[CFP yeah i know, i know - look i just stayed up all night writing papers too but hear me out] The 3rd Experimental AI In Games Workshop!

[Michael Cook]

Hello all,

The Experimental AI in Games workshop is coming back to AIIDE this year!

If you don't know about EXAG - it's a workshop for your newest ideas, your most broken prototypes, your wildest AI & games dreams. It's for papers about what games could be, or might be, or should be, with your best magic AI research dust sprinkled on the top. It's for your secret projects or that special bit of work that doesn't quite fit in at the other conferences. We want all of that and more. Show us what you've been up to!

If you've been to EXAG before - this year it's going to be even more fun! We've got new cool evening events planned, an improved tutorials track designed for passionate and engaging introductions to cool topics - it's going to be the most inspiring two days of your conference calendar this year.

Without further ado, I've included the Call for Papers below. You can also play this year's Playable Call For Papers, PAPERTIME, online here: http://cutgarnetgames.itch.io/papertime

And of course, find all of these details on our website, http://www.exag.org/

We know it's been a long year so far, and we know the deadlines are tight. But EXAG is great because of the wonderful people who submit to it - we hope you'll be part of it this year!

All the best,

Mike, Antonios, Alex

EXAG Organisers

p.s. Thanks for reading this far! If you're the first, here's a Steam key: K9G8W-LTC70-5V3B4

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CALL FOR PAPERS

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The 3rd Experimental AI in Games Workshop

http://www.exag.org

October 8-9, 2016

Located at AIIDE 2016 in San Francisco, California

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DEADLINES

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Paper Submission deadline: June 27

Acceptance notification: July 20

Camera-ready deadline: July 29

Demos and Tutorials Submission Deadline: September 1

Demos and Tutorials Notification: September 14

EXAG 2016: October 8-9

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ABOUT THE WORKSHOP

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The Experimental AI in Games (EXAG) workshop aims to foster experimentation at the interface of AI (broadly construed) and all aspects of games and game development. EXAG solicits submissions in three tracks:

 + Papers arguing for new roles of AI in games and game development or presenting prototypes of experimental applications of AI in games and game creation

 + Tutorials - short talks that introduce new ideas, teach people to use new tools or libraries, or describe useful resources

 + Demonstrations of innovative tools, games, art or other creations in and around experimental AI and games

We have much more planned for EXAG besides talks, including our traditional games night, a show and tell demo session, a revamped game jam, and possibly some special game events!

EXAG will be held on October 8-9, 2016 and be co-located with the Artificial Intelligence in Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE) 2016 conference located in San Francisco, CA, USA.

To support experimentation, EXAG will include a number of socializing, demonstration, and (optional) coding/hackathon events. DAGGER is an evening event where local game developers and AIIDE attendees meet up to play and share their games and demos with each other, eat some food, and get to know each other. EXAG is running a demonstration track alongside its main track for games or tools which may be of interest to EXAG attendees. Demonstration submissions will be considered for inclusion in both DAGGER and the main event itself, schedule permitting. If you are submitting a paper to the main track which includes or refers to a game or tool that you wish to demonstrate, you should still submit a separate demonstration abstract of roughly 500 words, at least 1 image of the system, and a link to the game/system.

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WORKSHOP TOPICS

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EXAG 3 will touch on a variety of experimental topics. Workshop topics include, but are by no means limited to:

 + Full or prototype games demonstrating novel or experimental applications of AI

 + Procedural content generation in game development or as a game mechanic

 + New applications of AI to game design problems or game mechanics

 + Automated game generation

 + Computational Creativity in Games

 + Formal and computational models of game design and aesthetics

 + AI-powered tools for expert and novice game design

 + New approaches to traditional game AI problems, e.g. agents, planning, narrative

 + Fringes and beyond - showing us new ideas in and around gaming that might influence or improve our research

 + Oops! Research (games, experiments, theories) that didn’t quite work and an explanation about the failure and lessons learned

We welcome submissions that push our understanding how AI can be applied to or influence game design. The above topics are suggestive only!

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SUBMIT!

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EXAG 3 will be accepting three types of submissions, all in AAAI format.

Submission of papers takes place via our EasyChair site:

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=exag16

Submissions of Tutorials and Demonstrations is done via a Google Form:

http://tinyurl.com/exag16demotut

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SUBMISSION TYPES

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<Papers>

Papers of up to 6 pages of text and unlimited space for references and acknowledgments. Papers may address any of the workshop topics (or other topics authors consider of interest to the community). Papers should support new topics through arguments spanning prototypes, thought experiments, or other forms of evidence.

Not sure a topic is relevant? Reach out to the organizers and we can help!

Are you an indie or games industry person and not sure? Contact us and we’ll help sort things out!

Papers will be presented at the workshop; presentation lengths will depend on the total number of acceptances. Reviewing will use a double blind process: reviewers will not know the identity of authors and authors will not know the identity of reviewers.

