Foundations of Digital Games 2014
Workshops
Workshop proceedings are now available online.
FDG2014 will have a number of co-located workshops. Each workshop's organizers issue their own call for participation and select the workshop's participants. Please see the websites for each workshop below for submission details and deadlines.
The workshops that will be co-located with FDG 2014 are:
Teaching Game Studies: Course Post-Mortems & Advanced Syllabus Design
Global Game Jam Workshop
Design Patterns in Games
Procedural Content Generation in Games
Social Believability in Games
Teaching Game Studies: Course Post-Mortems & Advanced Syllabus Design
Description: The aims of the workshop are twofold- it will both benefit pedagogy about games and, especially for faculty members who are among the only faculty at their institution studying games, provide a valuable resource for sharing and critiquing pedagogical practices. Participants will gain access to a range of syllabi for and example assignments from game studies courses currently being taught. They will also obtain feedback on their own syllabi, including help with assignments, reading selections and overall course goals. Participants will be able to develop best practices on teaching game studies and on how to integrate game play into courses. Finally, the workshop will generate a repository (from those willing to share) of game studies courses currently being offered.
Organizers:
Mia Consalvo, Concordia University - mconsalvo@gmail.com
Christopher A. Paul, Seattle University
Annika Waern, Uppsala University
Roger Altizer, University of Utah
Global Game Jam Workshop
Description: The Global Game Jam (GGJ) [1] is the world’s largest game development activity (“game jam”). Every year since 2009 thousands of game enthusiasts participate in this forty-eight hour challenge to make games together around the world. The event provides a unique opportunity to study and understand people, processes, and products; the three P’s of game development to explore innovation, collaboration and experimentation. The interest in researching the GGJ community has reached significant levels. It has been evolving for the past few years, extending and modifying existing methodologies used to understand the complexities game development within a rapid-prototyping framework, in a specified time and theme. In this workshop, we plan to continue where we left off from our successful FDG 2013 workshop. This will bring together academics and Game Jam organizers to discuss and understand the considerable potential that the GGJ offers participants, academics, and organizers.
Organizers:
Allan Fowler
Mirjam Palosaari Eladhari
Foaad Khosmood
Ali Arya
Susan Gold
Design Patterns in Games
Description: A design pattern is a means of formally describing a solution to a design problem in a particular domain or field. 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 untried ideas and expectations of player behavior.
The DPG workshop features a half day of research paper presentations, followed by a half day of group discussions on challenges and opportunities in design pattern research, concluding with short presentations of group discussion results.
Organizers:
Joris Dormans, Hogeschool van Amsterdam - j.dormans@hva.nl
Procedural Content Generation in Games
Description: Procedural content generation (PCG) in games, a field of growing popularity, offers hope for substantially reducing the authoring burden in 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. The workshop will also feature discussion panels and invited speakers.
We invite contributions on all aspects of generating game content, using any method. Both descriptions of new algorithms, theoretical or critical analysis and empirical studies of implementations and applications are welcome.
Organizers:
Noor Shaker, ITU University of Copenhagen
Kenneth Stanley, University of Central Florida
Kate Compton, University of California, Santa Cruz
Social Believability in Games
Description: Social believability is of key interest to computer game studies, development, and 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. In 2013 we organized two workshops organized with the theme of Social Believable NPCs, one at DiGRA 2013 and one at ACE 2013. We aim these to be the start of a workgroup series to be organized on a yearly basis together with appropriate leading game conferences. Both occasions had around 10 participants and discussants which we estimate in the case of FDG should be closer to around 20. 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.
Organizers:
Mirjam Palosaari Eladhari
Harko Verhagen
Joshua McCoy
Magnus Johansson