Workshop on Design Patterns in Games (DPG 2012)

Co-located with FDG 2012 - Raleigh, North Carolina, USA - May 29, 2012

Call for Participation

Overview
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.

Important Dates
Paper submission: 11 March, 2012 (Midnight UTC-11)
Notification to authors: 26 March, 2012
Workshop held: 29 May, 2012

Workshop Organization
The DPG workshop would feature a half day of research paper presentations, followed by a half day of hands-on activities concluding with short presentations of activity results.

The research paper program will consist of short papers (4 pages in ACM format) and full papers (8 pages) selected via a peer-reviewed process. Since the workshop is intended to explore new ideas and directions, submission of incomplete and in-process results are encouraged. Selected authors will be invited to submit an expanded version of their paper to a special issue of the journal Game Studies.

The hands-on activity will consist of a group discussion identifying the challenges and opportunities in discovering patterns, teaching them, and applying them in game design practice. We expect that many of these issues will follow from the presented papers, but participants are also encouraged to prepare short position statements if they have specific issues they would like to see addressed. Participants will then be divided into groups of 4-5 to select an issue and explore it in-depth. At the end of the workshop, we will re-convene and present results. Each breakout group will select a representative to present their findings, which may include a detailed exploration of their selected issues and proposals for solutions and new research directions.

Research Areas
Submissions to this workshop are encouraged from, but not limited to, the following areas:

How game design practice can benefit from a design pattern approach
Case studies of design pattern usage
Teaching game design using patterns
Methods for discovering design patterns in existing games
Methods for representing and communicating design patterns
Methods for evaluating design patterns
Design patterns as input to procedural game or level generation systems
Design patterns in different game genres
Design patterns in different aspects of game design, including:
Levels
Quests/objectives
NPC interactions
Multiplayer
Relationship between player behavior and design patterns
Understanding designer intent through design pattern analysis
Methods of tuning/improving games with design patterns
Design patterns in analog games
Use of design patterns in procedural content generation (we have discussed to possibility of a joint session with PCG if we accept papers of interest to both workshops)



Submission Instructions
Submissions should follow ACM SIG conference formatting guidelines. Papers may be submitted using the Easychair submission system: DPG 2012 submissions

Proceedings
We are requesting that all papers be archived in the ACM Digital Library.

Workshop Organizers
Co-Chairs:
Kenneth Hullett, UC Santa Cruz
David Milam, Simon Fraser University

Committee:
Staffan Björk, Göteborg University & Interactive Institute
Gillian Smith, UC Santa Cruz
Jose Zagal, DePaul University

For more information, please visit http://dpg.fdg2012.org
Questions regarding the workshop can be sent to khullett@soe.ucsc.edu