Workshops and Tutorials
General Information
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 (2 pages) should include: an extended abstract, the objectives and expected outcome of the workshop, the planned activities, the background of the organizer(s), the anticipated number of participants, and the means for soliciting and selecting participants.
The workshops that will be co-located with FDG 2015 are:
The Sixth Workshop on Procedural Content Generation
Workshop on Game Jams, Hackathons, and Game Creation Events
The Fourth Workshop on Design Patterns in Games
{Craft, Game} Play
The tutorials that will be co-located with FDG2015 are:
Learn CS1/2 by Playing and Building Commercial Grade Casual Games
Emergence, Art, and Game Design: A Hands-On Game Jam in Minecraft
Workshops
The Sixth Workshop on Procedural Content Generation
Details:
Generating game content via algorithmic processes has gathered
substantial academic interest in recent years. Procedural content
generation (PCG) offers hope for substantially reducing the authorial
burden within games, improving our theoretical understanding of game
design, and enabling entirely new kinds of games and playable
experiences. The goal of this workshop is to advance knowledge in PCG by bringing together researchers and fostering discussion about the current state of the field.
We invite contributions on all aspects of generating game content, using any method. Both descriptions of new algorithms and empirical studies of implementations and applications are welcome. Submissions can be full papers about results from novel research (up to 8 pages long) or short papers describing work in progress (up to 4 pages long).
Important Dates:
Extension deadline for paper submissions: 27 April 2015
Deadline for paper submissions: 20 April 2015
Notification for accepted papers: 15 May 2015
Deadline for camera-ready papers: 27 May 2015
Organizers:
Antonios Liapis, Institute of Digital Games (University of Malta)
Noor Shaker, Center for Computer Games Research (IT University of
Copenhagen)
Sebastian Risi, Center for Computer Games Research (IT University of
Copenhagen)
Workshop on Game Jams, Hackathons, and Game Creation Events
Details:
Game jams, hackathons and similar group game creation events have become increasingly popular. They provide convenient environments for collaborative game development throughout the world. These events are run in a variety of ways, formats, and have differing time constraints. However, what they have in common are new and exciting opportunities for education and research.
The interest in studying game jams has reached significant levels. Such research has been evolving for the past few years, extending and modifying existing methodologies used to understand the complexities of game development within a rapid-prototyping framework. Thisworkshop, closely associated with the Global Game Jam Community, will bring together academics from these various consortia to discuss and to further the understanding of game jams and the potential they offer participants and academics.
Important Dates:
Submission deadline: 1 May 2015*
Decision notification: 15 May 2015
Camera-ready deadline: 22 May 2015
*Submissions for in-progress work are welcome
Organizers:
Alexander Zook, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA.
Allan Fowler, Waiariki Institute of Technology, New Zealand.
Foaad Khosmood, California Polytechnic State University, USA.
Johanna Pirker, Graz University of Technology, Austria.
Menno Deen, Fontys University of Applied Sciences, Netherlands.
Mirjam Eladhari, University of Malta, Malta
Nia Wearn, Staffordshire University, UK
The Fourth Workshop on Design Patterns in Games
Design pattern approaches have long been used in diverse fields such as architecture, software engineering, and interaction design. With the emergence of game scholarship, there has been interest in applying design patterns to aspects of game design. There are many potential benefits to design pattern approaches, including generation of frameworks for teaching and communicating about game design and practical usage in brainstorming ideas and tuning designs. Furthermore, deeper understanding of the patterns implicit in their games can help designers explore previously unused ideas and expectations of player behavior.
{Craft, Game} Play
Details:
Games have much to learn from craft, and vice versa. Craft is collaborative, open-ended, creative, meditative, and focused on visual aesthetic goals. Games can be competitive, strategic or luck-based, and focused on player engagement. This workshop focuses on bringing these communities closer together by looking at the similarities and differences between craft-play and game-play, and the lessons that can be learned from each community with a view towards being able to create new kinds of game and/or craft experiences.
This workshop aims to build a community of scholars and practitioners interested in the intersection of games and crafts, and to identify research questions, project ideas, and collaboration opportunities.
Important Dates:
Submission deadline: 15 May 2015
Organizers:
Gillian Smith, Northeastern University
Anne Sullivan, Play Crafts
Tutorials
Learn CS1/2 by Playing and Building Commercial Grade Casual Games
Designed specifically for educators who are interested in engaging students with videogames in their classrooms for learning programming, and based on our original casual game designs, this will be a half-day tutorial that involves the participants in:
- Analyzing the familiar game mechanics from the perspective of fundamental programming constructs.
- Understanding and evaluating the design considerations involved in our custom casual game APIs.
- Working in groups to design your own versions of these games that are suitable for demonstrating and teaching programming concepts.
- Reporting back for group feedback, and examining our existing game-based teaching materials.
Emergence, Art, and Game Design: A Hands-On Game Jam in Minecraft
This tutorial will expose participants to the enormous potential for research in art, design, game development, programming and education in Mojang/Microsoft’s Minecraft game environment. The tutorial is for all experience levels. Educators and researchers, who are curious about the buzz, as well as Minecrafters, who have created worlds, will find something new as they start from the “first night” and go on to design games, create artwork or extract data from the server for 3D printing or other visualization. For those with an interest in computing, this tutorial will survey the basic aspects of programming for Minecraft and its derivatives. The tutorial will highlight social interaction and demonstrate game development in the sandbox environment.
This half-day design tutorial will include presentations, discussions, live-exercises and experience in Minecraft. Presentations will cover a variety of work that has been created in SJSU’s Minecraft server, Orwell. The “hands-on” part will cover the basics of Minecraft, it will encourage the participants to create games and art in Minecraft. Throughout the tutorial, the participants will be exposed to new ideas and skills via social interactions and unique challenges that they encounter in Minecraft. These will improve their game development skills as well as scaffold an understanding of emergent spaces. At the end of the conference, the data from the Minecraft server will be made available to participants.
Participants will need to bring their own computers that are capable of running Minecraft and we would prefer that players have created their accounts. We will have a limited number of licenses available at cost.