Call for Participation

Important Dates

  • Paper Deadline: August 19 (extended from August 12)

  • Notification: September 16 (extended from September 9)

  • Workshop: October 11-12

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.

Topics of interest 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 in the following categories:

  • Conversation Starters (up to 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.

Paper lengths exclude references; up to one additional page may be used for references.


Submission instructions

All paper submissions must be anonymized for double blind review. Papers should be prepared in LaTeX using the AAAI format* and submitted as a PDF via EasyChair at:

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

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).

*If you are unfamiliar with LaTeX, please author your paper as a 2-column document in 11-pt Times New Roman font (or similar) in the word processor of your choice, and our organizing team will assist you with formatting your document for camera-ready submission if the paper is accepted.

Workshop Format: Discussions and 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 write up and present your work is important for students and newcomers to academic communities. We therefore also invite regular paper submissions in several categories and will extend the opportunity for longer, traditional "talk slots" for accepted papers in these categories. These slots don't have to be filled with a traditional live talk! You can give us a demo of your system, send us a video in advance to "screen" during your slot, give us a performance, or ask us to play a game, just to give you a few ideas. To accommodate a range of presentation types, we ask that you tell us at the time of submission how much time you'd like to hold the floor during the event. By default, authors of accepted Conversation Starters will get 2 minutes to "pitch" their topic ideas prior to breakout room discussions, but even these submissions can request more or less time, depending on your needs.

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.