Theme

CELEBRATING THE PLAYER

When designing games, the cardinal question is often referred to as “what does the player do”? This question is not restricted to game design but pertains to all game research. For user researchers and data analysts this question is about analyzing, modeling, and predicting player behavior; for AI researchers this is about anticipating player responses to interacting with Non-Player Characters and generated content or modeling human-like responses; for game studies scholars this is about understanding play and its meaning for players, culture and society; for scholars investigating games for a purpose this is about exploring how more impact can be achieved by considering the role of players more fundamentally. In fact, “what does the player do?” is the central question of this year’s conference theme of “Celebrating the Player” with the following modification: “what does the player do, why, and how do we know?” The “why” suggests a theoretical explanation for understanding players. The “how do we know” refers to a methodological underpinning for understanding players. For FDG 2017 we seek efforts within and across domains and disciplines that propose theoretical frameworks and methods to accomplish this, and thereby advance the field of digital games at large. We especially welcome interdisciplinary efforts where scholars collaborate across disciplines to address this year’s theme.

Papers

We invite research contributions in the form of a full paper of up to 10 pages in length or as short paper of up to 6 pages in length. We invite contributions from any discipline, from computer science, communication studies, learning sciences, and psychology to the visual arts, humanities, public policy, and architecture. When submitting authors are requested to select one the following tracks that fits most closely with their submission:

All papers must describe a completed unit of work and show rigorous and compelling evaluation of the ideas they present. FDG 2017 will not accept any paper that, at the time of submission, is under review for or has already been published or accepted for publication in a journal or another conference. Each track will nominate two papers for honorable mention and one best paper. All best paper award winners will present their paper in the “best paper” single track session. Honorable mention papers will receive recognition during their session.

Workshops

The conference workshops are full-day and half-day sessions focused on emerging game-related topics. These workshops provide an informal setting for new developments to be presented, discussed, and demonstrated. Workshops can also be hands-on or studio-based, and we especially encourage the submission of proposals for workshops that involve participants working together to explore and define new areas of game-related scholarship. We are particularly interested in topics that bridge different communities and disciplines. Concise workshop proposals (4 pages) should include: the objectives and expected outcome of the workshop, the rationale for the workshop informed by the literature and current trends, the planned activities, the background of the organizer(s), the anticipated number of participants, and the means for soliciting and selecting participants, and publication strategy.

Panels

Panel submissions should be in the form of a 4-page extended abstract describing the focus of the panel (informed by the literature and current trends), providing a list of confirmed speakers, and indicating their areas of expertise relative to the topic. We encourage both debate-style panels that include representatives advocating several positions on a topic of disagreement, and emerging-area style panels that consolidate and explain recent work on a subject of interest to the FDG community.

Posters

Posters are aimed at capturing work in progress and ongoing promising research. In addition, in light of the latest developments on research in general, we welcome proposals for studies and experiments designs that have not run yet. We encourage the FDG community to look into the work by the Center for Open Science and the suggestion to consider pre-registration, an open research practice where researchers have the option or are required to submit their research rationale, hypotheses, design, and analytic strategy before beginning the study. Submissions should be in the form of a 4-page extended abstract. Extended abstracts will be published in the ACM DL and exposed during a dedicated poster session. In your submission you need to indicate one of the tracks from full/short paper submission.

Tech Demos

The demo exhibition provides a forum for demonstrations of work best suited to interaction rather than a paper or a formal presentation. This track encourages submissions of technical demos showcasing the latest tools, techniques, and systems created for games by academic or industrial research groups, or other early-stage or late-breaking research not yet ready for formal presentation. Submissions should include a 4-page extended abstract, an unedited video illustrating the technology, and (if possible) a link to the demo. Tech demos will be presented at a dedicated tech demo session. Selected students projects receive a conference registration waiver for the day of the conference.

Game Competition

This competition is a showcase of games and playable media. We encourage submissions that are aligned to one or more of these themes:

• Expressive PCG: Playable experiences that include content generation as the main driver. Encouraged are submissions that think deeply about a meaningful role of Procedural Content Generation (PCG) and not apply it for the sake of increasing replayability.

• Narrative Experiences: Playable experiences where story and narrative are central elements to the experience. Submissions are encouraged that experiment with innovative ways of how gameplay and narrative are integrated. Also encouraged are submissions that perform environmental storytelling.

