From the first thrown dice and lots to modern VR and AR headsets, technology has always driven, and been driven by, the ways in which we play with one another. Today, AI is a major driving force behind innovation in creative and playful spaces, as well as the field of game design. AI has been leveraged in a variety of ways over the past few decades, from breathing life into fictional characters that walk around game worlds, to analyzing gameplay and assisting developers. New technology doesn’t simply increase profit margins – it brings games to new audiences, helps people overcome barriers to play, and empowers designers to design completely new kinds of experience. This Dagstuhl Seminar focuses on bringing together world-leading researchers, makers, artists and engineers to devise and discuss the next generation of playful experiences and technologies.

Tools and technology drive huge shifts in the games industry. Several of the top-selling games from the last decade, for instance, were built on top of procedural content generation, a technology that has been a core focus of game AI research for decades. Novel game design tools such as Inky, PICO-8 and Puzzlescript have changed how games are made and who can make them, which has reshaped the landscape of the games industry. Bringing academics into contact with the practicalities of making both games and game-making tools is crucial to driving progress both for the commercial games industry and the millions of people around the world making games for other purposes. As such, this seminar will focus on practical building, prototyping and testing, alongside discussion groups and tutorial sessions. By the end of the seminar, we aim to have not only identified new research questions and fostered collaborations between attendees, but also have a suite of games and prototypes to present alongside our traditional Dagstuhl Seminar report.

The goal of this Dagstuhl Seminar is to bring together researchers and designers in the game design and game AI spaces to explore the current and future uses of AI in the practice of game design. This seminar will cover a wide breadth of topics within AI including the following: automated game design; generative AI, procedural content generation; computational creativity; co-creative assistance and mixed-initiative design; speculative design tools and interfaces, including computational craft; game evaluation; human-computer interaction; heuristic search methods; evolutionary design; online community science; and topics within game design practice. Our work will not be limited to the digital: we will be bringing many physical creativity and building systems to the event, as well as inviting several well-known designers of physical installation artworks and games. Part of our goal is to investigate how both AI research and videogames can bridge the gap to the physical world, and explore game AI in a more embodied sense – through toys, creativity and physical games. We aim for this seminar to be guided by, and built around, a sense of fun and play – and in doing so, to find new avenues for research and practice to explore together.

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M Charity, Michael Cook, Nicolaas Vas, and Georgios N. Yannakakis