We are happy to announce the new issue of gamevironments, http://www.gamevironments.uni-bremen.de/!
In this year’s regular issue, #6 (2017), you find articles, a game review, and a research report.
Continue reading →

CALL FOR PAPERS

GAMES & CULTURE

SPECIAL ISSUE: CASUAL GAMES AND GAMING

Editors:

Shira Chess, University of Georgia (schess@uga.edu)

Christopher A. Paul, Seattle University (paulc@seattleu.edu) Continue reading →

Inviting for submissions for a forthcoming issue of the Journal for Digital Culture & Society “Rethinking AI: Neural Networks, Biopolitics and the New Artificial Intelligence.”

The meaning of AI has undergone drastic changes during the last 60 years of AI discourse(s). What we talk about when saying “AI” is not what it meant in 1958, when John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky and their colleagues started using the term. Take game design as an example: When the Unreal game engine introduced “AI” in 1999, they were mainly talking about pathfinding. For Epic Megagames, the producers of Unreal, an AI was just a bot or monster whose pathfinding capabilities had been programmed in a few lines of code to escape an enemy. This is not “intelligence” in the Minskyan understanding of the word (and even less what Alan Turing had in mind when he designed the Turing test). There are also attempts to differentiate between AI, classical AI and “Computational Intelligence” (Al-Jobouri 2017). The latter is labelled CI and is used to describe processes such as player affective modelling, co-evolution, automatically generated procedural environments, etc.
Artificial intelligence research has been commonly conceptualised as an attempt to reduce the complexity of human thinking. (cf. Varela 1988: 359-75) The idea was to map the human brain onto a machine for symbol manipulation – the computer. (Minsky 1952; Simon 1996; Hayles 1999) Already in the early days of what we now call “AI research” McCulloch and Pitts commented on human intelligence and proposed in 1943 that the networking of neurons could be used for pattern recognition purposes (McCulloch/Pitts 1943). Trying to implement cerebral processes on digital computers was the method of choice for the pioneers of artificial intelligence research.
The “New AI” is no longer concerned with the needs to observe the congruencies or limitations of being compatible with the biological nature of human intelligence: “Old AI crucially depended on the functionalist assumption that intelligent systems, brains or computers, carry out some Turing-equivalent serial symbol processing, and that the symbols processed are a representation of the field of action of that system.” (Pickering 1993, 126) The ecological approach of the New AI has its greatest impact by showing how it is possible “to learn to recognize objects and events without having any formal representation of them stored within the system.” (ibid, 127) The New Artificial Intelligence movement has abandoned the cognitivist perspective and now instead relies on the premise that intelligent behaviour should be analysed using synthetically produced equipment and control architectures (cf. Munakata 2008). (:::::)

For the complete Call please see http://digicults.org/callforpapers/cfp-rethinking-ai/

Call for Papers for 2017 vol.2, issue 2

Game Studies at the crossroads
Investigating troublesome lines of the intersection between videogame studies and other disciplines.
Edited by: Jan K. Argasinski (Jagiellonian University, Poland)
Continue reading →

Theoretical Perspectives and Applications of Gamification in Business Contexts - https://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-business-research/call-for-papers/special-issue-theoretical-perspectives-and-applications-of-g

*** CALL INFORMATION ***
Special Issue Guest Co-Editors:
Juho Hamari, Tampere University of Technology (juho.hamari@tut.fi)
Petri Parvinen, University of Helsinki (patri.parvinen@helsinki.fi)
Anders Gustafsson, Karlstad University (anders.gustafsson@kau.se)
Nancy V. Wünderlich, Paderborn University (nancy.wuenderlich@upb.de)

Submission deadline: 15 Nov 2017

First revisions due: 15 March 2018

Final revisions due: 15 October 2018

Expected publication date: JBR makes articles available as soon as they are accepted

This an open call. However, interested authors can OPTIONALLY submit a first 10-page version to the gamification-track at the 51st Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-51):

Submission of 10-page version to HICSS-51: 15 Jun 2017

Deadline for HICSS-51 fast-track papers: 15 Feb 2018

http://hicss.hawaii.edu/program/hicss51-fasttrack/

http://gamification-research.org/2017/03/hicss2018/
Continue reading →

AUTOPLAY. GAMING IN THE AGE OF AUTOMATION

Call for Papers for a special journal issue

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Mit_cE1f6uTiDyq-g1V8tRFYw39fgP5EwXRJ6lig3Ww/edit

Currently, at the edge of the new digital frontier, automation and smart algorithms are gaining immense social attention, enticing, as mechanisation and machines before, as much wonder as awe. Automation affects all aspects of life. Although it remains most noticeable in the context of work and the fourth industrial revolution, it also plays a large, albeit questionable, role in the creative domains – in music, visual arts, literature, film and digital games. Some of the recent examples include Sony’s first fully AI produced music album, J. Walter Thompson’s 3D printed Rembrandt “created” by deep learning algorithms, Sunspring sci-fi film co-written by AI, or Google’s experiments with natural language learning and poetry, amongst many others.

Continue reading →