• Games as Research Tools: Playable experiences where the environment is used to study behavior of humans or systems (think of the bullwhip effect in the Beergame), collect data (e.g., gamified surveys), let players contribute to research (e.g., human computation or crowdsourcing games), or train AI agents.

Submissions should include a 4-page extended abstract, an unedited video of a playthrough, and (if possible) a link to the game. Selection is juried. Selected students projects receive a conference registration waiver for the day of the conference.

Doctoral Consortium

We invite PhD students to apply to the Doctoral Consortium, a forum to provide PhD students with early feedback on their research directions, from fellow students, researchers, and experienced faculty in the area. The consortium is primarily for PhD students who intend to pursue a career in academia and who will soon propose, or have recently proposed, their dissertation research. To apply, doctoral students should submit a CV, a 4-page extended abstract describing their proposed research, and a short letter explaining how you would benefit from the consortium and what questions you want to discuss (general and/or specific to your research). The abstract should address the goals of your research, the proposed approach and how it differs from prior work, any results you may have, and your plans for completing the work. Accepted Doctoral Consortium students will give a presentation and are invited to present a poster on their abstracts during the general conference poster session. Approximately 6-8 students will be invited and receive scholarships that cover the conference registration.

Registration

Registration covers everything at the conference (workshops, meals, gala etc.).

When registering keep in mind that your e-mail will give you access to the conference schedule. If you register for multiple attendees, make sure you provide a unique e-mail for each attendee. You can update e-mails at a later point.

Keynotes

Constance Steinkuehler

Constance Steinkuehler is a Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine where she investigates cognition and learning in multiplayer videogames in domains including literacy, scientific reasoning, mathematical reasoning, computational literacy, collective problem solving, sociability, attention, and emotional self-regulation. Her current interests also include cultural myths about videogames, women in the industry, and the role of eSports on college campuses (like UCI).

She is President of the Higher Education Video Games Alliance (HEVGA), an academic organization of game design and game studies programs in higher education. She formerly served as Senior Policy Analyst under the Obama administration in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, advising on games and digital media. Her work has been funded by the MacArthur Foundation, the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation, the Gates Foundation, and the National Science Foundation.

Constance has a PhD in Literacy Studies, an MS in Educational Psychology, and three Bachelor Degrees in Mathematics, English, and Religious Studies. Her dissertation was a cognitive ethnography of the MMOs Lineage I and II where she served as siege princess for the LegendsOfAden guild. Her husband Kurt Squire is an educational game designer and scholar. They live with their two little gamers in Southern California.

Keynote slides (19MB)

Raph Koster

Raph Koster is a veteran game designer who has been professionally credited in almost every area of the game industry. He’s been the lead designer and director of massive titles such as Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies; a venture-backed entrepreneur heading his own studio; and he’s contributed design work, writing, art, soundtrack music, and programming to many more titles ranging from Facebook games to single-player games for handheld consoles.

Koster is widely recognized as one of the world’s top thinkers about game design, and is an in-demand speaker at conferences all over the world. His book A Theory of Fun for Game Design is nearing its tenth anniversary as one of the undisputed classics in the games field. In 2012, he was named an Online Game Legend at the Game Developers Conference Online. Visit his blog at www.raphkoster.com.

Keynote slides

Adrian Cheok

Adrian David Cheok (www.adriancheok.info), Director of Imagineering Institute, Iskandar, Malaysia, Professor of Pervasive Computing at City University London. Founder and Director of the Mixed Reality Lab. Previously Professor at Keio University, Graduate School of Media Design, Associate Professor at National University of Singapore, and Mitsubishi Electric, Japan. Research in mixed reality, human-computer interfaces, wearable computers, pervasive and ubiquitous computing. Featured in worldwide broadcasts such as CNN, BBC, National Geographic, Discovery Channel, etc. Recipient of awards and prizes: A-STAR Young Scientist of the Year, Hitachi Fellowship, SCS Young Professional of the Year, Fellow in Education, World Technology Network, Microsoft Research Award in Gaming and Graphics, C4C Children Competition Prize, Integrated Art Competition Prize, Creativity in Action Award, First prize Mindtrek Award, First prize Milan International InventiON, Gold Award Creative Showcase ACE, Keio University Japan Gijyuju-sho award, SIP Distinguished Fellow Award, Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. Honorary Expert of Telefonica and El Bulli, the number one restaurant in the world. Fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA). NESTA Top 10 Technologies of 2015.

