Storytelling is central to human activity, one of the ways in which we make sense of the world. The screen industries are the latest in a long line of technologies and cultural practices committed to the creation of stories. Film, TV, video, computer games and other interactive media now tell stories digitally. But digital technologies are changing rapidly, enabling new modes of creation, new approaches to storytelling, new experiences for audiences and users. How can the screen industries keep pace with such change? How can they make the most of the new opportunities available to them? How can they develop the skills necessary to engage with these new technologies? How can they create with those technologies in ways that are exciting, commercially viable and capable of generating significant economic growth? These are some of the questions that Creative Media Labs (CML) seeks to answer, as it enables innovations in screen storytelling in the age of interactivity and immersion. The focus of CML is the considerable cluster of screen industry enterprises in the Yorkshire and Humber (Y&H) region. The partnership aims to enable this regional cluster to become the UK centre of excellence for the next generation of digital storytelling. This is an established creative industries cluster that has been earmarked for significant support through Screen Yorkshire's (SY) Growth Plan, backed by the British Film Institute's (BFI) Creative Clusters Challenge Fund, and showcased in the Creative Industries Sector Deal document as one of five "prominent creative industries cluster projects". SY, the BFI and University of York (UoY) have come together in a collaboration that blends world-leading research on digital storytelling with national strategic vision and unparalleled regional industry nous. Clustering is key to the development of the contemporary screen industries, and clusters come in many shapes and sizes. With key initiatives across its five major cities, the Y&H region saw the fastest rate of screen industry growth in the UK in 2009-2015. It is home to one of only three ITV production centres, producing around 500 hours of TV annually; True North, the biggest factual producer in the North of England, now owned by Sky; Warp Films, probably the most important out-of-London film company in the UK, and winners of multiple BAFTAs; Rockstar, one of the largest games developers in the world; Sumo Digital, one of the fastest growing games companies in the UK with over 300 staff; Revolution Software, developers of the hugely successful Broken Sword series; Viridian FX, one of the largest VFX houses in the North of England; and Church Fenton Yorkshire Studios, a major production facility used by Mammoth Screen for ITV's Victoria. There is also a wealth of micro businesses working in the sector. Creative Media Labs will build a sustainable, collaborative R&D partnership around this regional screen industries cluster, its numerous MSMEs and branches of large creative enterprises. Its core delivery partners are UoY, SY and the BFI; the key local authorities, enterprise partnerships and universities in the region are on board; so too are investors and several leading national trade associations, organisations and creative enterprises. Co-creation and collaborative working will be at the core of what we do. UoY has an excellent track record in multi-disciplinary research, with huge investment in creativity, across the arts, humanities and sciences - a combination reflected in the multi-million pound Digital Creativity Labs. There is an extensive pool of research expertise in digital storytelling, from writing, through media embodiment, to development of underpinning technologies. By identifying industry-led challenges, this expertise will be shared with the Y&H screen industries cluster in ways that will enable us to fulfil our ambition to establish the region as the UK centre of excellence for digital storytelling.

The digital games market is an enormous and fast-growing industry with extraordinary impact, particularly on young people and increasingly on other segments of the population. The importance of the UK games industry (3rd largest in the world) was underlined in the Chancellor's Autumn statement (5th December 2012), which confirmed substantial tax reliefs for the digital games industry, saying that "the Government will ensure that the reliefs are among the most generous in the world". Enthusiasm for digital games is underlined by a 2012 Forbes magazine article suggesting that, by the age of 21, the typical child has played 10,000 hours of digital games. How can we harness widespread enthusiasm for digital games to contribute to advances in society and science in addition to economic impacts? For example, we can test economic theories by analysing the artificial economies in online games, or we can improve the motor skills of recovering stroke patients by using games based on motion detection devices such as the Wii controller, Kinect or simply the mobile phone. In this proposal we will bring the UK digital games industry closer to scientists and healthcare workers to unlock the potential for scientific and social benefits in digital games. The numbers of games sold and the numbers of game hours played mean that we only need to persuade a small fraction of the games industry to consider the potential for social and scientific benefit to achieve a massive benefit for society, and potentially to start a movement that will lead to mainstream distribution of games aimed at scientific and social benefits. In order to do this we need to understand the current state of the digital games industry, by engaging directly with games companies and with industry network associations like the Creative Industries Knowledge Transfer Network. We have a group of 12 games companies and 9 network organisations, all of whom have pledged their support, to get us started. Then we need to build simulation models that will allow us to investigate what might happen in the future (e.g. if government policy were to encourage the development of games with scientific and social benefits). We need to conduct research into sustainable business models for digital games, and particularly for games with scientific and social goals. These will show us how businesses can start up and grow to develop a new generation of games with the potential to improve society. Every action in an online game, from an in-game purchase to a simple button push, generates a piece of network data. This is a truly immense source of information about player behaviours and preferences. We will explore what online data is available now and might become available in the future, investigate the issues around gathering such data, and develop new algorithms to "mine" that data to better understand game players as an avenue for making better games, societal impact and scientific research. It is an ambitious programme, but the potential benefits if we are even partially successful could have a huge impact on children, science and wider society.

