7th Workshop on Procedural Content Generation (PCG2016)

August 1, 2016

This workshop aims to advance knowledge in the field of procedural content generation (PCG) by bringing together leading PCG researchers and facilitating discussion. Because academic workshops are a place for feedback and discussing new ideas, this year’s workshop will allow extra time for comments on each paper and a special demo session for people to discuss ongoing research.

Live Stream:
We will live stream the talks on August 1, 2016 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V52B2sjtOsU
Special thanks to Michael Cook (@mtrc) for hosting the stream!

Official Hashtag: #PCG16

Location:
Hosted at 2016 Joint International Conference of DiGRA and FDG (DiGRA-FDG 2016)
[GOOGLE MAPS] Dalhousie Building, Lecture Theater 1, University of Dundee (organized by Abertay University). Dundee, Scotland. August 1, 2016

Co-Organizers:
Rafael Bidarra <r.bidarra@tudelft.nl>
Amy K. Hoover <amy.hoover@gmail.com>
Aaron Isaksen <aisaksen@appabove.com> (@aireye)

Schedule and Accepted Papers:
9.30-11.00: Session 1: Levels

• “The VGLC: The Video Game Level Corpus” – Adam Summerville, Sam Snodgrass, Michael Mateas and Santiago Ontañón.
• “Scalable Level Generation for 2D Platforming Games” – Neall Dewsbury, Aimie Nunn, Matthew Syrett, James Tatum, and Tommy Thompson.
• “Identifying Attributes for Defining Specific Game Areas in Virtual Terrain” – Andrew Pech, Philip Hingston, Martin Masek and Chiou-Peng Lam

11.00-11.30: Coffee break

11.30 – 12.30: Session 2: Languages

• “Procedural Generation of Linguistics, Dialects, Naming Conventions and Spoken Sentences“ – Mark R Johnson
• “Diegetically Grounded Evolution of Gameworld Languages“ – James Ryan

12.30-13.00: Lightning Talks

• 3 minute talks from attendees about their latest research

13.00-14.00: Lunch (provided by conference)

14.00-15.30: Session 3: Gameplay

• “Exhaustive Exploration Strategies for NPCs“ – Muntasir Chowdhury and Clark Verbrugge
• “Towards Procedural Generation As Gameplay: CLAY and Tombs of Tomeria“  – Michael Cook and Simon Colton
• “Danesh: Helping Bridge The Gap Between Procedural Generators And Their Output“ – Michael Cook, Jeremy Gow and Simon Colton 

15.30-16.00: Coffee break

16.00-17.00: Session 4: Creativity

• “Do You Like This Art I Made You: Introducing Techne, A Creative Art bot Commune“ – Jonathan Pagnutti, Kate Compton and Jim Whitehead
• “Shopping for Game Mechanics“ – Tiago Machado, Ivan Bravi, Zhu Wang, Andy Nealen and Julian Togelius  

17.00-17.45: Demos + Cocktails

17.45: Finish

 

Important Dates:

Deadline for paper submissions: Friday 13 May 2016 (FINAL EXTENTION)
Notification for accepted papers: 13 June 2016 
Deadline for camera-ready papers: 27 June 2016 
Demo submission date: TBD
Workshop date: 1 August 2016

Submissions:
We welcome submissions as either full papers describing novel research (max. 16 pages including references, formatted with DiGRA+FDG 2016 Word or LaTeX templates) or short papers describing work in progress (max. 8 pages including references in DiGRA+FDG 2016 format). Submissions will be through the PCG2016 EasyChair site.

Topics:
Papers may cover a variety of topics within procedural content generation for games, including but not limited to:

• Real-time or offline algorithms for the procedural generation of games, levels, narrative, puzzles, environments, artwork, audio, sound effects, animation, characters, items, and other game content
• Case studies of procedural generation as applied for use in the games industry
• Techniques for procedural animation, procedural art, and other forms of visual content in games
• Work on procedural audio, music, sound effects, and other forms of audible content in games
• Procedural generation of narrative, stories, dialogues, conversations, and natural language
• Automated generation of game rules, variants, parameters, strategies, or game systems
• Automatic game balancing, game tuning, and difficulty adjustment through generated content
• Applications of PCG for digital, non-digital, physical, card, and tabletop games
• Applications of procedural content generation for Virtual Reality (VR) and virtual worlds
• Issues in mixed-mode systems combining human generated and procedurally generated content.
• Tools and systems to aid players and game designers in creating their own content for games
• Procedural content generation as a game mechanic
• Distributed and crowdsourcing procedural content generation
• Computational creativity and co-creation of games and game related content
• Novel uses of AI and machine learning algorithms for generating and evaluating procedural content
• Evaluation of player and/or designer experience in procedural content generation.
• Procedural content generation during development (e.g. prototyping, playtesting, etc.)
• Theoretical implications of procedural content generation
• Strategies for meaningfully incorporating procedural generation into game design
• Lessons from historical examples of PCG, including postmortems
• Social and ethical impact of procedural content generation
• Applications to games other than Super Mario Bros are especially welcome!

Conference Information:
More information about the entire DiGRA+FDG conference, including accommodations arrangements, can be found at http://digra-fdg2016.org.

Program Committee:
Gabriella Barros, New York University
Bedrich Benes, Department of Computer Graphics, Purdue University
Rafael Bidarra, Delft University of Technology
Cameron Browne, Queensland University of Technology
Kate Compton, Independent
Michael Cook, University of Falmouth
Andrew Doull, Independent
Matthew Guzdial, Georgia Tech
Amy K. Hoover, Northeastern University
Aaron Isaksen, New York University
Antonios Liapis, Institute of Digital Games, University of Malta
Mike Preuss, TU Dortmund University
Sebastian Risi, IT University of Copenhagen
Ruben Smelik, TNO Defence, Security and Safety
Gillian Smith, Northeastern University
Adam M. Smith, Microsoft Corporation
Adam Summerville, University of California, Santa Cruz
Tommy Thompson, Anglia Ruskin University
Julian Togelius, New York University
Alexander Zook, Blizzard Entertainment

About the Co-Chairs:
Rafael Bidarra is associate professor Game Technology at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science of Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands.  He leads the game technology research lab at the Computer Graphics and Visualization Group. His current research interests include: procedural and semantic modeling techniques for the specification and generation of both virtual worlds and gameplay; serious gaming; game adaptivity and interpretation mechanisms for in-game data. Rafael has publications in international journals and conference proceedings, integrates the editorial board of several journals, and has served in many conference program committees.

Amy K. Hoover is a postdoctoral researcher with the Playable Innovative Technologies Lab (PLAIT) at Northeastern University. Her research interests include procedurally generating music and content for games, computational creativity, and facilitating learning and creativity through games. As part of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO), she has organized the competitions session (2014), co-organized the Evolutionary Art, Design, and Creativity competition (2012, 2013, 2014), and co-chaired the Digital Entertainment Technologies and Arts track at GECCO (2015).

Aaron Isaksen is a PhD Candidate at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering Game Innovation Lab, studying automated game tuning, player modeling using probability distributions and survival analysis, and data-driven computer-aided game design.   He was Festival Chair for IndieCade East 2014, and been working in the games industry since 2003.  Aaron is also a founding partner of Indie Fund, an Advisory Board member for Fig, the Chairman of IndieBox, and an Advisor for the NYU Game Center Incubator.