Studying what makes games fun, and leading the people who build them.

Dr. Schaffer has been in UX for over 18 years. Early in his career, he worked as Playtest Project Manager on AAA titles at Ubisoft, including Splinter Cell: Blacklist, Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, and WATCH_DOGS. Since then, he has run card sorting studies to map the sources of player enjoyment, published validated psychometric measures of them, and used the measures in controlled experiments with custom research games.

He has guided 25 independent-study students through building research games, several of them co-authoring some of his 15 peer-reviewed publications and 2 book chapters. His PhD adviser was Xiaowen Fang at DePaul. His Master's research adviser was Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, co-founder of the field of positive psychology.

He currently teaches and runs a research group as Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Elmhurst University. Over seven years in university teaching, he has taught across Computer Science, Data Science, Game Programming, Web Development, and Human-Computer Interaction. His research sits at the intersection of HCI, positive psychology, and game development, applied to both game design and serious games, including a current project on serious games for cybersecurity training and defense against social engineering attacks.

Education