FDG2022 | 4th Workshop on Tabletop Games

Conference on September 5-8 | Athens, Greece (and online)

1 Introduction

Analog games have seen a surge of interest: board game cafés, new titles, and a more accepting culture to role-playing games as a pass-time has fueled a boom in sales. However, academic research is relatively stagnating upon the analog domain as an object of design, due to both the interdisciplinary nature taking cues from computer science, narrative creation, psychology, and due to a lack of good publication venues for such works. Although being integrated to achieve crucial outcomes such as brain health diagnosis, industrial training, recruitment process, analog games have been under-studied in terms of human factors consideration and design improvisation. The workshop endeavours to highlight such issues by discussing existing solutions and potential areas of improvement. Furthermore, the aim of this workshop is to address the gap between research and practice, looking at the ways in which academics can apply their tools to the discussion of analog games; this includes but is not limited to board games, war games, and tabletop role-playing.

This year sees the 4th iteration of the FDG Workshop on Tabletop Games. You can find the programme and accepted papers the previous workshops held on 2018, 2019 and 2020.

2 Important note on scope

We define tabletop games here to include any game played by a group of players (or one player, in niche cases) on the tabletop: this includes board games, role-playing games, technology-enhanced board games (e.g. Mansions of Madness or Alchemists), and so on. Computer simulations of tabletop games are also included, e.g. for simulated board game play for the purposes of artificial intelligence or other computational tasks. Importantly, the topics of this workshop do not include playground activities or urban games, pervasive games (e.g. played throughout the day during other activities), and games intended to be played exclusively on the computer (e.g. digital card games such as Hearthstone). Therefore, while a computer-based generator which outputs a map and description which can be played on a tabletop role-playing game such as Dungeons & Dragons is acceptable, should the same generator only output dungeons played on the computer it would not be acceptable. Similarly, a computer simulation (interactive or not) of Chess would be acceptable provided that it simulates a board game (in this case Chess) which can be played on the tabletop. If you have any questions on whether a topic is within scope of this workshop, please contact us at ttgworkshop4@easychair.org for the specific case.

3 Submissions

We welcome submissions as either full papers describing novel research as well as short papers. Note that full papers may be published at the ACM Digital Library under circumstances (depending on the number of accepted papers), but short papers will not.

We futher welcome playable experiences and demos as part of or instead of a normal paper presentation and we will work with accepted submissions in order to allow for the presentation in a space for such demos.

Submissions can be made via EasyChair at the following address: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ttgworkshop4

Tabletop games span a broad range of applications, but indicative topics for papers include but not limited to:

Player/User Experience Testing and Playtest Methodologies
Design and Manufacturing of Physical Game Objects.
Impact of 3D printing and rapid prototyping.
Rules Generation, Development, and Extraction.
Crowd-Funding Development and Processes.
Social Networks and Discussion Groups on Analog Games.
Impact of YouTube (i.e. video rule-books) on games rules presentation
IoT Technologies in Games Objects.
Procedural Content Generation.
Technology applied to the understanding of play.
Historical Reviews, Post Mortem, and Lessons Learned.
Dos and Don'ts of Game Design.

4 Programme

  • The Tabletop Games Workshop will take place between 10:00 and 13:00 on Tuesday 6 September, 2022. The venue is the New Building of Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences. See the FDG website for more venue details.

10:00-10:05 Introductions
10:05-10:30 Paper presentation: Exploring Game Balance in the Scandinavian Fox Game with Monte-Carlo Tree Search (Olof Mattsson and Anton Janshagen)
10:30-10:55 Paper presentation: Tabletop role playing games and creativity: The Game Master perspective (Akrivi Katifori, Dimitra Petousi, Pantelis Sakellariadis, Maria Roussou and Yannis Ioannidis)
10:55-11:00 Debrief
11:00-12:00 Coffee Break
12:00-12:30 Presentation and Demo: MANTEIA: A Tarot RPG in Progress (Renata Ntelia and Aphrodite Theodora Andreou)
12:30-13:00 Round-table Discussion

5 Important Dates

27 May 2022 10 June 2022Paper submission deadline
8 July 2022Acceptance Notification
6 September 2022Workshop
5-8 September 2022Conference

6 Submission Guidelines

The workshop accepts four types of submissions:
label Full Papers (5-8 pages)
label Short Papers — works in progress (2-4 pages)
label Playable Experiences — defined as activities requiring the entire group to participate (max 2 pages, and should include a supplement with images and ideally video)
label Playable Demos — requiring only a few members or one member as part of the demo (max 2 pages, and should include a supplement with images and ideally video)
Please designate the type of paper you are submitting in the title (as a second line). E.g.