In 2016, he was awarded the Distinguished Alumni Awards by University of Adelaide, in recognition of his achievements and contribution in the field of Computing, Engineering and Multisensory communication. In 2017, he entered the elite list of The h-Index for Computer Science, a list that contains only the top 0.06% of all computer scientists in the world. Editor in Chief of the academic journals: ACM Computers in Entertainment, Transactions on Edutainment (Springer), and Lovotics: Academic Studies of Love and Friendship with Robots. 1994, Bachelor's (First Class Hons) in Engineering, University of Adelaide; 1999, PhD in Engineering.

A letter to the FDG community concerning this keynote and later Twitter behavior.

Michael Gourlay

Dr. Michael J. Gourlay works as a Principal Software Engineer Lead at Microsoft on HoloLens, where he leads software engineering teams in the Analog Platform R&D organization, under the Environment Understanding group, for augmented reality, virtual reality & mixed reality platforms such as HoloLens and Windows Holographic.

Michael leads the team that develops the inside-out tracking system which fuses computer vision, signal processing and inertial tracking techniques. This technology underlies rendering world-locked holograms. He also led the team that performs calibration using computer vision and numerical optimization. That team creates calibration solutions for both factory and field operation. Michael’s team also developed the surface reconstruction solution (branded Spatial Mapping) for Windows Holographic. That gives devices a virtual representation of real-world surfaces, permitting virtual objects to appear to interact with real-world objects, both visually and physically.

Michael previously worked at Electronic Arts (EA Sports) and also developed curricula for and taught at the University of Central Florida (UCF) Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy (FIEA). He also performed scientific research using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and the world's largest massively parallel supercomputers. He received his BS in Physics from Georgia Tech and his PhD in Physics from University of Colorado at Boulder.

Keynote slides (300MB)

Special Sessions

Rational Game Design Tutorial

A full day crash course in Rational Game Design (RGD) and the rational conception process to learn the Ubisoft Way from Game Director Alexis Jolis-Desautels. RGD is a way of objectively quantifying elements of user experience in order to create a consistent game play experience. RGD is most commonly used to understand how various game elements impact on difficulty. As difficulty plays such a significant role in determining user experience (a precarious balance between rage and boredom!), we can use the objective, number driven system of RGD to craft user experience. Although RGD is now used to create much more than just game levels, the RGD tag has stuck and is now used to describe design activities using this data driven approach. For more on rational game design, see an introduction Gamasutra article and a Gamasutra article applying it to Rayman.

Alexis started in games in 2004 with Ubisoft Montreal and now is a Design Director at Lucky Hammers. He has worked, among others, on Splinter Cell: Double Agent, TMNT, Lost: Via Domus, Shaun White Skateboarding and on the Assassin’s Creed brand. He is mostly interested in new applications of science and psychology in the field of games. With a background as an actor and journalist, he developed skills as a trainer and a communicator, mostly about game design but also about games as a medium and human activity. After teaching game design at the Ubisoft Campus, he specialized as a teacher and internal trainer and assisted the design community within the studio. He is now mostly lost in virtual space, looking at the design of VR.

Tutorial slides (300MB)

Tuesday Evening LARP

Lizzie Stark and Emily Care Boss will run a short larp from or influenced by the Nordic tradition--few rules, a set structure, and packing a powerful emotional wallop. What we run, and whether we run two games simultaneously, will depend on the number of participants who sign up. Candidates include White Death, a poetic non-verbal larp that emphasizes physical expression; In Residency, about the strange atmosphere of artists' colonies, the relationship between trauma and art, and flirting; Before and After Silence, about the power of silence in a world of sound; Papers, about life in a surreal office governed by consultants; and more.

Lizzie Stark is an author, journalist, and larp designer. Her first book, Leaving Mundania, was a narrative nonfiction account of larp in the US and Nordic countries. Since then, she has edited the collections Larps from the Factory and #Feminism; served as a play consultant to museums and interactive theater troupes; designed larps for festivals, the Kennedy Center's ArtsEdge, and for fun; and traveled the country giving talks and workshops about games. Her larp blog, LeavingMundania.com, is widely cited in the field.

