Call for Papers:
The 1st Workshop on Programming Languages and Interactive Entertainment (PLIE) at AIIDE 2021 (http://aiide.org/)
Event website:
https://sites.google.com/view/plie21/home?authuser=0

Important Dates
Paper Deadline: August 19
Notification: September 16
Workshop: October 11-12

Invited Speaker
Jon Ingold, Inkle Studios

About PLIE

Programming languages are everywhere in interactive entertainment, often hiding in plain sight -- from high-level tools for creating games and generative art, to scripting languages for non-player characters, to level and artifact representation formats,
to compilers from high-level designer specifications to runnable code, to game engines driven by language-like rules.

The PLIE workshop aims to bring researchers and practitioners together who work at the intersection of Programming Languages (PL) and Interactive Entertainment, both broadly construed; especially PL methods applied in game- and art-related contexts. The
goal is to bring together researchers across communities, i.e. who participate primarily in one of these communities but have an interest in both areas, to identify convergent lines of work and spark new collaborations.

Topics of Interest

PLIE welcomes papers at the intersection of Programming Languages (PL) and Interactive Entertainment, both broadly construed; especially PL methods applied in game- and art-related contexts. Relevant topics include:
Scripting languages for game AI, including behavior trees, rule-based systems, and custom languages like ABL;
Functional reactive programming for interactive or procedural art and animation Logic programming engines to manage game logic;
Novel logics or deductive systems that model game AI reasoning;
Procedural content generation techniques based on program synthesis, logic programming, or solver-aided tools;
Domain-specific and end-user programming languages;
Authoring tools, structure editors, and mixed-initiative co-creativity tools; Formal verification and static analysis techniques for proving things about games;
Game modeling and description languages (such as VGDL);
Formal representation systems for game logic or game AI, such as rule-based and rewriting languages, grammars and regular expressions, finite state machines, rete rules, and Petri nets;
API and library design;
Studies of game developers and games industry practices surrounding programming;
Principles and practices of testing, bugfinding, engineering, designing, and iterating on interactive digital entertainment software;
Studies on the HCI/UX of programming, or Developer Experience, including user interface concerns like integrated development environments (IDEs), direct manipulation programming, and command-line interfaces.

All work should be situated in the context of at least one interactive entertainment domain relevant to AIIDE, such as video games, tabletop games, interactive storytelling, virtual and mixed reality, digital creativity tools, casual creators, procedural
content generation, explorable explanations, educational and training games, livecoding performances, participatory musical and theatrical performance, art installations, escape rooms, and more. Please see AIIDE’s CFP for more information about AIIDE’
s scope.

Submission Types

PLIE will accept submissions to the following tracks:
* Conversation Starters (1-2 pages): Short pitches for discussion group topics (see Format below). We plan to focus PLIE on discussion more than on traditional research presentations, so this type of submission is highly encouraged.
* Preliminary Work Papers (up to 10 pages): Research papers about work-in-progress and initial investigations on relevant topics. Papers should clearly motivate the research question they are asking and may additionally describe software prototypes,
implementations, mathematical definitions of formal systems, design work, corpus analysis, or preliminary data collection, or other technical details of the project. These papers should also describe plans for continuing the work and indicate
opportunities for collaboration.
Position Papers (up to 10 pages): Position papers make a thesis statement related to PLIE topics and argue for that statement, supporting the thesis with cited research.
* Postmortems (up to 10 pages): Postmortem papers describe a completed project and what resulted from it, including successes, failures, and lessons learned.
* Demo or Tutorial Abstracts (up to 4 pages): Describe a system you want to demo and get feedback on, or a skill you want to teach us that might be useful in this kind of research! Please take the online format of the event in mind for this type of paper.

All authors of accepted papers will have the option to publish their paper in the workshop proceedings following the AIIDE conference, which will be published as an open-access CEUR-WS volume (separate from the main AIIDE proceedings).

Presentations

Since watching people give talks is not always the most invigorating part of conferences, we want to devote as much time as possible during PLIE’s synchronous event to discussion. We will therefore encourage authors to pre-record videos and make them
available in advance of (and after) the synchronous event. The Conversation Starters track is meant to give people an opportunity to provide a short pitch for a discussion topic; discussion groups will be organized around selected conversation starters.
We highly encourage Conversation Starter submissions.

However, we also recognize that the opportunity to present work is important for students and folks not already deeply integrated into this community. We therefore request that each paper submission be accompanied by an amount of time you’d like during
the workshop to “hold the floor” during the event. Based on these requests and the volume and nature of submissions, we will curate our event schedule to allow for a good balance of individual speaking and discussion.

Submission instructions

All paper submissions must be anonymized for double blind review.

Submissions should be formatted in AAAI two-column, camera-ready style (use the AAAI Press Author Kit) and be submitted as PDF files via EasyChair at:

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=plie2021

Please reach out to the workshop organizers for any queries or concerns.

Organizing Committee

Ian Horswill, Northwestern University (ian@northwestern.edu)
Chris Martens, NC State University (contextadventure@gmail.com)
Joe Osborn, Pomona College (Joseph.Osborn@pomona.edu)

Program Committee

Sarah Groff Hennigh-Palermo New York University
Rogelio Cardona-Rivera University of Utah
Robert Zubek SomaSim
Mike Sperber DeinProgramm
Michael Cook Queen Mary University of London
Max Kreminski University of California Santa Cruz Mark Santolucito Barnard College
John Aycock University of Calgary
Jim Whitehead University of California Santa Cruz Jacques Carette McMaster University
Halley Young University of Pennsylvania
Gillian Smith Worcester Polytechnic Institute Diego Perez-Liebana Queen Mary University of London
Charlie Roberts Worcester Polytechnic Institute
April Gonçalves Roskilde University
Alan Jeffrey Roblox
Adam Smith University of California Santa Cruz

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