Invited Speaker

Chris Bateman, Managing Director of International Hobo.

Call for Papers

The Workshop on Optimizing Player Satisfaction will be held at the Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Entertainment Conference (AIIDE) 2007, June 6-8, Stanford, CA. This is the second workshop in a series started in conjunction with the SAB conference in 2006. Click here for further details on the 1st Workshop held at SAB'06, Rome.

Description

The current state-of-the-art in intelligent game design using AI techniques is mainly focused on generating human-like and intelligent characters. Even though complex behaviors emerge through various adaptive learning techniques, there is generally little further analysis of whether these behaviors contribute to the satisfaction of the player. The implicit hypothesis motivating this research is that intelligent opponent behaviors enable the player to gain more satisfaction from the game. This hypothesis may well be true; however, since no notion of entertainment or enjoyment is explicitly defined, there is therefore few evidence that a specific opponent behavior generates enjoyable games.

The focus of this workshop is on adaptive methodologies based on richer forms of human-machine interaction for augmenting gameplay experiences for the player. We want to encourage dialog among  researchers in AI, human-computer interaction, affective computing  and psychology disciplines who investigate dissimilar methodologies for improving user (player) experiences. This workshop should yield an understanding of state-of-the-art approaches for capturing and augmenting player satisfaction in games.

Topics relevant to this workshop include, but are not limited to, the following areas:

• Adaptive learning for entertainment augmentation.
• Empirical approaches to entertainment modeling in games.
• Psychological approaches to entertainment capture / Psychology of  entertainment.
• Player modeling for optimizing entertainment.
• Player-Game Interaction through biosignals.

Plans

We plan to include an invited speaker to present an overview of recent work in the field. Furthermore, a few number of recognized contributors in this area will be invited to submit papers. The organizing committee will select a subset of the submitted papers for oral presentation. Moreover, panel discussions will be arranged in between oral presentations to further motivate researchers to seek innovative directions in the field.

Participation Process

Our workshop organizing committee will select participants through a review process. Papers must be in trouble-free, high resolution PDF format, formatted for US Letter (8.5" x 11") paper, using Type 1 or TrueType fonts. Papers may be no longer than 6 pages including references, and formatted following the AAAI formatting guidelines. Submitted papers should not include author names and affiliations. The workshop follows a blind review process to match AIIDE'07 conference standards. Please email submissions or requests to be on this workshop's (moderated) mailing list to co-chair Georgios N. Yannakakis.

Important Dates

February 24, 2007: Paper submissions
March 13, 2007: Notification of acceptance decision
April 10, 2007: Submission of camera-ready papers
June 6-8, 2007: Workshop dates (Stanford, CA)

Proceedings

The proceedings of the workshop will be published as an AAAI Technical Report series*. The advantage of such a technical report is that papers will be available for citation and distribution after the workshop. 

*(subject to the quality of contributions)

Organizing Committee

Christian Bauckhage, Deutsche Telekom Laboratories (Germany)
Bobby Bryant, University of Nevada, Reno (USA)
Darryl Charles, University of Ulster (UK)
Vincent Corruble, Université Pierre et Marie Curie - Paris 6 (France)
John Hallam, University of Southern Denmark (Denmark) (Co-Chair)
Daniel J. Livingstone, University of Paisley (UK)
Alexander Nareyek, National University of Singapore (Singapore)
Stephane Natkin, Conservatoire national des arts et métiers - CNAM (France)
Pieter Spronck, Universiteit Maastricht (Netherlands)
Georgios N. Yannakakis, University of Southern Denmark (Denmark) (Co-Chair)