Unpacking Casual Game Engagement Across Time Scales

What makes people stick to a mobile game for days, months, or years? This interdisciplinary, data-intensive PhD project unpacks casual game engagement across time scales. The PhD works closely with industry partner King (now part of Microsoft Gaming), providing data access to over 200 million active players of Candy Crush Saga. The project combines longitudinal mixed methods with interpretable machine learning. Housed in the Dyson School of Design Engineering at Imperial College London, in collaboration with N/Lab at University of Nottingham, it is supervised by experts in game engagement, explainable AI, behavioural analytics, and user experience. It offers a unique opportunity to impact responsible industry practice and policy guidance in games; experience state of the art data science in the games industry; and learn advanced machine learning methods for social science.