Emily Care Boss of Black & Green Games is an award-winning, independent role-playing game designer living in western Massachusetts, USA. Her designs include Breaking the Ice, Shooting the Moon, and Under my Skin, now collected as the Romance Trilogy. An outspoken and influential advocate of diversity and creator-control in analog games for over a decade, Emily has edited collections of essays on women in gaming; founded a regional convention showcasing small-press and indie tabletop games; and been published internationally in journals and games. Emily is a member of the Indie Game Developer's Network. Find her work at blackgreengames.com.

"The Lost Arcade" Documentary Screening

Written and produced by Irene Chin and directed by Kurt Vincent, THE LOST ARCADE, is an intimate story of a once-ubiquitous cultural phenomenon on the edge of extinction, especially in New York City, which once had video arcades by the dozen. These arcades were as much social hubs to meet up and hang out as they were public arenas for gamers to demonstrate their skills. But by 2011, only a handful remained, most of them corporate affairs, leaving the legendary Chinatown Fair on Mott Street as the last hold-out of old-school arcade culture. Opened in the early 1940’s, Chinatown Fair, famous for its dancing and tic tac toe playing chickens, survived turf wars between rival gangs, increases in rent, and the rise of the home gaming system to become an institution and haven for kids from all five boroughs. A documentary portrait of the Chinatown Fair and its denizens, THE LOST ARCADE is a eulogy for and a celebration of the arcade gaming community, tenacity, and Dance Dance Revolutionary spirit.

The documentary will be screened at FDG and the director Kurt Vincent will be at FDG.

"The Lost Arcade" Documentary Screening

Written and produced by Irene Chin and directed by Kurt Vincent, THE LOST ARCADE, is an intimate story of a once-ubiquitous cultural phenomenon on the edge of extinction, especially in New York City, which once had video arcades by the dozen. These arcades were as much social hubs to meet up and hang out as they were public arenas for gamers to demonstrate their skills. But by 2011, only a handful remained, most of them corporate affairs, leaving the legendary Chinatown Fair on Mott Street as the last hold-out of old-school arcade culture. Opened in the early 1940’s, Chinatown Fair, famous for its dancing and tic tac toe playing chickens, survived turf wars between rival gangs, increases in rent, and the rise of the home gaming system to become an institution and haven for kids from all five boroughs. A documentary portrait of the Chinatown Fair and its denizens, THE LOST ARCADE is a eulogy for and a celebration of the arcade gaming community, tenacity, and Dance Dance Revolutionary spirit.

The documentary will be screened at FDG and the director Kurt Vincent will be at FDG.

Workshops

Schedule

This schedule is subject to changes and, except for the panels, single track. For quick access to the schedule:

• Computer: http://fdg2017.sched.com/
• Mobile: http://fdg2017.sched.com/mobile

Proceedings

The FDG17 proceedings (papers, posters, and selected workshops) are available on the ACM Digital Library. All other publications are listed below.

Tech demos:

• Owen Gottlieb, Dakota Herold and Ed Amidon - Card Tricks: A Workflow for Scalability and Dynamic Content Creation Using Paper2D and Unreal Engine 4
• Markus Eger and Chris Martens - A Browser-based Interface for the Exploration and Evaluation of Hanabi AIs
• Joe Griffin, Jim Laffey, Justin Sigoloff, Sean Lander, Troy Sadler, Sean Goggins, So Mi Kim, Eric Wulff and Andrew Womack - Mission HydroSci: Tech Demo
• Tiago Machado, Andy Nealen and Julian Togelius. Cicero - A mixed-initiative AI-assisted game design tool
• Eric Kaltman, Joseph Osborn, Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Michael Mateas - Game and Interactive Software Scholarship Toolkit (GISST)

Games:

• Bria Mears and Jichen Zhu - Motherhood
• Jeff Warmouth, Ben Houge, Justin Rounds and Jon Pierre Héroux - Harmoni-us
• Steven Denisevicz, Kristen Dechiaro and Giselle Martinez - Homunculus Love
• Augustina Isidori and Etienne Brunelle-Leclerc - Sola

Workshop:

• Karen Schrier - Investigating Typologies of Games as Research Environments