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Special Issue on Computer Vision and Games: Call for Papers

Video Games and Computer Vision research have long held a symbiotic relationship. On the one hand, virtual worlds in games are often used for collecting training data or as testbeds for computer vision models since they provide a greater deal of flexibility, control and scalability in the data collection process compared to the real world. On the other hand, computer vision advancements have enabled us to push the frontiers of what is possible within these artificial game worlds and have transformed the processes with which these worlds are created. However, significant research questions still remain unaddressed both in the field (Computer Vision) and the domain (Games), which include technical and engineering challenges.

 

This special issue invites research papers aiming to bridge the existing gaps between computer vision research and games engineering, with the motive of bringing together the games research community and the computer vision community that have largely operated independently until now. We are inviting papers for two main tracks. The first track focuses on introducing novel techniques within computer vision research that can advance the field of digital games. The second track, instead, focuses on leveraging game technologies to advance state-of-the-art techniques in computer vision. The list of topics below is not inclusive of all research directions that will be represented.

1) Computer Vision for Games

  • CV for game-playing, game testing and player modelling.

  • Data-driven CV to improve game graphics, animations, level-design, etc. as well as procedural content generation.

  • HCI through visual interfaces (gestures, posture, gaze, etc.).

  • Extended reality games.

  • Synthetic data and media generation based on users' emotions, behaviour, etc.

  • Improving real-time applicability of vision models integrated within games and game engines.

2) Games for Computer Vision

  • Game worlds that aid data augmentation techniques.

  • Rich game-based labelled datasets for tasks such as object detection, segmentation, or depth and flow estimation.

  • Ethics of game-based data collection and inference.

  • Forward modelling in and for games.

  • Generalisation and robustness in vision models leveraging a plethora of existing commercial games.

  • Unsupervised pre-training of image/video representations and world transition models from gameplay data.

 

We invite the submission of high quality papers on the topics above in the full paper format. Authors should follow normal IEEE Transactions on Games guidelines for their submissions, but clearly identify their papers for this special issue during the submission process. Extended versions of previously published conference or workshop papers are welcome, provided that the journal paper is a significant extension, and is accompanied by a cover letter explaining the additional contribution. You may visit the submission guidelines for author information guidelines and page length limits.

Important Dates:

  • Paper submission: January 31, 2024

  • First decisions: May 31st, 2024

  • Early access SI publication (online): August 2024

  • Publication in print: End 2024

Guest Editors:

  • Chintan Trivedi (University of Malta)

  • Matthew Guzdial (University of Alberta)

  • Konstantinos Makantasis (University of Malta)

  • Julian Togelius (New York University)

  • Nicu Sebe (University of Trento)

 

Special Issue on Human-Centred AI in Game Evaluation - Call for Papers

Most games are consciously designed with a specific experience or vision in mind. Games are commonly designed for entertainment and competition purposes, but self-expression, social critique, targeted learning, knowledge discovery as well as physical and mental health are also valid design objectives. Determining whether an objective is fulfilled is often quite difficult due to the complexity of modern games and the variability of human responses. For this reason, games are commonly playtested before being published. However, playtests are expensive and time-consuming and not all aspects of the game can be evaluated to the full extent before it is published.

There is thus a need for more concentrated and systematic work on evaluating/characterising games, its artefacts as well as player experience. Researchers have proposed approaches intended to assist game designers using methods from the field of artificial and computational intelligence (AI and CI, respectively). Still, to our knowledge, there is a surprising lack of generality and validation regarding these methods, even in scientific publications on game design. No central repository for methods currently exists. In this special issue, we want to focus on human-centred AI approaches aiming for a more holistic and systematic approach to game evaluation. We thus seek submissions on related topics for this special issue.

 

The following is a non-comprehensive list of suggested topics:

  • Uses of AI agents to evaluate game content

  • Measures for game evaluation

  • Game evaluation and play-testing for AR/VR

  • Relationship between AI agents and player experience

  • Automatic analysis of play-traces

  • Mixed-Initiative gameplay evaluation

  • Player modelling for game evaluation

  • Automatic evaluation for new game genres

  • Validation of automatic evaluation methods using human data

  • Generality of automatic evaluation methods

  • Differences between different evaluation methods (tested with AI or humans, qualitative vs. quantitative, objective vs subjective measures, etc.)

  • Evaluation measures and their relationship to business and research goals

  • Playtesting standards in industry

  • Correlation between objective and subjective measures

  • Ethics, privacy and legal aspects of using player data

  • Evaluation of generated content

 

We invite the submission of high quality papers on the topics above in the following formats:

  • Full papers

  • Short papers

  • Letters

 

Authors should follow normal IEEE Transactions on Games guidelines for their submissions, but clearly identify their papers for this special issue during the submission process. Extended versions of previously published conference or workshop papers are welcome, provided that the journal paper is a significant extension, and is accompanied by a cover letter explaining the additional contribution. See (https://www.transactions. games/submit/submission- guidelines ) for author information guidelines and page length limits.

Important Dates

  • Paper submission November 1st, 2023

  • First decisions January 29th, 2024

  • Early access SI publication (online) March 2024

  • Publication in print End 2024

Guest Editors

  • Alena Denisova (University of York, UK)

  • Diego Pérez-Liébana (Queen Mary University of London, UK)

  • Vanessa Volz (modl.ai, DK)

  • Julian Frommel (Utrecht University, NL)

  • Sahar Asadi (King, SE)

 

Ongoing Special Issues

  • User Evaluation for VR Games - Guest editors: Hai-Ning Liang (Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China), Wenge Xu (Birmingham City University, UK), Yiyu Cai (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore), Fotis Liarokapis (CYENS – Centre of Excellence, Cyprus)

 

Recent Special Issues

  

New Proposals

If you are interested in guest editing a special issue, you should send a proposal to the Editor-in-Chief (Georgios N. Yannakakis).

 

Preparing your Proposal

  1. Please prepare a Call for Papers which will ultimately be distributed. We would suggest that this is a maximum of one side of A4.
  2. Please provide an additional page, that presents short biographies of the proposed guest editors and why they are qualified to guest edit a special of the Transactions of Games in the area being suggested.
  3. The proposal will be sent to the journal’s Associate Editors for comment. You may be asked to revise the proposal and this iterative process will continue until a decision has been made.

 

Other Points to Note

  • The proposed guest editors must include a current Associate Editor of ToG. This will ensure that the same standards are maintained for special issues, as for regular issues.
  • A guest editor can submit a maximum of ONE paper with them as an author.
  • A special issue cannot be related to a particular event (e.g. a conference) and submissions should be open to all
  • The editorial that is eventually written to introduce the special issue must not mention specific conferences or events

 

Previous Special Issues

  1. Computational Aesthetics in Games (Volume 4, Issue 3 and Editorial)
  2. Computational Narrative and Games (Volume 6, Issue 2 and Editorial)
  3. General Games (Volume 6, Issue 4 and Editorial)
  4. Age of Analytics (Volume 7, Issue 3 and Editorial)
  5. Physics Simulation (Volume 8, Issue 2 and Editorial)
  6. Real Time Strategy (Volume 8, Issue 4 and Editorial)