ICIDS 2023

Youichiro Miyake

Monday, November 13th, 09:00-10:45 GMT+9

Youichiro Miyake (Ph.D) is a general manager of AI Division, SQUARE ENIX.  He is also a project professor at the Institute of Industrial Science (IIS), the University of Tokyo. He has been developing AI of digital games in game industry as AI technical director while researching game AI technologies as lead AI researcher in a digital game company in twenty years. He developed the technical design of AI for the following game titles: CHROME HOUNDS (2006, Xbox360), Demon’s Souls (2009,PlayStation3), Armored Core V (2012, Xbox360, PlayStation3) developed by FROM SOFTWARE, and FINAL FANTASY XIV, FINAL FANTASY XV, and Kingdom Hearts III developed by SQUARE ENIX. He is also a board member of Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) JAPAN and a chair of SIG-AI in Japan Chapter, and the International Game Developers Association (IGDA Japan) since 2006 He researches the technical design of combination of smart city and metaverse by using game AI system “Meta-Character-Spatial AI dynamic cooperative model”. He published more than 10 books on game AI, and many academic papers. He had many lectures in international academic conferences such as SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAPH ASIA, IEEE Conference On Games, and ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, and international industrial conferences such GDC and CEDEC.

Keynote 1:

I have been researching game AI technologies since 2004 for twenty years. The technologie are to make interactive, real-time, digital contents. A digital game is not just simulation, but entertainment. A role of digital game AI is to make a lot of dramatic scenes in digital game. I will show some cases of how AI makes dramas by using game AI techniques

Anastasia Salter

Tuesday, November 14th, 09:00-10:45 GMT+9

Anastasia Salter is a Professor of English at the University of Central Florida, and the Director of Graduate Programs and the PhD in Texts & Technology for the College of Arts and Humanities. Dr. Salter is the author of Playful Pedagogy in the Pandemic: Pivoting to Games-Based Learning (Routledge, with Emily Johnson, 2022), Twining: Critical and Creative Approaches to Hypertext Narratives (Amherst College, with Stuart Moulthrop, 2021), A Portrait of the Auteur as Fanboy (University of Mississippi Press, with Mel Stanfill, 2020), Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider (Bloomsbury, with Aaron Reed and John Murray, 2020), Toxic Geek Masculinity in Media (Palgrave Macmillan, with Bridget Blodgett, 2017), Jane Jensen: Gabriel Knight, Adventure Games, Hidden Objects (Bloomsbury, 2017), What is Your Quest? From Adventure Games to Interactive Books (University of Iowa Press, 2014), and Flash: Building the Interactive Web (MIT Press, with John Murray, 2014). 

Keynote 2:

In Search of “No-Code”: Reimagining IDN Authoring Tools in the Age of AI

The promise of “no” or at least “low” code has been foregrounded in many IDN authoring tools. From Flash’s original timeline interface to Inform 7’s promise of “natural language” development; from Adventure Game Studio’s graphical structures to Twine’s various story formats; from Ren’Py’s modified Python to Bitsy’s minimalist interface; IDN authoring tools that aim at empowering individual creators or students are particularly prone to this rhetoric. However, an author seeking to craft anything beyond the most superficial of experiences in any of these tools will usually find that code is waiting just below the surface. However, the rise of AI-powered coding assistants (such as ChatGPT 4 and GitHub CoPilot) is raising new speculation on the future of code: in an provocation published in The Atlantic, Kelli Maria Korducki suggested that “computer science is no longer the safe major.” As we reckon with both the possibilities and panics surrounding AI-augmented IDN authoring tools, the history of “no-code” and the search for inclusive IDN authoring tools offers guidance for imagining the platforms of our future.

Andrew Phelps

Wednesday, November 15th, 09:00-10:45 GMT+9

Dr. Andrew “Andy” Phelps (https://andyworld.io/) is a Professor in the Film & Media Arts division of the School of Communication at American University, and as Director of the AU Game Center, a multidisciplinary effort that engages faculty, staff, and students from several divisions and departments across AU. He also holds a joint appointment as a Professor in the Computer Science Department in the AU College of Arts & Sciences. AU offers several degrees and certificates relative to games and media, including an MA in Game Design and an MFA in Games and Interactivity, and Phelps advises students in these programs as well as other areas of media arts and computing.

Mia Consalvo

Wednesday, November 15th, 09:00-10:45 GMT+9

Dr. Mia Consalvo is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Game Studies and Design at Concordia University in Montreal. She is the co-author of Real Games: What’s Legitimate and What’s Not in Contemporary Videogames (2019) and Players and their Pets: Gaming Communities from Beta to Sunset (2015). She is also co-editor of Sports Videogames (2013) and the Handbook of Internet Studies (2011), and is the author of Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames (2007) as well as Atari to Zelda: Japan’s Videogames in Global Context (2016). 

Keynote 3:

The Un-Hero’s Journey: Notions of Narrative in a More Mundane Context

This talk explores notions of interactive digital narrative that challenge notions of agency, choice, and engagement. Specifically, we examine ( and challenge ) notions of a hero’s narrative, or even being a hero, or even what it means to ‘play’. This is a rethink, a thought exercise, a set of ideas wrapped around exploring the very fundamentals of interactivity, as we try to work out notions of engagement, agency, and choice (or lack thereof). See you there!