Workshops

This year FDG hosts 6 workshops as part of their program. This year we have:

The 13th Workshop on Procedural Content Generation (PCG2022)


Website: https://www.pcgworkshop.com/

Submissions: https://easychair.org/cfp/pcg2022

Procedural Content Generation (PCG) attracts significant interest from both academia and the games industry.

PCG has the potential of substantially reducing the authorial burden in game creation, improving the theoretical understanding of game design and realizing its automation, and enabling entirely new forms of games and playable experiences.

This workshop aims to advance knowledge in PCG by bringing together researchers and developers and facilitating discussion.

Developing Digital Games in and for Academic Contexts


Website: https://gameresearch.leiden.edu/events/fdg22-workshop

Within the FDG community, we are frequently involved in the design and development of games that are used for research. The games we develop are meant to educate, train, or are tools to understand individual or social behavior. We create them to gather data or to serve as training grounds for algorithmic advancements. We might even use games to convey an argument, or to illustrate a thought experiment. All of these motivations for developing games have one thing in common: they happen in and for an academic context.

Despite this commonality, there is lack of discourse on the idiosyncrasies that come with the development of games within the academic environment. In this workshop, we map challenges, opportunities, and strategies that are specific to game development within and for an academic context.

Doing so requires the participation of reflective researchers and developers who have a stake in the creation of digital games for academic purposes. Join us for a day of getting into the weeds of academic game development, and shaping the academic discourse surrounding it.

The 2022 Workshop on User Experience of Artificial Intelligence in Games


Website: http://uxofai.org/cfp.php

Submissions: https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=uxofai2022

The Workshop on User Experience and Artificial Intelligence encompasses the intersection between UX and AI as they manifest in games, as it pertains to how the player experiences the interaction with games that embed AI systems as artifacts or underlying systems for personalization, adaptation or content creation.

A commonly quoted aim of AI in Games research is the idea that we are not building AIs to beat a game, but to create a better user or player experience. One large question in the field is how do we do this, and maybe even more importantly, how do we know when we are successful in creating a better user or player experience?

The purpose of the User Experience of Artificial Intelligence in Games workshop to act as a point of interaction between researchers specialized within these fields, in the hope that this will help facilitate research that allows for the creation of more interesting and robust AI based game experiences, construed very broadly. This includes, but is not limited to, human experiences with procedural content generation, personalization, player modeling, analytics, agent-based models, or other AI-based systems or artifacts within games. We hope to connect researchers working within many disciplinary orientations, including computer science, human-computer interaction, social science, and cognitive and social psychology. Of particular interest are studies on how we create interesting game experiences using AI as an underlying architecture, and how these are interpreted by players. This year's workshop aims to further build a community centered on this by putting forward demonstrations of work combining UX and AI, as well as models and theories that can be used to create understanding where the areas intersect. We especially welcome demonstrations of work in progress or work showcasing new ideas.

Games and the Metaverse


Website: https://sites.google.com/view/fdg-metaverse-workshop/

Submissions: 2 tracks with separate submission guidelines.
Talk: https://forms.gle/X6k4ib6vaGSCL9p29
Paper: https://easychair.org/cfp/metaverse2022

The metaverse has become a topic of interest in both industry and academic settings. Research and development that focus on the ‘metaverse’ explore the immersive future of the internet, where distributed people from around the world can connect through virtual social environments. Research on the metaverse is distributed throughout varying sub-domains of games research, thus bringing these groups together will help unify and provide a launching point for future progress in the field. Unsurprisingly, the term has gained traction in the digital gaming realm as many related games and play research topics directly contribute to the metaverse. We are hosting a workshop at FDG 2022 which will bring together researchers in the field and discuss the current landscape of the metaverse in game research, and opportunities and challenges to propel the future evolution of research in this area.

Gameplay Design Patterns


Website: http://virt10.itu.chalmers.se/index.php/Gameplay_Design_Patterns_FDG_2022_Workshop

Submissions: Please send letter of interest explaining your interests and expectations regarding the workshop (max 500 words, excluding bibliography) to Jussi Holopainen (jholopai@cityu.edu.hk) by June 17th 2022.

Gameplay design patterns were introduced as a game design approach in the early 2000s (Kreimeier 2002; Holopainen and Björk 2003; Björk, Lundgren, & Holopainen 2003) with the first major pattern collection published in 2004 (Björk and Holopainen 2004). Since then the approach has gained some momentum in both academia and industry with considerable variation in the details and aims (e.g., Björk & Holopainen 2006; Barney 2020; FDG Workshop on Design Patterns for Games series). This workshop has two main goals. The first goal is to collect and discuss gameplay design patterns as a phenomena, including identifying new takes on gameplay design patterns, collecting known uses of gameplay design patterns, and providing feedback on the planning of the new gameplay design patterns book. The second goal is that the workshop will bring together game design researchers interested in pattern approaches to facilitate future collaborations, including future workshops.

Interested participants are expected to provide a letter of interest explaining their interests and expectations regarding the workshop (max 500 words, excluding bibliography). This will provide the basis for selecting attendees moderated by a goal to ensure a diversity among the participants. The organizers are solely responsible for the final selection of attendees. The selected letters of interest will be distributed to the participants one week prior to the workshop together with other relevant articles and texts. Anticipated number of participants is 10 to 15.

The authors are planning to release an open access anthology collecting various patterns approaches to coincide with the 20th anniversary of Patterns in Game Design (Björk & Holopainen 2004). The authors are running a series of workshops for developing the contents for the anthology and this would be the second after one at DiGRA 2022.

Participants are welcome regardless of interest or not in submitting a proposal for chapter in the planned new book on gameplay design patterns.

Fourth Workshop on Tabletop Games


Website: http://tabletopgamesworkshop.org/

Submissions: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ttgworkshop4

Analog games have seen a surge of interest: board game cafés, new titles, and a more accepting culture to role-playing games as a pass-time has fueled a boom in sales. However, academic research is relatively stagnating upon the analog domain as an object of design, due to both the interdisciplinary nature taking cues from computer science, narrative creation, psychology, and due to a lack of good publication venues for such works. Although being integrated to achieve crucial outcomes such as brain health diagnosis, industrial training, recruitment process, analog games have been under-studied in terms of human factors consideration and design improvisation. The workshop endeavours to highlight such issues by discussing existing solutions and potential areas of improvement. Furthermore, the aim of this workshop is to address the gap between research and practice, looking at the ways in which academics can apply their tools to the discussion of analog games; this includes but is not limited to board games, war games, and tabletop role-playing.

This year sees the 4th iteration of the FDG Workshop on Tabletop Games. You can find the programme and accepted papers the previous workshops held on 2018, 2019 and 2020.

CONTACT US - fdg2022@easychair.org