I’m Eric Butler, a second year Ph.D. student in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. I work in the Center for Game Science. My research advisor is Zoran Popović. I received my MS and BS in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.

My research broadly works towards using computation to help the game development process. More specifically, my current projects involve design tools for game progressions and tools for data anlytics of player data. Other research includes procedural content generation for educational games, in particular Refraction, which I helped (and am still helping) create.

My primary interests in life are making games and lowering barriers for making games (and messing around with computers). You can check out stuff I’ve made on my games page.

Publications

Yun-En Liu, Travis Mandel, Eric Butler, Erik Andersen, Eleanor O’Rourke, Emma Brunskill, Zoran Popović, Predicting Player Moves in an Educational Game: A Hybrid Approach, In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2013), 2013. [pdf]

Adam M. Smith, Eric Butler, Zoran Popović, Quantifying over Play: Constraining Undesirable Solutions in Puzzle Design, In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG 2013), 2013. [pdf]

Eleanor O’Rourke, Eric Butler, Yun-En Liu, Christy Ballweber, Zoran Popović, The Effects of Age on Player Behavior in Educational Games, In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG 2013), 2013. [pdf]

Teaching

For the Spring 2012 Quarter, I was a Teaching Assistant for UW’s undergraduate capstone course on game development (CSE 481D). I advised and guided students as they created and published games on an online games portal. I was additionally responsible for managing some of the lectures and grading.

For 3 semesters (Spring 2009, Fall 2009 Spring 2010) I was a Teaching Assistant for CMU’s undergraduate computer graphics course (15-462). Along with other TAs, I spearheaded a ground-up design and implementation of all course programming projects. Additionally, I gave a few of the lectures, helped designed homework assignments, held office hours, and graded assignments and tests. Assignment grading involved detailed code review and feedback.