EDG: The 1st Workshop on Engineering Digital Games: Towards the Next Generation of Programming Models, Languages and Authoring Tools is a full-day workshop on June 25 2012. It is co-located with the fourth ACM SIGCHI Symposium on Engineering Interactive Computing Systems (EICS) in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Workshop website:
http://equis.cs.queensu.ca/~eicsgamesworkshop/
Conference website:
http://eics-conference.org/
Important dates:
Submission: April 23
Notification: May 7
Final version: May 21
Digital games have become an increasingly important form of entertainment. Their appeal includes their engaging interactive nature, the social opportunities they afford through networked play, and their wide availability on platforms ranging over the web, mobile phones, specialized consoles, and traditional PCs.
Game developers face relentless pressure to deliver better graphics, more realistic physics, more natural forms of interaction, and support for larger networked groups. Thus, games are becoming more expensive to produce and require ever more sophisticated expertise to create. At the same time, prices of games are dropping (particularly for mobile and social platforms). Games are also proving valuable in specialized markets such as education, advertising and physical therapy, where the large teams and budgets used by traditional studios are not available.
Clearly, techniques are required allowing developers to quickly implement new game ideas with decreasing need for advanced programming skills. Yet games are still built using low-level techniques based around the frame-loop architecture, the scene graph data structure, C++ API’s to physics, networking and AI libraries, and low-level programs on the graphics processing unit.
(more after the jump)
Workshop goals:
In this workshop, we will explore current research into programming models, authoring and implementation tools, and domain-specific languages that address the hard problems of game development, aiming to reduce development time, increase support for rapid iterative development, support developers’ creativity, and reduce requirements for low-level programming expertise.
Submission details:
Position papers should be two to four pages long in SIGCHI format. Specific problem domains to be addressed in the workshop include (but are not limited to):
Novel software architectures for games, such as entity-based architectures
Novel programming models for AI
Novel programming models for networking in games
Novel tools and languages for game design and game narrative
Creativity support in game development tools.
Position papers should express a position, not simply report on research you are performing. They should form a launching point for discussion at the workshop. Each position paper should include a short bio of the authors of the paper. Accepted papers will be published on the web site.
Please email your submission in PDF format to eicsgamesworkshop@googlegroups.com by 8:00 PM Pacific Time (PT) on April 23, 2012.
Organizers:
Nicholas Graham
School of Computing, Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada
Robert Walter
Entertainment Computing Group, University of Duisburg-Essen, Duisburg, Germany