Assistant Professor

Bio: Dr. Erik Vick holds an M.S.C.S (UCF, 1998) and a Ph.D. in Modeling and Simulation specialized in Artificial Intelligence (UCF, 2005) and has extensive experience in artificial characters and game design, including a stint at Electronic Arts as a technical game designer, artificial intelligence researcher, and software engineer. Dr. Vick is an Assistant Professor in the Information Technology Department's Game Design and Development program at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He also served at the Chief Technical Officer for an international software company focused on mobile devices. He taught Computer Science at UCF from 1998 to 2000, and Digital Media Faculty from 2001 to 2004 and 2005 to 2007.

Dr. Vick has worked on multiple projects in recent years, including a synthetic personality, an AI-driven in-game presentation director, synthetic emotion in video game characters, a computational story generation system for video games, synthetic biomechanics, a serious game design formalism and rubric, games to test the effectiveness of narrative versus non-narrative games, and a game designed to teach narrative theory.

Dr. Vick currently consults for multiple game projects, spearheads an effort to design novel game technology and teaches the classes in both the undergraduate and graduate Game Design and Development programs at R.I.T..

Dr. Vick pursues four main research agendas: serious game design, entertainment game design, game technologies development and advanced artificial intelligence techniques for video games.