CfP: Workshop on Procedural Content Generation in Games (PC Games)

Workshop on Procedural Content Generation in Games (PC Games)

Co-located with FDG 2010 – Monterey, California – June 18, 2010

http://pcgames.fdg2010.org/

Overview

As computer games increasingly take place inside large, complex worlds, the cost of manually creating these worlds is spiraling upwards. Procedural content generation, where a computer algorithm produces computationally generated levels, art assets, quests, background history, stories, characters, and weapons, offers hope for substantially reducing the authoring burden in games. Procedural content generation has multiple benefits beyond reducing authoring cost. With rich procedural generation, a single person becomes capable of creating games that now require teams to create, thus making individual artistic expression easier to achieve. Automated content generation can take player history as one of its inputs, and thereby create games that adapt to individual players. Sufficiently rich content generation algorithms can create novel game elements, thereby discovering new game potentials. Finally, the procedural generation algorithm itself acts as an executable model of one aspect of the game, thereby improving our theoretical understanding of game design.


Important Dates

* Paper submission: Feb. 24, 2010

* Notification to authors: April 5, 2010

* Workshop held: June 18, 2010 (day before the main conference)

Workshop Organization

PC Games is a full-day workshop, with a peer-reviewed workshop program. Following a traditional working conference model, each talk session will have 2-3 paper presentations, followed by extensive time for questions and answers, as well as general discussion.

Research Areas

The PC Games workshop solicits paper submissions as either full papers (8 pages) or short papers (4 pages). PC Games welcomes research results that are either fully or semi-automated, in the following (and related) list of research areas. Papers will be published as part of the workshop proceedings.

* Procedural game level generation, for all game genres
* Procedural scenario generation for both entertainment and serious games
* Procedural quest generation, for single and multiplayer (online) games
* Procedural (non-player) character generation
* Procedurally generated game objects (e.g. weapons, vehicles, …)
* Procedural art asset generation, for a wide range of art assets
* Procedural creation of buildings, villages, towns, and cities
* Automatic layout techniques and procedural generation of interiors
* Procedural creation of natural environments, including terrain, water, clouds, plants, trees, etc.
* Procedural generation of crowds in real time
* Procedural animation of both procedurally and manually created content
* User control in procedural generation and intuitive input mechanism for procedural systems
* Construction and use of mixed-mode systems with both manual editing and automatic generation of content
* Integrating frameworks for procedural methods
* Procedural creation of background history and background stories for game worlds
* Adaptive game balancing and content generation based on prior player history
* Techniques for games that evolve and/or discover new game variants
* Procedural generation of computer and/or tabletop games
* Automatic generation of game rules
* Procedural generation of content for web-based and social networking games
* Player and/or designer experience with procedural content generation
* Models of player experience with procedurally generated content
* Theoretical implications of procedural content generation
* Meaningful incorporation of procedural generation into game design
* Procedural generation during development (e.g. for prototyping, design, testing, tuning, etc.)
* Lessons from historical examples of procedural generation
* Case studies of industrial application of procedural generation

Submission Instructions

Submissions to the PC Games workshop must follow ACM SIG conference formatting guidelines (http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates). Papers must be submitted using the Easychair submission system (http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=pcgames2010).

Program Committee

Ruth Aylett, Heriot-Watt University
Rafael Bidarra, TU Delft
Ian Bogost, Georgia Tech.
Cameron Browne, Imperial College London
Simon Colton, Imperial College London
Eric Galin, LIRIS - CNRS - Université Lumière Lyon 2
Magy Seif El-Nasr, Simon Fraser University
Erin Hastings, Alion Science and Technology
Pascal Mueller, Procedural, Inc.
Ian Parberry, Univ. of North Texas
Jimmy Secretan, DiSTI Corporation
Ken Stanley, Univ. of Central Florida
Julian Togelius, ITU Copenhagen
Jim Whitehead, Univ. of California, Santa Cruz
Georgios Yannakakis, ITU Copenhagen
R. Michael Young, North Carolina State Univ.


The PC Games workshop is co-located with the 2010 Foundations of Digital Games (FDG 2010, www.fdg2010.org), which is an official conference of the Society for the Advancement of the Science of Digital Games (SASDG).
FDG 2010 is supported by a generous sponsorship from Microsoft Research.