Call for papers for a conference on adaptive approaches to player satisfaction and games. And yes our friends in Coleraine are involved.

**** CALL FOR PAPERS

We would like to invite paper submissions for the Workshop on “Adaptive Approaches for Optimizing Player Satisfaction in Computer and Physical Games” in conjunction with SAB’06: From Animals to Animats 9,(http://www.sab06.org), October 1st, Rome, Italy.

For further details, please visit the workshop’s web-page at:

http://www.mip.sdu.dk/~georgios/gamesWorkshop

Submitted papers will follow the SAB conference formatting guidelines and will not exceed 10 pages. Paper submission deadline: 1
May 2006.

We would also appreciate if you could distribute this message to other
interested parties.

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 behaviours emerge through various adaptive learning techniques, there is generally little further analysis of whether these behaviours contribute to the satisfaction of the player. The implicit hypothesis motivating this research is that intelligent opponent behaviours 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 behaviour 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 and psychology disciplines who investigate dissimilar methodologies for improving gameplay experiences. This workshop should yield an understanding of state-of-the-art approaches for capturing and augmenting player satisfaction in computer and physical (interactive) 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.
– Player Modeling approaches for optimizing entertainment.
– Player-Game Interaction through biofeedback signals.

Important Dates
1 May 2006: Paper submissions
15 June 2005: Accept/reject decisions on submitted papers
1 August 2005: Submission of camera-ready papers
1 October 2006: Workshop date (Rome, Italy)

Organizing Committee
David W. Aha, Naval Research Laboratory (USA)
Bobby Bryant, The University of Texas at Austin (USA)
Darryl Charles, University of Ulster (UK)
Ian Lane Davis Mad Doc Software (USA)
John Hallam, University of Southern Denmark (Denmark) (Co-Chair) Daniel J. Livingstone, University of Paisley (UK) Alexander Nareyek, AI Center (Germany) Nilanjan Sarkar, Vanderbilt University (USA) Pieter Spronck, Universiteit Maastricht (Netherlands) Georgios N. Yannakakis, University of Southern Denmark (Denmark) (Co-Chair)