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I’ve attached after the jump the Call for Papers for the first ever Games and Software Engineering Workshop (GAS 2011), which will be held at ICSE 2011 in idyllic Honolulu, Hawaii! Jim and I have been working very hard getting everything together on what promises to be a great workshop, and we’re honored to have such an illustrious program committee. Papers are four page position papers, to be in by January 21st.
In the past, I’ve written about game design as a new domain for automated discovery, in which one might build discovery systems which uncovered new and interesting knowledge in game design. However, unless you are already familiar with discovery systems, all this might sound too blue-sky to even visualize. So what does it even mean for machine to discover something about game design?
In the prehistory of discovery systems for mathematics and science it wasn’t clear either. It took the development of working systems to give a clear idea of what automated discovery would look like in those domains, and the first hint was in rediscovery of existing knowledge. AM (the “Automated Mathematician”) rediscovered Goldbach’s conjecture about prime numbers through open-ended tinkering with small integers. BACON rediscovered Kepler’s Third Law governing the motion of planets around the Sun by exploring a space of symbolic expressions in relation to a fixed data set (a very early success in what is now popularized as data mining).
If rediscovery provides the first clear evidence of automated discovery in some domain, what would you dare a system to rediscover in game design? We don’t have any sort of “Miyamoto’s Second Law of Platformer Jumping Mechanics” (though it would be pretty neat to see it if it existed). We’ve got the 400 Project and Koster’s Laws of Online World Design, but these are more like wisdom, an intangible step above the kind of solid knowledge we might one day bake into bad-ass design tools. The Game Ontology Project is closer, but what’s something really obvious?
Ok, System, let’s see you rediscover Space Invaders after I feed you Breakout as input.
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At UC Santa Cruz we’re looking for someone to help us conceptualize, launch, and run a new “Center for Games and Playable Media.” We’re seeking someone who would be interested in representing Santa Cruz at events, working with the new center’s affiliates (in industry, government, etc), imagining how new game research technologies could be made into experimental games, and working with students and faculty to bring the game-related activities at Santa Cruz to the next level.
Excerpts from the official information are below. People can apply by going to http://jobs.ucsc.edu and searching for job number 1002822. Also, feel free to leave comments with questions.
NextSpace in Santa Cruz is ending its 2010 What’s Next lectures with a talk titled “Choose Your Own Adventure: The Future of Gaming and Social Media” — 7 p.m. Thursday, December 2, on the UC Santa Cruz campus. Our own Michael Mateas will be one of the panelists, along with CBS Interactive’s Simon Whitcombe and Sol Lipman of AOL / Rally Up.
Per NextSpace: “Two pillars of the digital economy are colliding: Gaming and Social Media. As developers layer more and more of the social graph on the games that we play, the lines between these industry verticals are getting more and more pixilated. Our panel will take a provocative look at this new phenomenon and ask the hard questions, such as: ‘Is social gaming really social?’ and ‘How can innovation in game play and game design impact the social graph?’ With CBS Interactive’s Simon Whitcombe, Sol Lipman of AOL / Rally Up and Michael Matteas of the Expressive Intelligence Studio at UC Santa Cruz, this evening promises to be innovative, iconoclastic and inventive. Join moderator Sandy Skees December 2, for the final installment of the 2010 What’s Next Lecture Series.”
Tickets are $12, $3 with a valid student ID and can be found by calling 831.420.0710 or visiting http://gamingadventure.eventbrite.com/. The lecture will be held in the UC Santa Cruz Theater Arts Center, Heller Dr., Santa Cruz, 95060.
More information can be found at http://whatsnextlectures.com/.
The journal IEEE Software will be running a special issue on the topic of “Engineering Fun” for its September/October 2011 issue. The call for papers is out now, with a deadline of February 1, 2011. Guest editors for the issue are Clark Verbrugge of McGill University and Paul Kruszewski of GRIP Entertainment. IEEE Software has a magazine format and publishes academic research aimed at a software practitioner audience. It has a circulation of over 10,000.
For our (possibly) sizable Belarusian readership, Patric Conrad has translated the original Space Invaders Enterprise Edition post into a Belarusian version! Дзякуй, Patric!
