responded and said we were going to create an interactive entertainment section.
The field has grown and now you see more people wondering if this is really “hard science,” or are we just playing games and calling it research? But there’s a lot of hard science.
I think games are powerful tools. For example, in the classroom, you could use it as a tool and then have reflections and other learning that happens around the game. The game by itself is not going to be where all the learning happens. It’s important to have a community and a social component around it, and I think games have a lot of educational potential once that happens.
You’re coming up on one year as the UC presidential chair. What has that experience been like for you?
I spent the past year meeting a lot of different people, giving talks on AI around the country and having discussions with people in the community, particularly about AI integration into education. With AI changing many fields and aspects of our lives, many instructors are thinking about how to integrate AI into their classroom or how their students are making use of AI, and what are the dangers of using it. These discussions have been amazing.
We put together a group around UCSC to bring people from the humanities, the arts, and computational media together to engage in a critical discussion around AI and specifically human-centered AI. We’re really interested in how we integrate AI into our lives and the university.
Your initiatives as Presidential Chair all focus on AI and education. Why was it important for you to teach people about AI in education?
I have been in the AI field since the 1990s and it was a very different story back then. At that time, nobody outside the field knew what AI was. Now, everybody has a perception of what that means. But very few people know the inner workings of it and the dangers that may be there. I have been in the field for a while, and developed a human-centered AI before ChatGPT became a thing, and I saw how students were eager to understand more about AI. I thought there was a place for somebody to bring people together, not just at UC Santa Cruz, but also globally to look at where AI is going.
This is why I wanted to spend my first year as Presidential Chair talking with people to see what their perceptions of AI are and find out how those perceptions are changing over time as they are interacting with it.
When you’re giving a talk, what’s the main takeaway you want your audience to understand about AI and AI in education?
In terms of AI and education, we always approach it as a human-in-the-loop integration of AI. We know that students are going to be using AI, but how they use it effectively would be the important piece here.
So, if they’re using it for writing, are they just copying and pasting? Are they thinking about what ChatGPT or other types of AI are telling them and then adjusting based on that? Most of my work has been looking at how to engage the human.
Let’s take a calculator as a metaphor. When you’re first starting to learn your multiplication tables, you may not want to use it, but maybe later you start using the calculator because you’re doing something more on top of it. The same thing goes for writing. Maybe in the very beginning, you don’t want to use AI, but after a while, when you’re writing something else or something bigger, you may want to figure out how to integrate AI into your process.
Same thing with coding. In the very beginning, because you want to know how to structure your code, you want to write it without AI. After that, you may want to use AI because most of the companies now are going to be looking for people who are effective at using AI. We need to integrate that into our classes so we make sure that we prepare the students well for working in the industry.
What are some of the biggest misconceptions and concerns that people have around AI?
That AI will replace everybody’s jobs — I really don’t believe so. It will replace some jobs, but I think it will create a lot of jobs too.
The United Arab Emirates just put a big investment in AI. Many people are saying that AI is going to replace many jobs with new jobs, which means that education has to keep up. We need to make sure that we educate people about the integration of AI that will then lead to new jobs in the future.
What are your plans for the rest of your tenure as a presidential chair?
What’s interesting is I’m seeing that the narrative is changing over time as new systems are coming up and people are using them. Next year, I want to lead more workshops on AI literacy, and I will continue to do more outreach with different teaching and learning centers at UC Santa Cruz, as well as at UC Riverside and UC San Diego, and others that are open to it.