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KEYNOTE: FROM STUDENTS TO HEROES - UNLOCKING STUDENTS' POTENTIAL THROUGH GAMES

Lucas Gillispie

Lecture, worksheet, test.  Lecture, worksheet, test.  It's a common routine in many classrooms, and, rather than a rare virus or nuclear war, it's likely to be the true cause of a future zombie apocalypse.  In an effort to break this vicious cycle (and save humanity?), Lucas and pioneering teachers in his school district are teaming up and working to transform classrooms through the use of popular commercial games.  Through games like World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2, and Minecraft, they are awakening young minds, inspiring a new generation of creative thinkers, and finding that game designers may, in fact, have a great many insights to offer classroom teachers about creating environments that foster learning.

KEYNOTE: FROM PLASTIC BAGS TO SELF-PUBLISHING;  THE INDUSTRY IS COMING FULL CIRCLE

Ken Lobb

I should have taken some of my early hacks on the TRS-80, and sold them. I am not sure if that would have landed me in a better place; but it’s something that I have always looked back on as a “failure”. That was a time when legwork, and perseverance lead to Rare, to Ultima, and to many other successful early industry entries.

Over the last 35 years +, we have transitioned to a retail model, a publisher model, and a huge team AAA focus. But over the last few years, the AAA games have partners at most award shows. Smaller games, from passionate small teams. In the new world of open systems, we now have million, and multi-million selling content, which in the past, may have been only delivered via small baggie, or massive publisher.

My talk will touch on the role of AAA in the future. Indy development, and how it has cemented its place in the charts. The impact of the commoditization of game development. Sprinkled with my experiences from all sides of the business.

KEYNOTE: ALTERNATIVE GAMES AND NEW PLAYERS: KICKING DOWN THE DOOR

Brenda Laurel

Imagine a world where games were designed by young men, sold in male-oriented spaces, to be played by young men. Meanwhile, in computer classrooms in schools, boys mobbed the machines while girls stood back, afraid of the "mathiness" of it, and worried that they would break something. Eighteen years ago I launched a company to build games and online community for middle-school girls.The company was based on four years of extensive design research including around 1000 dyad interviews with kids and dozens of design probes as well as interviews with parents and experts and testing of mock-ups and prototypes. The greatest challenge by far at that time in history was to successfully publish and sell games that were not designed by or intended for young men. The games' successes, as well as the frictions it produced, are the basis of some informative tales. In more recent times, organizations like Games for Change and genres like interactive narrative have been increasingly carried diverse, formerly marginalized voices to diverse new communities. In this talk I will share some heuristics for "changing the game".

FULL PAPERS

meIRL-BC: Predicting Player Positions in Video Games
Inge Becht and Sander Bakkes

#1ReasonWhy: Game Communities and the Invisible Woman
Bridget Blodgett and Anastasia Salter

X-COM: UFO Defense vs. XCOM: Enemy Unknown - Using Gameplay Design Patterns to Understand Game Remakes
Alessandro Canossa, Staffan Björk and Mark J. Nelson.

Open Trumps, a Data Game
Andrew Borg Cardona, Aske Walther Hansen, Julian Togelius and Marie Gustafsson Friberger

A Framework for Coherent Emergent Stories
Gail Carmichael and David Mould

Dance Enhanced: Investigating How Earning Content Through Exertion Impacts Dance Game Enjoyment
Emiko Charbonneau, Sarah Buchanan, Jared Bott, Floyd Mueller and Joseph J. Laviola Jr.

Retention and Progression: Seven Months in World of Warcraft
Thomas Debeauvais, Cristina Lopes, Nick Yee and Nicolas Ducheneaut

Off With Their Assists: An Empirical Study of Driving Skill in Forza Motorsport 4
Thomas Debeauvais, Thomas Zimmermann, Nachiappan Nagappan, Kevin Carter, Ryan Cooper, Dan Greenawalt and Tyson Solberg

Author Assistance Visualizations for Ice-Bound: A Combinatorial Narrative
Jacob Garbe, Aaron Reed, Melanie Dickinson, Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Michael Mateas

