Schedule for: 16w5160 - Computational Modeling in Games

A buffet dinner is served daily between 5:30pm and 7:30pm in the Vistas Dining Room, the top floor of the Sally Borden Building.

Breakfast is served daily between 7 and 9am in the Vistas Dining Room, the top floor of the Sally Borden Building.

What would more formal definitions and theories of “depth” and “fun” look like? How do you employ such theories for design and analysis? What are the more fine-grained concepts that get mashed together under broad terms such as “depth” and “fun”? What are some potential approaches for making forward progress on these topics?

What are the limits in the current state of the art of gameplay analytics and player modeling? What are the big open challenge questions and low-hanging fruit? What is the relationship between analytics and player modeling? What are the opportunities for live analytics and modeling within the gameplay loop? What are the challenges in applying analytics and player modeling to design?

What are the different representational areas/aspects of narrative systems (e.g. dialog, story progression, etc.) and what kinds of formalisms support modeling these areas? What are the authoring tradeoffs that arise with different commitments to computational representations of narrative? For combinatorial narrative systems, how can player-perceived qualities of the narrative be modeled for guiding the combinatorial space? What might the design space look like for different approaches for player interaction with narrative systems?

Meet in the Corbett Hall Lounge for a guided tour of The Banff Centre campus.

Meet in foyer of TCPL to participate in the BIRS group photo. The photograph will be taken outdoors, so dress appropriately for the weather. Please don't be late, or you might not be in the official group photo!

A buffet dinner is served daily between 5:30pm and 7:30pm in the Vistas Dining Room, the top floor of the Sally Borden Building.

How might one go about measuring emotional and perceptual response to games? What is needed to move towards predictive models? What are the current frontiers for measuring and modeling emotional and perceptual response?

What might approaches to modeling dexterous and strategic skill in games look like? How can one model skill progression? What is Game Feel, and as designers what are the current limits for employing game feel as a concept in design (ie. where does Game Feel need to be extended)?

What are the challenges in representing player perception and design intent for PCG and game generation? What areas/aspects have been underrepresented in previous research in PCG and game generation? What does it mean to evaluate PCG and game generators? What are the challenges in using this work in playable experiences?

What are the different aspects of sociality that might be modeled? What formalisms might be useful for modeling social interaction? What are the tradeoffs in using the same modeling approaches for modeling player and NPC social interaction (vs. treating the player asymmetrically from NPCs)? At what different levels of granularity might a player engage a social model, and how does this place different requirements on the social model? What are some open questions in modeling social interaction?

What leverage does a formalist approach to game design give you? What might it leave out? What are the broad contours of the landscape of formalist game design theories? What intellectual commitments are formalist game designers making? What are the biggest holes in our current understanding of formalist approaches to game design?

What properties of games can be determined statically from their rules and what properties require dynamic analysis? What are different approaches for analysis of gameplay systems? What kinds of formal representations of games are necessary to support such automated analysis? What kinds of interfaces are necessary to enable game designers to interact with automated analysis systems? Where does automated analysis fit within the broader architecture of a computer-aided game design system?

5-day workshop participants are welcome to use BIRS facilities (BIRS Coffee Lounge, TCPL and Reading Room) until 3 pm on Friday, although participants are still required to checkout of the guest rooms by 12 noon.