We’re planning a workshop on Design Patterns in Games in conjunction
with next year’s Foundations of Digital Games conference. There is
more info on our website (http://dpg.fdg2012.org/) or you can contact
me directly.
CFP follows:
Workshop on Design Patterns in Games (DPG 2012)
Co-located with FDG 2012 – Raleigh, North Carolina, USA – May 29, 2012
Call for Participation
Overview
A design pattern is a means of formally describing a solution to a
design problem in a particular domain or field. Design pattern
approaches have long been used in diverse fields such as architecture,
software engineering, and interaction design. With the emergence of
game scholarship, there has been interest in applying design patterns
to aspects of game design. There are many potential benefits to design
pattern approaches, including generation of frameworks for teaching
and communicating about game design and practical usage in
brainstorming ideas and tuning designs. Furthermore, deeper
understanding of the patterns implicit in their games can help
designers explore previously untried ideas and expectations of player
behavior.
Important Dates
Paper submission: 5 March, 2012
Notification to authors: 26 March, 2012
Workshop held: 29 May, 2012
Workshop Organization
The DPG workshop would feature a half day of research paper
presentations, followed by a half day of hands-on activities
concluding with short presentations of activity results.
The research paper program will consist of short papers (4 pages in
ACM format) and full papers (8 pages) selected via a peer-reviewed
process. Since the workshop is intended to explore new ideas and
directions, submission of incomplete and in-process results are
encouraged. Selected authors will be invited to submit an expanded
version of their paper to a special issue of the journal Game
Studies.
The hands-on activity will consist of a group discussion identifying
the challenges and opportunities in discovering patterns, teaching
them, and applying them in game design practice. We expect that many
of these issues will follow from the presented papers, but
participants are also encouraged to prepare short position statements
if they have specific issues they would like to see addressed.
Participants will then be divided into groups of 4-5 to select an
issue and explore it in-depth. At the end of the workshop, we will
re-convene and present results. Each breakout group will select a
representative to present their findings, which may include a detailed
exploration of their selected issues and proposals for solutions and
new research directions.
Research Areas
Submissions to this workshop are encouraged from, but not limited to,
the following areas:
- How game design practice can benefit from a design pattern approach
- Case studies of design pattern usage
- Teaching game design using patterns
- Methods for discovering design patterns in existing games
- Methods for representing and communicating design patterns
- Methods for evaluating design patterns
- Design patterns as input to procedural game or level generation systems
- Design patterns in different game genres
- Design patterns in different aspects of game design, including levels, quests/objectives, NPC interactions, or multiplayer
- Relationship between player behavior and design patterns
- Understanding designer intent through design pattern analysis
- Methods of tuning/improving games with design patterns
- Design patterns in analog games
- Use of design patterns in procedural content generation (we have discussed to possibility of a joint session with PCG if we accept papers of interest to both workshops)
Submission Instructions
Submissions should follow ACM SIG conference formatting guidelines.
Papers may be submitted using the Easychair submission system: https://www.easychair.org/account/signin.cgi?conf=dpg2012
Proceedings
We are requesting that all papers be archived in the ACM Digital Library.
Workshop Organizers
Co-Chairs:
Kenneth Hullett, UC Santa Cruz
David Milam, Simon Fraser University
Committee:
Staffan Björk, Göteborg University & Interactive Institute
Gillian Smith, UC Santa Cruz
Jose Zagal, DePaul University
For more information, please visit http://dpg.fdg2012.org
Questions regarding the workshop can be sent to khullett@soe.ucsc.edu