A Methodology for Requirements Analysis of AI Architecture Authoring Tools
April Grow, Swen Gaudl, Paulo Gomes, Michael Mateas and Noah Wardrip-Fruin

Authoring Conversational Narratives in Games with the Chimeria Platform
D. Fox Harrell, Dominic Kao, Chong-U Lim, Jason Lipshin, Ainsley Sutherland, Julia Makivic and Danielle Olson

Part of the Game: Changing Level Creation To Identify and Filter Low-Quality User-Generated Levels
Andrew Hicks, Veronica Catete and Tiffany Barnes

A Comparative Evaluation of Procedural Level Generators in the Mario AI Framework
Britton Horn, Steve Dahlskog, Noor Shaker, Gillian Smith and Julian Togelius

An Air of Independence: A History of Independent Game Style
Jesper Juul

Governance in League of Legends: A Hybrid System
Yubo Kou and Bonnie Nardi

Software Verification Games: Designing Xylem, The Code of Plants
Heather Logas, Jim Whitehead, Michael Mateas, Richard Vallejos, Lauren Scott, John Murray, Kate Compton, Joseph Osborn, Orlando Salvatore, Dan Shapiro, Zhongpeng Lin, Huascar Sanchez, Michael Shavlovsky, Daniel Cetina, Shayne Clementi and Chris Lewis

Development of Recovery Rapids; A Game For Cost Effective Stroke Therapy
David Maung, Lise Worthen-Chaudhari, Alex Borstad, Linda Lowes, Roger Crawfis, Lynne Gauthier and Ryan McPherson

Introducing Choice Poetics
Peter A. Mawhorter, Michael Mateas, Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Arnav Jhala

Slot Machine Development: A Course for CS Majors
Tony Morelli

Balancing Physical and Cognitive Challenge: A Study of Players’ Psychological Responses to Exergame Play
Andrea Nickel, Tiffany Barnes, Jamie Payton and Erik Wikstrom

From Consumers to Producers: African American Middle School Students as Game Designers
Yolanda Rankin, India Irish, Jakita Thomas and Stevie-Mari Hawkins

Ice-Bound: Combining Richly-Realized Story with Expressive Gameplay
Aaron Reed, Jacob Garbe, Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Michael Mateas

Pixel Motion: A Surveillance Camera-enabled Public Digital Game
Holly Robbins and Katherine Isbister

Play in the Museum: Designing Game-Based Learning Environments for Informal Education Settings
Jonathan Rowe, Eleni Lobene, Bradford Mott and James Lester

Adapting Game Mechanics with Micro-Machinations
Riemer van Rozen and Joris Dormans

The Effect of a Persuasive Game on Attitude Towards the Homeless
Dana Ruggiero

Marking New Ground: Flash, HTML5 and the Future of the Web Arcade
Anastasia Salter and John Murray

Gradequest - Evaluating the impact of using game design techniques in an undergraduate course
Bob De Schutter and Vero Vanden Abeele

Collaboration versus Competition: Design and Evaluation of Mechanics for Games with a Purpose
Kristin Siu, Alexander Zook and Mark Riedl

Experiments in Map Generation using Markov Chains
Sam Snodgrass and Santiago Ontañón

Aussie women game developers
Debbie Taylor and Yusuf Pisan

Understanding Representation in Playable Simulations
Mike Treanor and Michael Mateas

Measuring Risk in Stealth Games
Jonathan Tremblay, Pedro Andrade Torres and Clark Verbrugge

Target Selection for AI Companions in FPS Games
Jonathan Tremblay, Christopher Dragert and Clark Verbrugge

Guiding Players through Structural Composition Patterns in 3D Adventure Games
Glenn Winters and Jichen Zhu

Identifying Patterns in Combat that are Predictive of Success in MOBA Games
Pu Yang, Brent Harrison and David Roberts

Mixed-Initiative Co-Creativity
Georgios N. Yannakakis, Antonios Liapis and Constantine Alexopoulos

Examining ‘RPG Elements’: Systems of Character Progression
Jose Zagal and Roger Altizer

Automatic Playtesting for Game Parameter Tuning via Active Learning
Alexander Zook, Eric Fruchter and Mark Riedl

