CFP: FDG workshop on tabletop games (deadline 27 May 2022)

[Antonios Liapis]

Hi everyone,

If you're working on Artificial Intelligence for playing tabletop games,
or board/card game generation, this call for papers may be of interest
to you! Joseph Brown, Hamna Aslam and I are organizing the fourth
iteration of the FDG workshop on Tabletop Games, and the goal is to get
different researchers approaching tabletop games from different
disciplines and towards different goals (from studying them, to
designing them, to applying AI on them) together. If you're interested,
please read below or visit http://tabletopgamesworkshop.org/ for more
details. As the subject reads, the important date is the submission
deadline on May 27, and the fact that the workshop will take place (in
hybrid format) in Athens, Greece, along with the FDG conference (
http://fdg2022.org ) between the 5th and the 8th of September 2022.

I hope that this is to your liking,

A. Liapis

----------- CFP -----------

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.

Important note on scope

We define tabletop games here to include any game played by a group of
players (or one player, in niche cases) on the tabletop: this includes
board games, role-playing games, technology-enhanced board games (e.g.
Mansions of Madness or Alchemists), and so on. Computer simulations of
tabletop games are also included, e.g. for simulated board game play for
the purposes of artificial intelligence or other computational tasks.
Importantly, the topics of this workshop do not include playground
activities or urban games, pervasive games (e.g. played throughout the
day during other activities), and games intended to be played
exclusively on the computer (e.g. digital card games such as
Hearthstone). Therefore, while a computer-based generator which outputs
a map and description which can be played on a tabletop role-playing
game such as Dungeons & Dragons is acceptable, should the same generator
only output dungeons played on the computer it would not be acceptable.
Similarly, a computer simulation (interactive or not) of Chess would be
acceptable provided that it simulates a board game (in this case Chess)
which can be played on the tabletop. If you have any questions on
whether a topic is within scope of this workshop, please contact us at
ttgwor...@easychair.org for the specific case.

Submissions

We welcome submissions as either full papers describing novel research
as well as short papers. Note that full papers may be published at the
ACM Digital Library under circumstances (depending on the number of
accepted papers), but short papers will not.

We futher welcome playable experiences and demos as part of or instead
of a normal paper presentation and we will work with accepted
submissions in order to allow for the presentation in a space for such
demos.

Submissions can be made via EasyChair at the following address:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ttgworkshop4

Tabletop games span a broad range of applications, but indicative topics
for papers include but not limited to:
 * Player/User Experience Testing and Playtest Methodologies
 * Design and Manufacturing of Physical Game Objects.
 * Impact of 3D printing and rapid prototyping.
 * Rules Generation, Development, and Extraction.
 * Crowd-Funding Development and Processes.
 * Social Networks and Discussion Groups on Analog Games.
 * Impact of YouTube (i.e. video rule-books) on games rules presentation
 * IoT Technologies in Games Objects.
 * Procedural Content Generation.
 * Technology applied to the understanding of play.
 * Historical Reviews, Post Mortem, and Lessons Learned.
 * Dos and Don'ts of Game Design.

Submission Guidelines

We welcome research papers of up to 6 pages in length. We also welcome
short papers on positions, visions and work in progress on topics that
are relevant to the topic of tabletop games: short papers should include
some key references. We also encourage the submission of demonstrations
of research prototypes and various interesting tabletop designs, which
can be accompanied by a long or short paper (of 2 pages). All
submissions have the same closing date, and the submission type should
be designated as part of the title.

Papers submissions will be subject to double-blind peer review, and each
submission will be peer reviewed. Authors of accepted papers will be
invited to give an oral presentation of their paper at the workshop
(either virtually or via physical attendance). All submissions should be
anonymized, as the review process is double-blind. All submissions
should be in PDF format and comply with the new ACM format and need to
import ACM CCS 2012 concepts. Both one-column and two-column ACM format
options are acceptable, and both LaTeX and Word ACM templates are
acceptable for producing the PDF file.

Papers should be submitted through EasyChair:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ttgworkshop4

Important Dates

May 27: Paper submission deadline to
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ttgworkshop4
July 8: Acceptance Notification
September 5-8: Workshop at FDG, Athens, Greece