Introduction
A one day workshop held in conjunction with the 36th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering.
The game community continues to grow and embraces stake-holders with broad interests. There are games for entertainment, serious games (i.e., games with a purpose), and gamified applications. Entertainment games, for example, are a thriving industry with over two billion players around the world; this industry generates over 120 billion in revenues. However, today’s large-scale entertainment games have many challenging development issues. They are complex, can take years to develop, and rely on teams with expertise spanning artistic, computer science, software engineering, and business skills. Games have demanding traditional quality of service requirements (e.g., performance, reliability, scalability, usability). They also have distinct user experience requirements to provide players with a game that is engaging and fun.
The interdisciplinary games and software engineering research community investigates game development issues from the perspectives of traditional engineering (e.g., requirements engineering, design, testing) and umbrella (e.g., lifecycle processes, configuration management, traceability) activities. In addition, topics including metrics, re-use, data analytics, user experience, and so on are also explored. Automating the methods for these diverse topics is essential to support the rapid, cost effective development of high quality games. ASE4Games 2021 provides a forum to explore issues that crosscut the automated software engineering and the game development communities.
Theme and Topics
Game developers share a common community of interest: how to best engineer game software. They focus their attention on entertainment market opportunities, game-based applications in non-entertainment domains such as defense, education, healthcare, and scientific research (i.e., serious games), and the gamification of applications to improve engagement. This workshop seeks contributions from academic researchers and commercial game developers, addressing topics that span the emerging and current research challenges in the areas including, but not limited to:
- Automated requirements engineering methods for games.
- Automated software architecture and design methods for games.
- Automated generation and modding of games.
- Automated software testing for games, including usability and playtesting.
- Automated model based representations, analyses, and transformations (forward, reverse).
- Automated monitoring, analysis, and visualization of game play data acquired from large scale games.
- Automated machine learning techniques applied to game development.
- Automated adaptation of game play.
- Automated workflows/processes for game development (e.g., Agile, DevOps).
- Automated configuration management, traceability, and build methods for game development.
- Tools, infrastructure, and services supporting automated game development methods.
The goals of ASE4Games are gathering academic game researchers and commercial game developers and contributing on topics relevant to the emerging and current grand challenges in Automated Software Engineering for Games. We seek to:
- Bring together the greater community of software engineers and game engineers in an interactive program that encourages discussion and scholarly debate from interdisciplinary perspectives.
- Identify and explore emerging and new research challenges, costs and benefits for entertainment games, serious games, and gamification in traditional (non-game) applications and activities.
- Generate a new research agenda, identify topics of interest for this community, and how future workshops may explore these topics.
This workshop is structured to be highly interactive, encourage discussion, and appeal to participants from academia and industry. The workshop will feature two keynote presentations, short and long paper presentations with discussions, a game/tool demonstration session, and a social event to build strong, lasting relationships among the participants.
Important Dates
Submission Deadline: September 3, 2021
Notification: September 27, 2021
Camera Ready: October 1, 2021
Workshop date: November 15, 2021
Program and Pre-prints
| Item Name | Start (UTC-5) | Duration (mins) | Title | Author(s) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Welcome and Opening | 9:00:00 AM | 0:10:00 | – | Kendra M. L. Cooper | |
| Full Paper + Q&A | 9:10:00 AM | 0:25:00 | Automated game testing using computer vision methods | Ciprian Paduraru, Alin Stefanescu and Miruna Gabriela Paduraru | |
| Short Paper + Q&A | 9:35:00 AM | 0:15:00 | Rebuilding games at runtime | Diego Castro and Claudia Werner | |
| Break | 9:50:00 AM | 0:15:00 | – | – | |
| Full Paper + Q&A | 10:05:00 AM | 0:25:00 | Towards a Framework to Assist Iterative and Adaptive Design in Gameful Systems | Antonio Bucchiarone, Antonio Cicchetti, Enrica Loria and Annapaola Marconi | |
| Short Paper + Q&A | 10:30:00 AM | 0:15:00 | Metrics for Assessing Gamers’ Satisfaction: Exploring the Graphics Factor | Stylianos Gkikas, Christina Volioti, Nikolaos Nikolaidis, Apostolos Ampatzoglou, Alexander Chatzigeorgiou and Ignatios Deligiannis | |
| Break | 10:45:00 AM | 0:15:00 | – | – | |
| Keynote | 11:00:00 AM | 1:00:00 | Lessons Learned from 5 years of ASE4GAMES at Industrial Scale and Future Research Directions | Mathieu Nayrolles | |
| Round table | 12:00:00 PM | 1:00:00 | – | Fabio Petrillo & Cristiano Politowski | |
| Closing | 1:00:00 PM | 0:10:00 | – | Kendra M. L. Cooper |
Program Committee
Apostolos Ampatzoglou - University of Macedonia, Greece
Antonio Bucchiarone - FBK-IRST, Italy
Sylvain Hallé - Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, Canada
Abdelwahab Hamou-Lhadj - Concordia University, Canada
Joshua McCoy - University of California, US
Markus Schatten - Faculty of Organization and Informatics, Croatia
Submission details
All submissions will be refereed by three members of the program committee. Accepted submissions will be published in the conference electronic proceedings and in both the ACM Digital Library and the IEEE Digital Library.
Submissions are accepted as follows:
- Long research papers (8 pages)
- Short research papers (5 pages)
- Game and tool demonstrations (2 pages)
In their submissions, the authors must provide links to their repository of supporting material (e.g., code, videos, etc.). Submissions must follow the ASE 2021 submission instructions using the IEEE templates. Note that the names and ordering of authors in the camera ready version cannot be modified from the ones in the submitted version.
ASE4Games 2021 requires that at least one author on each accepted paper will register for, and attend, the ASE4Games 2021 workshop, and give a presentation on the results.
Papers submission is via EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ase4games.
Workshop recording
Hosted on Youtube.
