[agents] Final Call for Papers - Workshop on Social believability in games (part of ACE 2013)

[Harko Verhagen]

**excuses for cross-posting **

Deadline for papers extended to September 23!

The Social Believability in Games Workshop intends to be a point of 
interaction for researchers and game developers interested in different 
aspects of modeling, discussing, and developing believable social agents 
and Non-Player Characters (NPC). This can include discussions around 
behavior based on social and behavioral science theories and models, 
social affordances when interacting with game worlds and more. The 
intention is to invite participants from a multitude of disciplines in 
order to create a broad spectrum of approaches to the area.

 From the beginning of digital games, AI has been part of the main idea 
of games containing acting entities, which is to provide the player with 
"worthy" opponents (NPCs). The development of multiplayer games has 
increased the demands put on the NPCs as believable characters, 
especially if they are to cooperate with human players. However, the 
social aspect of intelligent behavior has been neglected compared to the 
development and use AI for other domains (e.g. route planning). In 
particular, the interplay between intelligent behavior that is 
task-related, the emotions that may be attached to the events in the 
game world, and the social positioning and interaction of deliberating 
entities is underdeveloped. This workshop aims to address this 
deficiency by putting forward demonstrations of work in the integration 
of these three aspects of intelligent behavior, as well as models and 
theories that can be used for the emotional and social aspects, and for 
the integration between the three aspects.

For this workshop, we invite participants to bring both their research 
questions and the demonstrations or initial prototypes built to address 
them. Additionally, we welcome contributions from research on social 
ontology, social simulation, the social impact of believable agents, 
intelligent virtual agents, and other related areas. The day will be 
dedicated to demonstration and discussion, with ample time for 
collaboration and comparison of theory, method, practice and results.

The purpose of this workshop is to allow discussion on the theories and 
models for NPC social behavior and social affordances in industry as 
well as between different but related academic disciplines. The expected 
outcome is a better understanding of the overlaps and differences within 
and between these communities. We also aim to document the workshop in a 
journal article or journal special issue.

Social believability is of key interest to many parts of ACE, in 
particular to game design and development. Believable game characters 
are of essence for player enjoyment and immersion. Thus, discussing 
elements of immersion from a research and a design perspective may 
contribute to developing more entertaining computer games.


The workshop will take place at the Conference for Advances in Computer 
Entertainment 2013 
<http://www.advancesincomputerentertainment.org/> (ACE2013).


Topics

- NPC design created to explore hypotheses

- realized prototypes, demos, and applications

- social science reaction to modeled social behavior

- philosophical approaches to sociality, NPCs, and believable agents

- trade-off between autonomous NPCs and control over story lines

- provocative ideas

- authoring social behavior for NPCs and agents


Important dates

September 23: Paper Submission (extended)

October 7: Notification to authors

October 28: Camera ready submissions

November 12: Workshop, whole day



Workshop layout

The workshop will consist of two main activities: paper presentations 
and group discussion. The morning session will be set aside for the 
paper presentations. This time will also provide for discussion and 
debate that will result from the paper presentations.

A hands-on session will be organized to recover from lunch where 
participants' sample approaches to social behavior and believability. 
Laptops will be set up with prototypes and commercial games (such as 
PromWeek, the Pataphysic Institute, Versu, Black & White, and the Sims 
3) that can inspire further discussions.

The afternoon session will be continued presentations, concluding with a 
panel discussion concerning future work and collaborations in the area.


Organizers

Mirjam Eladhari (Malta University), Magnus Johansson (Stockholm 
University), Josh McCoy (Univ. of California, Santa Cruz), Harko 
Verhagen (Stockholm University)


Submissions

Discussion papers or extended abstract, send in via EasyChair link 
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sbg2013. The papers should 
follow the Springer LNCS format 
<http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0> and have 
a length of 4 to 16 pages.

The accepted papers will be published online before the workshop. We aim 
for postproceedings of selected full papers in a relevant journal.

We also encourage the submission of demonstrations of research 
prototypes. Demonstrations should be accompanied by a single page 
(excluding references) description and an optional video.


Programme Committee

Julian Togelius, IT University Copenhagen

Ian Horswill, Northwestern University

Mike Sellers, Kabaam

Ben Samuel, University of California Santa Cruz


Webpage: https://sites.google.com/site/socialbelievabilityingames/