XR Network+ Virtual Production in the Digital Economy will provide a ten-year research agenda for content creation and consumption. XR Network+ is founded on research collaboration, co-creation and challenge-led innovation, and designed from the ground up to build a community of academic research and industry R&D at the convergence of ideas, technologies, and creative practice in Virtual Production (VP) to deliver impact and opportunity for the whole of the digital economy. Virtual Production (VP) is an emergent area of multi-disciplinary activity encompassing the wider application of digital creativity techniques and technologies across many domains. It is changing the landscape of technology-driven storytelling, media, film and television content production workflows, live and immersive experiences, both large and small scale. The UK screen industries sector is currently investing heavily in traditional studio infrastructure, with demand for production space currently outstripping supply. However, compact, flexible and technology-driven VP facilities will help to shape the future of these and other studios, their production practices, the content they make and hence the audiences that consume this content. This change is based on how a new generation of real-time technologies (motion capture, spatial computing, data, AI, machine learning, volumetric capture, haptics, real-time rendering, immersive XR and responsive media) offer, for the first time, the promise of integrating production processes and workflows from initial concept through to final result. XR Network+ will build on the success of the AHRC Creative Industries Clusters Programme (CICP) and the significant interest that has emerged from these projects in supporting R&D in XR (eXtended Reality) technologies as it converges with VP. The CICP demonstrates how leading universities can act as anchors at the centre of geographical/sectoral creative industries clusters and use their research capacity and expertise for the benefit of their SMEs, bringing opportunities for place-based growth, and economic, social and cultural impact. XR Network+ will land at a critical point, during the final year of the CICP and as a number of significant VP investments come online, offering a short window of opportunity to harness connections and capabilities. XR Network+ builds a bridge between five current CICP projects and will leverage other core UKRI, local government and industry investment. It will drive a community-led programme of complementary VP research and innovation to unlock the potential of content creation and consumption for the whole of the digital economy and related sectors. Research challenges co-created with project partners at application include: VP Integration of virtual game worlds and physical content; sound design in VP contexts; building VP environments, characters and objects; issues of ethics and IP in the use of digital assets and data; AI and data-driven automation; translation and impact in the digital economy. XR Network+ activities will be built across five stages corresponding to the five years of the project (1) Engage; (2) Explore; (3) Challenge; (4) Respond; (5) Report and Renew. An Annual Networking and Showcase event will provide a key point of dissemination for each stage of activity. Feasibility funding will support a potential range of research activities based on best practice from the five CICP projects: a Creative Bridge programme for early career researchers; a Knowledge Transfer Partnership Model; small grant funding; challenge funding; portfolio building; and commissioned research to evaluate the project and build a roadmap for future activity. XR Network+ is important and timely in terms of the significant current interest and investment in VP and the need to coordinate the UK's research base alongside industry and regional investments to provide a pathway for next stage investment and growth at a national level.