<Tool Tutorials>

Tutorials will allow for a presentation to demonstrate the use of a specific tool, technique, system. Tutorials can also introduce an interesting subculture or discipline from around games or outside it that may be relevant or inspiring to the EXAG audience. Submissions should be an abstract of up to 500 words, including at least 1 image if presenting software and a link to a website for others to access that tool/technique/system.

Tutorial presentations will be managed after submissions are received, but will likely receive a talk-length slot (25 mins) with optional breakout time for hands-on tutoring where appropriate. Tutorial submissions do not need to be anonymised, but can be if the authors wish.

<Game/Experiment Demos>

Demos will emphasize a presentation of a game or experimental research system (procedural content generator, AI director, interactive dance installation, etc.). Submission requirements mirror tutorials: up to 500 words in an abstract, at least one image of what will be demonstrated, and a link for web access to that thing (if possible).

Demo presentations will be allocated time based on the total number of acceptances (expect at least 10 minutes) and an (optional) showcase session where workshop participants can try the demos. Demos are perfect to show research systems, innovative game designs (even those that aren’t quite mature or don’t yet work!), or novel experiments at the intersection of AI and games (interpreted as broadly as you want, honestly).

Demo submissions do not need to be anonymised, but can be if the authors wish.

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ORGANISATION

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Antonios Liapis - @SentientDesigns - an.l...@gmail.com

Institute of Digital Games, University of Malta

Mike Cook - @mtrc - mi...@gamesbyangelina.org

Games Academy, Falmouth University

Alex Zook - @zookae - zoo...@gmail.com

Blizzard Entertainment

Program Committee announcements coming soon:

http://www.exag.org

[Julian Togelius]

A critical review of "Paper Time" by Michael Cook
By Julius Togelian
Department of Critical Reactions

"Paper Time", by Michael Cook of Failmoth University and Gut Carnage Games, has no option to play with a virtual reality headset. It has no 4K graphics and seems not to be prepared for the the Xbox One Scorpion Playstation, not to mention the Hollalens. This stark ignorance of current hardware trends, bordering on a rejection of technological progress, initially suggests that the game embodies a populist anti-modernist ethos and belongs in the realm of backward-looking heimat romanticism. This view is reinforced by the location of Foulmouth at the very end of Britain, a place modernity barely reached and which has been left at the sidelines of progress.

However, look further and a different picture emerges. Let's start with the title of the game. "Paper Time" is an obvious reference to "Papers, Please", a game about the cruelty of border controls where the player puts themselves in the role of an immigration official tasked with denying entry to refugees. This suggests that Cook sees the traditional peer-review process and low acceptance levels of established conferences as essentially the same xenophobic and discriminatory practice. In effect, he is saying that most computer science conferences could as well have been chaired by Donald Trump. The EXAG workshop supposedly instead embraces a labor theory of scientific productivity, where papers are given time to present in relation to the amount of hours that went into producing them. 

Another reading of the game's title alludes to the decline and eventual downfall of the paper industry, in the age of the increasingly computerized office and eternally jamming printers. Paper Time thus refers to a time passed, not to return. It becomes a eulogy for a lost industry, and a warning of a new age of blue-collar unemployment. What Cook does not sufficiently acknowledge is the vast environmental benefits of the cessation of paper production. Some published research may smell bad, but not as bad as a modern papermill.

A third reading of the title is that it references "Paper Boy", a 1980s game about delivering newspapers from a bicycle. That game made a strong statement about the occupational health hazards of an underpaid job with low or no job security. It is not unthinkable that Cook wants to make the same statement about the job situation of game AI researchers, at Foolmoot or elsewhere.

Here I should point out that I have of course not played the game, as the requirement of gaming literacy (also known as "skillz") is exclusionary and the performativity of game-playing precludes an adequate critical stance in reviewing. Actually playing the game also goes against the standard of triple-blind reviewing, which is increasingly adopted at conferences; as the content of the game can be seen as an expression of its creator, playing the game before reviewing it would put the reviewer at risk of biasing the review with their personal preferences.

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--
Julian Togelius
Associate Professor, New York University
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
mail: jul...@togelius.com, web: http://julian.togelius.com

--
Julian Togelius
Associate Professor, New York University
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
mail: jul...@togelius.com, web: http://julian.togelius.com

[Julian Togelius]

(If anyone is worried about the content of the previous mail, let me
assure you that there is nothing to worry about. It's just part of a
little tradition between me and Mike. A game, you might call it. The
only (intentionally) true statement in the previous mail is that I
have not player "Paper Time" yet.)

[Lucas, Simon M]

Julian,

My only worry is that we’ll have to wait too long for the next instalment…

Cheers,

Simon

[Michael Cook]

Oh my god I never saw this! :O

> email to proceduralcontent+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.

> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.



--
Julian Togelius
Associate Professor, New York University
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
mail: jul...@togelius.com, web: http://julian.togelius.com