EIS at UC Santa Cruz

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

This year the AAAI Fall Symposium Series included a track organized by Pat Langley on Advances in Cognitive Systems. Pat identified the following objective for the symposium:

Pursue the initial goals of artificial intelligence and cognitive science: To explain intelligence in computational terms and reproduce the entire range of human cognitive abilities in computational artifacts.

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When we started making Prom Week, our mission was to make social interactions truly playable. While games have increasingly gotten better at physical simulation, social interactions in games still tend to be scripted, with most games using dialogue trees of some form. A result of this is that many games end up being about physical conflict, as the physical simulation is the only part of the system dynamic enough to enable interesting gameplay.

Just like physics simulations in puzzle games such as Angry Birds support many emergent solutions to game challenges, we want to support emergent gameplay for social interaction.

Prom Week puts social interaction at the forefront, with the social simulation providing rich and emergent “social physics.” Unlike The Sims, which provides a rich simulation of abstract characters, we want concrete characters, speaking detailed lines of dialog, who have particular likes, dislikes and histories. Also, we want to support both more casual story gameplay, where players manipulate characters to find out what crazy things might happen next, and more strategic gameplay, where players try to accomplish specific goals by manipulating the social environment.

The gameplay involves choosing what social actions characters take with one another. What social actions characters want to take with each other, and how characters responding during these social actions is determined by Prom Week’s social artificial intelligence system. Given a goal, such as making two characters date, and a set of characters, there are innumerable ways to accomplish this goal, all holding true to each character’s personality, social context and history. And the game remembers every action the player takes, with this history influencing character reactions and being brought up in character dialog.

This requires a very rich social simulation. The character’s desires and reactions are determined by over 5,000 social considerations, rules that determine which social actions characters want to do and how they respond to social actions initiated by others. On the simple end, these considerations capture concepts such as being more likely to do something nice to someone if you’re friends with them. On the complex end, the considerations handle situations like a friend spending a lot of time with someone you’re not friends with, combined with the fact that your friend hasn’t spent much time with you lately, causing you to get jealous and making it more likely you’ll  be clingy with your friend. Additionally, the social actions play out with many dialog and effect variations depending on the characters involved and their traits, statuses and histories, using template-based natural language generation to create dialog fitting the situation. And to top it all off, social actions always have lots of repercussions across multiple characters, creating a dynamic social landscape for the player to navigate.

Prom Week is in beta now. Contact us if you want to be part of it! Stayed tuned for more news, stories and demos of Prom Week!