CfP: Second Workshop on Design Patterns in Games (DPG 2013) at FDG2013, Chania Greece, 14-17 May

Website: http://dpg.fdg2013.org/

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
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Paper submission: 6 March, 2013 (Midnight, UTC-11)
Notification to authors: 28 March, 2013
Workshop held: TBA, during the week of 14-17 May, 2013

Workshop Organization
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The DPG workshop will feature 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.

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.

Group discussions will likely follow from issues raised during the paper presentations, but participants are also encouraged to prepare short position statements. The goal is to identify challenges and opportunities in discovering patterns, teaching them, and applying them in game design practice. Following a workshop-wide discussion, participants will select select issues to explore in-depth in breakout groups of 4-5 based on interest. At the end of the workshop, all groups will re-convene and give short presentations of their 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
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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 content generation systems
- Design patterns in different game genres
- Design patterns in different aspects of game design
- Relationships 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

Submission Instructions
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Submissions should be in PDF format and follow ACM SIG conference formatting guidelines, please consult the ACM website for templates: http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates

Papers should be submitted using the Easychair submission system: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=dpg2013

Proceedings
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Papers from the 2012 workshop have been accepted for inclusion in the ACM Digital Library due to our in-cooperation status with SIGCHI (http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2427116). We anticipate the same for the 2013 workshop.


Organizing Committee
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Jose Zagal (Chair) - DePaul University
Staffan Björk - Göteborg University & Interactive Institute
Kenneth Hullett- GREE International, Inc.