Designing Play with and for AI

AI is reshaping game development, but has not yet reshaped game design. How do we design games, and other playful experiences, that actually use modern AI methods during play? Who is it for? This workshop is suitable for game designers, game developers, experience designers, but also welcomes proffesionals from other creative sectors. Experience of game design or game development is a plus, but the workshop open to anyone interested in designing interactive playful experiences. To be able to participate you need to be employed or self-emplyed (freelance), and based in Skåne. What you will learn The workshop will start with a brief history and overview of how game design innovation has built on technical innovation, but also responded to the lack of appropriate technologies. We will then give an overview of current work on designing games that actually make use of AI. The workshop will then turn into a collaborative design session, where groups of participants will analyze particular design problems from games or other interactive playful systems, and suggest. We will then use agentic AI to try make lightning prototypes of some of the best ideas together. Particpants will leave with a deepened understanding of the tradeoffs and conflicts between ludic design and non-deterministic AI techniques, but also with a better awareness for the immense possibilities for design innovation based on modern AI. Pracitcal Date and time: Oct 27, 1–5 pm Place: Media Evolution, Malmö Price: Free of charge thanks to funding from the European Social Fund Language: English Level: Experience of game design or game development is a plus Equipment: Bring your own laptop About the workshop leaderJulian Togelius is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at New York University, and a co-founder of modl.ai, a game AI company. He is also a membery of Unity's AI council. He works on artificial intelligence for games and on games for artificial intelligence. His current main research directions involve procedural content generation in games, general video game playing, player modeling, and fair and relevant benchmarking of AI through game-based competitions. Additionally, he works on topics in evolutionary computation, quality-diversity algorithms, and reinforcement learning. From 2018 to 2021, he was the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Games. Togelius holds a BA from Lund University, an MSc from the University of Sussex, a PhD from the University of Essex, and an honorary doctorate from Malmö University. He has previously worked at IDSIA in Lugano and at the IT University of Copenhagen. How to register • Fill out the registration form here on Eventbrite, it takes approximately 10 minutes to complete. • The workshop is free of charge thanks to funding from the European Social Fund – therefore we need to collect statistics and personal information about all participants and their organisations. • To be able to participate, you need to be employed or self employed and based in Skåne. Students or unemployed persons cannot participate, unfortunately. • Once you have registered your interest, we from Media Evolution will contact you shortly to ask an authorized signatory from your company to sign a certificate that confirms your participation. Once the certificate is signed, your seat is confirmed. • You are now enrolled in our competence development program and will get the opportunity to connect with other like minded professionals as well as get regular updates on what’s happening in Media Evolutions community. Looking forward to having you with us! Feel free to contact us if you have any questions regarding the application This event is a part of Learn, Create, Engage– a project that helps develop competence and strengthen people who work within the cultural and creative industries in Skåne, by offering free courses and much more. It is run by Media Evolution in collaboration with Region Skåne, with funding from the European Social Fund.