WORKSHOPS

Teaching Game Studies: Course Post-Mortems & Advanced Syllabus Design
Mia Consalvo, Christopher Paul and Annika Waern

Design Patterns in Games
Joris Dormans, Valter Alves, Aida Azadegan, Staffan Björk, Steve Dahlskog, Kenneth Hullett, Katharine Neil, Richard Wetzel, and Jose Zagal

Social Believability in Games 2014
Mirjam Palosaari Eladhari, Harko Verhagen and Joshua McCoy

FDG ‘14 – Global Game Jam Workshop
Allan Fowler, Mirjam Palosaari Eladhari, Foaad Khosmood and Ali Arya

5th Workshop on Procedural Content Generation in Games (PCG 2014)
Noor Shaker, Kenneth Stanley and Kate Compton

PANELS

Improving the Quality of New Hires in the Game Industry by Expanding the Pipeline
Adrienne Decker, Monica M McGill, Ian Schreiber and Olga Zinoveva

Game studies and area studies: a panel
Maggie Greene, William Huber and Mia Consalvo

Tools and Templates for Teaching Video Game Development
Ken Hoganson, Mario Guimaraes, Selena He, Cynthia Calongne and Barbara Truman

Game AI: The Undiscovered Country
Brian Magerko, Mirjam Eladhari, Mike Treanor, and Jichen Zhu

Session Proposal: Advocating for Our Field’s Future
Noah Wardrip-Fruin

Understanding Player Behavior: New Directions in User Research and Data Analytics
Veronica Zammitto, Tim Nichols, Ben Medler, and Ken Hullett

POSTERS

Codename Heroes – Designing for Experience in Public Places in a Long Term Pervasive Game
Jon Back and Annika Waern

Challenge Balancing for Personalised Game Spaces
Sander Bakkes, Efstathios Charitos, George Visniuc and Shimon Whiteson

Must be 13 to Play: Addressing Children Participation in Networked Games
Kara Behnke, Meg Leta Ambrose and John K. Bennett

Attitudes and Practices of Fantasy Sports Users
Gabriel Dzodom and Frank Shipman

Gender Differences in Videogame Development Classes: U.S. and the U.A.E.
Mario Guimaraes and Leon Jololian

Generative Agents for Player Decision Modeling in Games
Christoffer Holmgård, Antonios Liapis, Julian Togelius and Georgios N. Yannakakis

Reflecting Civic Protest – the Occupy Istanbul Game
Hartmut Koenitz

Visualizing the Play of Arbitrary Games
Joseph Osborn and Michael Mateas

WORKS-IN-PROGRESS

Pitch Perfect or Exploring Pitching Practices in Industry and Games Education
Roger Altizer and Jose Zagal

‘Knock Once for Yes’ – Knocking as Feedback in the Location-Based Game Passing On
Jon Back

Specifying the Pedagogical Aspects of Narrative-Based Digital Learning Games by Using Annotations
Frederik Van Broeckhoven and Olga De Troyer

(Re)telling Chess Stories as Game Content
Eric Buckthal and Foaad Khosmood

Chronologically Nonlinear Techniques in Traditional Media and Games
Gail Carmichael and David Mould

An Out of Character Approach to Emergent Game Narratives
Simon Chauvin, Guillaume Levieux, Jean-Yves Donnart and Stéphane Natkin

The Psychology of Play: Understanding Digital Game Evolution through Developmental Psychology
Lindsay Grace and Brooke Spangler

A Linguistic Analysis of Games: Verbs and Nouns for Content Estimation
Lindsay Grace

A Web-Based Editor for Multiplayer Choice Games
Ian Holmes

User Behavior Transformation through Dynamic Input Mappings
Dun-Yu Hsiao, Seth Cooper, Christy Ballweber and Zoran Popovic

Mobilising Monopoly: game design, place and social values
Mark Lochrie, Alison Gazzard, Adrian Gradinar and Paul Coulton

Introducing Shared Character Control to Existing Video Games
Anna Loparev, Walter Lasecki, Jeffrey Bigham and Kyle Murray

The Rooms - Creating immersive experiences through projected augmented reality
Jacob Michelsen and Staffan Björk