Randomness Mitigation Mechanics in Card Drafting Games: An Overview
Short Paper
Note that full papers may be published at the ACM Digital Library under circumstances (yet to be defined), but short papers and playable experiences/demos will not.
Papers submissions will be subject to double-blind peer review, and each submission will be peer reviewed. Authors of accepted papers will be invited to give an oral presentation of their paper at the workshop. Playable Experiences and Demos will be invited to present and set up live demonstrations during the event (ideally with a physical presence). All submissions should be anonymized, as the review process is double-blind. All submissions (short and long papers) should be in PDF format and comply with the new ACM format and need to import ACM CCS 2012 concepts. Both one-column and two-column ACM format options are acceptable, and both LaTeX and Word ACM templates are acceptable for producing the PDF file.
Papers should be submitted through EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ttgworkshop4

7 Organizers

  • Hamna Aslam is affiliated with the University of Toulouse, France, and Innopolis University in the capacity of the researcher and instructor. She is also the vice-chair of the IEEE Committee on Games. She co-authored the book "Affordance Theory in Game Design: A Guide Toward Understanding Players" and numerous peer-reviewed articles. Her research interests include Human Factors in Gaming, Human-Computer Interaction, Intuitive Game Design, and User Experience Evaluation Testing.

  • Joseph Alexander Brown was born in Niagara-on-the-Lake, ON, Canada, on July 6, 1985. He received a B.Sc. (Hons.) with first-class standing in computer science with a concentration in software engineering, and M.Sc. in computer science from Brock University, St. Catharines, ON, Canada in 2007 and 2009, respectively. He received a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Guelph in 2014. He also holds a к.ф.-м.н. issued by the Russian Higher Degree Attestation Committee in 2019. He previously worked for Magna International Inc. as a Manufacturing Systems Analyst and as a visiting researcher at ITU Copenhagen, and was most recently Associate Professor and Head of the Artificial Intelligence in Games Development Lab at Innopolis University in Innopolis, Republic of Tatarstan, Russia. He is currently an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Brock University, St. Catharines, ON, Canada. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE, was the proceedings chair for the IEEE 2013 Conference on Computational Intelligence in Games (CIG) and is Vice-Chair for the IEEE Committee on Games. He serves as a chair of the yearly Procedural Content Generation Jam (ProcJam). He the coauthor of "Affordance Theory in Game Design: A Guide Toward Understanding Players".

  • Antonios Liapis is a Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Digital Games, University of Malta, where he bridges the gap between game technology and game design in courses focusing on human-computer creativity, digital prototyping and game development. He received the Ph.D. degree in Information Technology from the IT University of Copenhagen in 2014. His research focuses on Artificial Intelligence in Games, Human-Computer Interaction, Computational Creativity, and User Modelling. He has published over 100 papers in the aforementioned fields, and has received several awards for his research contributions and reviewing effort. He has served as general chair in four international conferences, as guest editor in four special issues in international journals, and has co-organised 12 workshops.

8 Program Committee

  • Sofiia Yermolaieva, Innopolis University
  • Brenna Noonan, Quillsilver Studio
  • Mehmet Kosa, Arizona State University
  • Björn Strååt, Stockholm University
  • Marco Scirea, University of Southern Denmark
  • Phil Lopes, HEI-Lab, Universidade Lusófona
  • Joe A. Wasserman, West Virginia University
  • Staffan Björk, University of Gothenburg
  • Jose Zagal, University of Utah
  • Raluca Gaina, Queen Mary University of London