Laura Levy, PhDemocracy 👾🔬✨

Snow Sled
'Tomb Raider II'
PlayStation

Now seeking:

Senior/Principal User Researcher roles in games (esp early dev), emerging tech, or broader technology products.

Thanks for the consideration and hang in there, y'all!

What I do:

Have no clue what to do next? I *thrive* in those early, foundational research situations.

I specialize in rapid iteration research, emerging tech, and AI-powered systems. Ambiguity is my jam.

And, of course, I've got you on your live service and traditional products research needs

What I am:

• Human factors psychologist, PhD
• 15+ yrs games/tech UX research
• Former R1 academic Research Scientist in CS, HCI
• Live service game support
• Regular game support
• UX of AI...in games!
• Emerging and novel tech expert, yah for games and also other things

Screenshot from Slack with a profile picture of a brunette and blue-eyed character in a red robe from the game, Journey. The text at the top says "Happy 2 years! Joined on October 30, 2023". Additionally text reads "2023-2025".

Two days shy of my Amaversary, I join my dev brethren in the end of this Amazon Games chapter.

What an honor to work with friends that are also colleagues I admire, make some games, & do research that mattered.

15+ yrs in games/tech & ready for the Next Thing! 🧵

www.linkedin.com/in/drlaurale...

Hey folks. I was impacted by the layoffs at Amazon today. If you or someone you know is in need of a UX Researcher with multiple years of experience leading or supporting research initiatives, games or otherwise, please DM me or reach out to me on LinkedIIn. www.linkedin.com/in/cdwheelock

screenshot of a warning from the AI Claude platform that reads, <system warning>the user is nearing the half-way point of the conversation based on the chat session budget. Claude must now substantially reduce the length of responses in order to Keep Claude's responses from being cut off later in the conversation. (This warning is invisible to the user.)</system warning>

I got you baby, I didn't see shit 🫣

Picard: computer, energize

ChatGPT: energizing, sir

Picard: we are still here

ChatGPT: My apologies, you are right. I thought you energized but you are still here. You are energized now.

Picard: Nope, still standing here.

ChatGPT: Ah, I see the issue now. Energizing now.

a man in a suit and tie with the letter s on his tie Alt: Fox Mulder with short dark brown hair and sideburns wearing a light blue shirt, dark blue tie and black suit jacket smiles and shrugs

Happy 64th birthday to the man who makes us want to believe, Fox Mulder. How do you think he and Scully are celebrating? Sweet potato pie? #TheXFiles

Presentation slide with presenter in front. The slide reads: "The greatest research skill you can have is being a nosy bitch who wants to find out"

My user research friends can probably relate

March of Giants, a New Free-to-Play War MOBA From Amazon Games Montreal, Begins Closed Alpha Testing Players in North America can request access now to provide feedback on a brand-new competitive MOBA for PC from the team behind Rainbow Six Siege.

Announcing a game is a huge milestone for folks in the gaming industry and I am hyped that we've announced March of Giants today!

See our announcement here:
www.amazongames.com/en-us/news/a...

Sign up for our upcoming Alpha here:
playmog.games/requestMOGac...

March of Giants A Free-To-Play 4v4 War MOBA

Learn more and request access for the upcoming Closed Alpha at MarchOfGiants.com

March of Giants teaser image

What have I been working on for the past couple years, besides comics?

Alongside @jacksonlanzing.bsky.social and @collinkelly.bsky.social, I've been a writer on a brand new free-to-play AAA game from the team that brought you Rainbow Six: Siege.

Get ready for MARCH OF GIANTS!

The f*&%ing library.

my boss: hey nice job!

my brain: you cannot compliment me in a way that matters

I'll never forget watching Lauryn Hill smack her bassist in the chest for some reason in the middle of a song and him scoot his chair back just a little more to get out of her arm range

(but yah that looks dope af)

hol ‘up, I’m queuing for ranked now 🍌

"Wow, I'm so stressed out today. I wonder why. My job is neat."

: realizes I've been listening to non-stop enemy aggro music in my headset for 5 hours in this playtest :

"oh"

Discord Unveiled: A Comprehensive Dataset of Public Communication (2015-2024) Discord has evolved from a gaming-focused communication tool into a versatile platform supporting diverse online communities. Despite its large user base and active public servers, academic research o...

This is the THIRD paper I've seen in the last year that uses people's data in a way that is deeply ethically problematic. If games scholars keep doing this it is going to seriously harm everyone's ability to do research with online gaming communities as they start closing off to scientists.

Researchers Scrape 2 Billion Discord Messages and Publish Them Online A Brazilian team used Discord’s API to scrape 10% of its open servers.

Another week, another research ethics controversy.

TL;DR Researchers released a public dataset of 2B+ messages from 4M+ users on 3k+ "public" Discord servers. Usernames/IDs are anonymized.

But let's unpack this one... 🧵

www.404media.co/researchers-...

more like WRY FEAST amirite???

cause...Nordic humor...sorry

Lifeworld - Wikipedia

Humanities are important yap yap go read about phenomenology or not yap

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeworld

a close up of a woman 's face with the words `` fine '' written next to her . Alt: A close up of the artist, Rhianna, pouting on camera with text below that reads "fine"

"Hey babe, get a load of this [I DON'T REALIZE WHAT I'M ABOUT TO SAY IS SO STUPID] stupid humanities thing"

(enter computer scientist that you wouldn't expect to know a lot about humanities things)

👨‍🏫: that's a post-modern theory of yap yap important to yap theory Kuhn yap Popper yap

me: ...oh

You count on the NPR Network. THANK YOU to our supporters who are showing we can count on you too.

If you haven’t given yet, it’s time to join the movement to defend public media.

Donate now: n.pr/3EYClNR

Bill Nye the Science guy screenshot with NSF logo

Was watching Bill Nye with my son yesterday—the kind of science education creativity and spirit that's currently being extinguished. Credits hit hard when the NSF logo came up.

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So my girlfriend is an amazing stop motion animator, and she recently did a medieval cat themed bumper for Adult Swim!

Sharing it here because she only has Instagram and I think everyone needs to see her animations. She's so freaking talented, y'alls. PLEASE go follow her!

Tom Sizemore as Cerrito in Heat saying "Well ya know, for me, the action is the juice," crudely Photoshopped to instead read "Well ya know, for me, the gameplay IS the vibes."

A screen shot with dark blue borders and a faint ghostly blue in the middle. The top text shows the voice prompt to Siri, "Siri who is this". Siri's reply is, "This is KCRW. This track is called 'Music'."

It’s so cool how fast this technology has improved and continues to improve our lives every day 🥰 @kcrw.com

all academics hit a point where you must make the difficult decision to title your paper either

- TOWARDS ... [an understanding of yap yap]

OR

- BEYOND ... [whatever you're doing and not what I'm doing]

when, inevitably, you've committed both sins you become a Dean or a husk, who's to say really