The intersection between Alife and video games is a rich one, albeit often not explored explicitly.  While procedural content generation is a well-known application of nature-inspired algorithms, video games are also a perfect testbed for many other branches of Alife.  

In fact, many Alife simulators could be seen as 0-player games, and they frequently lead to proper video games. This connection continually fosters an ever-increasing community of both researchers and gamers interested in the evolution of artificial life. There is also a long history of video games using Alife concepts as core game mechanics. The intersection between games and Alife provides a fruitful ecosystem for exploring concepts related to life-like phenomena such as adaptability, unpredictability, complexity, and open-endedness. On the other hand, games provide the Alife community with an ever-lasting series of possible problems, limited only by the human imagination, and resulting in powerful and engaging domains. Both Alife and video games clearly greatly benefit from each other. 

The goal of this workshop is to gather and illustrate novel implementations, scientific studies, and demonstrations of nature-inspired algorithms and techniques for Alife in games and, similarly, scientific contributions to Alife employing video games. 

Submissions are welcome as far as the submitted content is relevant to the topic of the workshop. Submitted papers can have a maximum length of 8 pages, not including references, and should be formatted according to the main ALife conference templates (Word, LaTeX).  Contributions may be original or already published. Papers will be reviewed (single blind) by a committee of reviewers - see below if you are interested in serving!

Submit your full papers via the Google Forms submission form (submissions have been closed).

Important dates: 

• Submission closing: May 26th 2023 May 30th 2023

• Notification of acceptance: June 9th 2023 June 13th 2023

• Camera ready deadline: June 16th 2023 June 21th 2023

• Workshop day: July 25th, 17:10 -18:30, hybrid

The accepted contributions will be made available on this workshop website. 

1) Amorphous Fortress: Observing Emergent Behavior in Multi-Agent FSMs, by M Charity, Dipika Rajesh, Sam Earle, and Julian Togelius

2) Automata Quest: NCAs as a Video Game Life Mechanic, by Hiroki Sato, Tanner Lund, Takahide Yoshida, and Atsushi Masumori