The digital games industry has global revenues of $65bn (in 2011) predicted to grow to $82bn by 2017. The UK is a major player, whose position at third internationally (behind the US and Japan) is under threat from China, South Korea and Canada. The £3bn UK market for games far exceeds DVD and movie box office receipts and music sales. Driven by technology advances, the industry has to reinvent itself every five years with the advent of new software, interaction and device technologies. The influential 2011 Nesta "Next Gen" review of the skills needs of the UK Games and Visual Effects industry found that more than half (58%) of video games employers report difficulties in filling positions with recruits direct from education and recommended a substantial strengthening of games industry-university research collaboration. IGGI will create a sustainable centre which will provide the ideal mechanism to consolidate the scientific, technical, social, cultural and cognitive dimensions of gaming, ensuring that the industry benefits from a cohort of exceptional research-trained postgraduates and harnessing research-led innovation to ensure that the UK remains at the forefront of innovation in digital games. The injection of 55+ highly qualified PhD graduates and their associated research projects will transform the way the games industry works with the academic community in the UK. IGGI will provide students with a deep grounding in the core technical and creative skills needed to design, develop and deliver a game, as well as training in the scientific, social, therapeutic and cultural possibilities offered by the study of games and games players. Throughout their PhDs the students will participate in practical industrial workshops, intensive game development challenges and a yearly industrialy-facing symposium. All students will undertake short- and longer-term placements with companies that develop and use games. These graduates will push the frontiers of research in interaction, media, artificial intelligence (AI) and computational creativity, creating new game-themed research areas at the boundaries of computer science and economics, sociology, biology, education, robotics and other fields. The two core themes of IGGI are: Intelligent Games - increasing the flow of intelligence from research into digital games. We will use research advances to seed the creation of a new generation of more intelligent and engaging digital games, to underpin the distinctiveness and growth of the UK games industry. The study of intelligent games will be underpinned by new business models and research advances in data mining (game analytics) which can exploit vast volumes of gameplay data. Game Intelligence - increasing the use of intelligence from games to achieve scientific and social goals. Analysis of gameplay data will allow us to understand individual behaviour and preference on a hitherto impossible scale, making games into a powerful new tool to achieve scientific and societal goals. We will work with user groups and the games industry to produce new genres of games which can yield therapeutic, educational and social benefits and use games to seed a new era of scientific experimentation into human behaviour, preference and interaction, in economics, sociology, psychology and human-computer-interaction. The IGGI CDT will provide a major advance in an area of great importance to the UK economy and massive impact on society. It will provide training for the leaders of the next generation of researchers, developers and entrepreneurs in digital games, forging economic growth through a distinctly innovative and research-engaged UK games industry. IGGI will massively boost the notion of digital games as a tool for scientific research and societal good.

Digital games have extraordinary economic, social and cultural impact. The industry is one of the fastest-growing in the world, larger than film or music, with revenues expected to increase from $138 billion in 2018 to $180 billion by 2021. 2.6 billion people worldwide play digital games (21 million in the UK), with an average age of 35 and equal numbers of females and males. The Wellcome Trust-sponsored game Senua's Sacrifice, made in the UK, won 5 Baftas for its interactive and educational portrayal of psychosis. The UK games industry is a global leader - UK game sales are valued at £4.3bn with 12,000 people directly employed. The games industry is innovative and hungry for innovation - recent research breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) have arisen through games research undertaken at Google DeepMind in the UK. Rolls Royce makes better jet engines using 3D technology pioneered in games. Games are leading the "data and AI revolution" of HM Government's 2017 Industrial Strategy. Games have become a massive lever for social good through applied games for health, education, and science. The mobile game Pokémon Go added 144 billion steps to physical activity in the US alone. The Alzheimer's Research-funded Sea Hero Quest game collected data equivalent to 9,400 years of dementia lab data within 6 months. The EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Intelligent Games and Game Intelligence (IGGI) first received funding in 2014, and has since been a huge success: raising the level of research innovation in games, with the highest-possible ratings in our EPSRC mid-term review. The next phase of IGGI will inject 60+ PhD-qualified research leaders and state of the art research advances into the UK games industry. The two core themes of IGGI are: (1) Intelligent Games: increasing the flow of research into games. IGGI PhD research in topics such as AI, data science, and design will empower the UK games industry to create more innovative and entertaining games. IGGI research has already enhanced the experience for millions of game players. IGGI will create engaging AI agents that are enjoyable to interact with, tackling fundamental challenges for the future of work and society that go beyond games. IGGI will spearhead new AI techniques that augment human creativity by automatically 'filling in the details' of human sketches. (2) Game Intelligence: increasing the use of intelligence from games to achieve scientific and social goals. Every action in a digital game can be logged, creating huge data sets for behavioural science. For example, current IGGI students have assessed traits such as IQ, agreeableness, or attention from large game datasets. IGGI students will investigate more intelligent, adaptive games for education and to improve mental health. IGGI will maximize the enormous opportunity for scientific and social impact from games by laying the research groundwork for further data-driven applied games for health, science, and education. IGGI will massively advance these research themes, and train 60+ PhD students to be future research leaders. To accomplish this, our updated training programme and 60+ research supervisors will provide students with rigorous training and hands-on experience in AI, programming, game design, research methods, and data science, with end user and industry engagement from day one. Recruiting and empowering a diverse student cohort to promote equality, diversity, and inclusion through games, IGGI will drive positive culture change in industry and academia. Students will work with leading UK experts to co-create and disseminate standards for responsible games innovation. Directly working with the UK games industry through placements, workshops, game development challenges, and an annual conference, they will advance research knowledge and translate it into social, cultural and economic impact.