Mind the Game – Computer games driving AI & shaping society /// International conference & hackathon

Mona Leinung Announcement
Location
Germany
Subject Fields
Cultural History / Studies, Digital Humanities, Intellectual History, Philosophy, Communication

*Call for Papers*

Mind the Game – Computer games driving AI & shaping society

International conference & hackathon of the VW research group ‚Mind the Game‘
at Folkwang University of the Arts, Essen

26th – 29th March 2020 /// Deadline for submissions: 30th November 2019

AI in games is a well-established technology but surprisingly a less explored topic in today’s discussions on AI. AI in games has a huge impact on both children and adults by socially adapting 34 Million German citizens to AI on a daily basis. Thus, our main hypothesis is that AI is not a future technology but has long been part of the living rooms of our present society, opening up an unexplored socio-intelligent space. Therefore, it is time to ‚Mind the Game!‘ and to scientifically explore the socio-intelligent space of AIs and users in games, its adaptive impact on society, but also its growing influence on academic AI research.

 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) increasingly dominates the public discourse on future society. Self-driving cars, robots that care for elderly people and decision making algorithms in user applications will transform our social life. However, while most of the publicly discussed smart cars, robots, and algorithms are still to be developed in academic and industrial labs, the massive exposure of millions of users to AI in computer games is already part of our everyday experience. Games have an audience of 46% of the German population and even larger audiences in countries like Japan, the US, China and Korea regardless of gender, ethnicity, social or educational background. While some people are worried about a few autonomous cars running in supervised test conditions in California, many have

gotten used to driving amongst autonomous cars in

games like Grand Theft Auto V or Forza Motorsport — fully equipped with autonomous path finding algorithms, collision detection, obstacle recognition and other advanced AI methods. Games provide a continuous ubiquitous and pervasive mode of testing AI, disseminating AI technologies, and introducing AI in a massive prosumer community.

 

The conference brings together researchers from philosophy, computer science, media- and social studies and allied disciplines to reflect the conceptual and/or theoretical dimension of Artificial Intelligence in Games, and discuss or question how the human-AI collaboration can be defined, what it can describe, and how it can be differentiated.

 

Topics could include:

  • Co-Evolution of AI and Computer Games
  • Social and Cultural impact of Game-AI
  • History of AI related to Play and Game
  • Concepts of Alien and Animal-AI
  • Influence of Game-AI on Science
  • Playful Epistemologies and Aesthetics
  • Socio-cultural Posthumanism
  • Affective Human-AI relations

 

Paper proposals (including title, max. 600 word abstract, and biographical sketch) should be sent to  onference@mindthegame.de by 30th of November 2019. For further information please see www.mindthegame.de

Contact Information

Folkwang University of the Arts 
Campus Zollverein I Quartier-Nord 
Faculty of Design | Philosophy 
Martin-Kremmer-Str. 21 
D- 45327 Essen

Contact Email
conference@mindthegame.de