An Exergame to Improve Balance in Children who are Blind
Tony Morelli, Lauren Lieberman, John Foley and Eelke Folmer

The Effect Of Surroundings On Gaming Experience
A. Imran Nordin, Paul Cairns, Matthew Hudson, Alejandro Alonso and Eduardo Calvillo Gamez

“Let’s Roll!”:Comparative Representations of Empire in Board Games
William Robinson

Experiences Teaching a Course in Android Game Development
Timothy Roden and Rob Legrand

Alphabet Soup: Design and Development of a Short Form Game
Dana Ruggiero

Story Sampling: A New Approach to Evaluating and Authoring Interactive Narrative
Ben Samuel, Joshua Mccoy, Mike Treanor, Aaron Reed, Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Michael Mateas

Initial Perceptions of a Casual Game to Crowdsource Facial Expressions in the Wild
Chek Tien Tan, Hemanta Sapkota, Daniel Rosser and Yusuf Pisan

Active Player Modelling
Julian Togelius, Noor Shaker and Georgios N. Yannakakis

Adapting In-Game Agent Behavior by Observation of Players with Learning Behavior Trees
Emmett Tomai and Roberto Flores

GWAPs: Games with a Problem
Kathleen Tuite

Virtual Character Behavior Architecture using Cyclic Scheduling
Richard Zhao and Duane Szafron

DISSERTATION CONSORTIUM

Analyses and Simulations of Virtual Economy
Sheng-Yi Hsu and Chuen-Tsai Sun

Integrating Semantics and Narrative World Generation
Ben Kybartas, Rafael Bidarra and Elmar Eisemann

Challenges for Game Addiction as a Mental Health Diagnosis
Rune K. L. Nielsen, Espen Aarseth and Arne Poulsen

Automated Terrain Analysis in Real-Time Strategy Games
Chen Si, Yusuf Pisan and Chek Tien Tan

Evaluating the Evaluations
Björn Strååt and Harko Verhagen

Digital Political Science: Pixelizing International Relations
Sandra Yao and Mark B. Salter

DEMOS

A Prototype using Territories and an Affordance Tree for Social Simulation Gameplay
Tilman Geishauser, Yun-Gyung Cheong and Mark J. Nelson

SimBully: A Bullying in Schools Simulation
Edgar Omar Cebolledo Gutierrez and Olga De Troyer

Lost and Found: The design of demonstrative advergames.
Anuj Kumar and Malcolm Ryan

FLARE: An Open Source Toolkit for Creating Expressive User Interfaces for Serious Games
Bradford Mott, Jonathan Rowe, Wookhee Min, Robert Taylor and James Lester

THE LISTENING WALKER Interactive Sound Walk in a Virtual City
Cecile Le Prado-Natkin and Stephane Natkin

Harmony: A Game to Teach Transitive Game Balance
Ian Schreiber

GAMES

Will Love Tear Us Apart
Gordon Calleja

Ice-Bound: A Novel of Reconfiguration
Jacob Garbe, Aaron Reed, Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Michael Mateas

Big Huggin‘ Affection Gaming for Alternative Play
Lindsay Grace

Equal Opportunity Affection Games, Critical Design in Stolen Kisses
Lindsay Grace

Adapting Games from Literature: Edgar Allen Poe Embodied in Players
Lindsay Grace

Embedding Message in Digital Play: Stereotype as Mechanic
Lindsay Grace

Xylem: The Code of Plants
Heather Logas, Jim Whitehead, Michael Mateas, Richard Vallejos, Lauren Scott, John Murray, Kate Compton, Joseph Osborn, Orlando Salvaore, Dan Shapiro, Zhongpeng Lin, Huascar Sanchez, Michael Shavlovsky, Chris Lewis, Daniel Cetina and Shayne Clementi

Games about Mental Health – Designing the Experience of "What It's Like"
Doris C. Rusch

A Game to Crowdsource Data for Affective Computing
Chek Tien Tan, Hemanta Sapkota, Daniel Rosser and Yusuf Pisan

Sparks of Eternity: A New Approach to Religious Education
Brian Winn, Casey O'Donnell, Reuven Margarett and Greg Kozma