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Over the past month, has continued to champion important research in artificial intelligence and game design while actively promoting the work of the on the international stage. 

His journey began in Berlin at the AMAZE 2025 Festival, a landmark event celebrating independent games and playful media. There, Dr Khalifa presented his latest game, Queen Boat, at the Open Screens showcase—an opportunity to engage with a diverse audience of creators, critics, and technologists. The game, which interweaves cultural narratives with experimental mechanics, sparked conversations around representation and innovation in design. 

Dr Khalifa’s newest game Queen Boat is a visual novel inspired by real events that happened in Egypt targeting 52 men who were arrested and tortured for political agendas. 

From Berlin, Dr Khalifa traveled to Edmont, Canada to speak at the Upper Bound 2025 AI Conference, where he delivered a talk on procedural content generation (PCG) in games. His focus on iterative generators—systems that build content step-by-step—highlighted both technical possibilities and design challenges, reinforcing his commitment to making AI research comprehensible and applicable for newcomers and seasoned developers alike. 

But Dr Khalifa’s engagement didn’t end on stage. He was also invited to a mini Dagstuhl-style research retreat held immediately after the conference. This intimate gathering of researchers tackled three forward-thinking topics:

• Structuring game knowledge as a tree to help players re-engage with games after time away,
• Defining and modeling “intent” in design to better understand the relationship between designers and systems,
• Exploring tension and arousal curves as design tools, where Dr Khalifa introduced the AGAIN and GameVibedatasets—developed to map and measure emotional engagement in games.

Across these events, Dr Khalifa didn’t just present his own work—he actively brought visibility to the research and creative philosophy of the Institute of Digital Games. In talks and conversations, he highlighted the Institute’s commitment to merging design practice with computational research, especially around player experience and procedural generation.

From introducing the AGAIN and GameVibe datasets to connecting with international scholars and developers, his presence opened doors for collaboration and reinforced the Institute’s reputation as a space where technical experimentation meets critical and cultural inquiry in games.