The Social Believability in Games Workshop of 2015 (SBG2015) is organised in cooperation with the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE’15). The workshop will be held on the 15th of November 2015 at the University of California Santa Cruz, California.
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. We 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, research results, 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.
Topics
We welcome submissions on the following 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
- authoring social behavior for NPCs and agents
- provocative ideas
Important Dates:
Paper and demo submission: July 3, 2015
Decision notification: July 24, 2015
Camera-ready deadline: August 10, 2015
Workshop: November 15, 2015
Submission instruction
We welcome both long papers (7 pages) reporting research results as well as short papers (2-3 pages) describing work in progress.
Papers should be formatted in AAAI two-column, camera-ready style (see the author instructions page: http://www.aaai.org/Publications/Author/author.php).
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.
Papers and demoes should be submitted through EasyChair. Please visit the workshop page for the EasyChair url, it will appear there shortly: https://sites.google.com/site/socialbelievabilityingames/cfp-sbg-aiide-15
Organizers
Harko Verhagen (Stockholm University), verhagen[at]dsv.su.se
Mirjam Eladhari (Otter Play), info[at]otter-play.com
Josh McCoy (American University), jam[at]american.edu
Magnus Johansson (Stockholm University), magnus[at]dsv.su.se
Program Committee (still growing)
Richard Evans, Imperial College London
Ian Horswill, Northwestern University (NWU)
Phil Lopes, University of Malta (UoM)
Brian Magerko, Georgia Institute of Technology (GaTech)
Mike Sellers, Indiana University (IU)
Anne Sullivan, American University (AU)
Webpages
Link to main conference, AIIDE’15: http://www.aiide.org
Link to SBG@AIIDE’15 workshop: https://sites.google.com/site/socialbelievabilityingames/
