This talk traces the interdisciplinary landscape of video-game academia through the work of researcher–designer Shashvat Singh, building on the broad foundations he developed at Krea University. It begins with his master’s project, The Last Vampire, a social-deduction game used to study deception via Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) and facial analysis, probing physiological and behavioral markers of lying in play. It then examines his dissertation research on the complex relationship between the Pokémon franchise and its fan communities, highlighting the legal and creative tensions that arise in the creation and circulation of fan games. The talk concludes with an overview of his current doctoral work on Ludic Data Visualization (LudaViz) at Johannes Kepler University, exploring how playful, game-inspired interfaces can make data more interpretable and why an interwoven, cross-disciplinary training is a powerful springboard for a career in games research.

Shashvat Singh is a researcher for the LudaViz project and a PhD student at Johannes Kepler University (JKU) in Austria. At JKU, he is part of the Institute of Computer Graphics at the Replay Lab, and his PhD dissertation examines data visualisation in video games. He previously studied at Krea University (India) and Uppsala University (Sweden), where he earned a master's in Game Design. At Krea, he completed the Interwoven Arts and Sciences curriculum with a major in Computer Science and a double concentration in Psychology and Global Arts. Krea's interwoven education approach, anchored by his major and double concentrations, taught Shashvat to fuse human behavior, cultural context, and computational thinking, shaping his cross-disciplinary path in game design and data visualization research.