Accepted Papers

Full Papers

Track: AI and Game-playing

Title	Authors	ID
An approximate solution of “Einstein Würfelt Nicht!”	Wei-Lin Hsueh and Tsan-Sheng Hsu	12
Bootstrap Your Own Teacher: Online Policy Distillation for Multi-Game Reinforcement Learning	Donal Byrne, Marko Tot, Paul Duckworth, Clement Bonnet, Alexandre Laterre and Thomas Barrett	21
Pokémon Red via Reinforcement Learning	Marco Pleines, Daniel Addis, David Rubinstein, Frank Zimmer, Mike Preuss and Peter Whidden	26
Time-critical and confidence-based abstraction dropping methods	Robin Schmöcker, Lennart Kampmann and Alexander Dockhorn	33
Real-Time Diffusion Policies for Games: Enhancing Consistency Policies with Q-Ensembles	Ruoqi Zhang, Ziwei Luo, Jens Sjölund, Linus Gisslén and Alessandro Sestini	43
Automatic Action Space Specification for Deep Reinforcement Learning in Games via Program Analysis	Sasha Volokh and William G.J. Halfond	45
NTRL: Encounter Generation via Reinforcement Learning for Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment in Dungeons and Dragons	Carlo Romeo and Andrew David Bagdanov	47
On the Importance of Representation in Imitating Human-like Gameplay	Ville Tanskanen, Arto Klami and Ville Hautamäki	53
Grammar and Gameplay-aligned RL for Game Description Generation with LLMs	Tsunehiko Tanaka and Edgar Simo-Serra	56
FAST: Similarity-based Knowledge Transfer for Efficient Policy Learning	Alessandro Capurso, Elia Piccoli and Davide Bacciu	80
Comparative Analysis of GAT and BERT for Human-Like Playtesting	Kleio Fragkedaki, Theodoros Panagiotakopoulos, Matteo Biasielli and Hui Wang	83
RL- and LLM-based AI Solvers for the Game of Wordle/Fibble	Krerkkiat Chusap, Colin Murphy, Clay Hess, Sai Deepa Kadaru, Rohit Buccapatnam and Chang Liu	103
Can LLMs Generate Good Stories? Insights and Challenges from a Narrative Planning Perspective	Yi Wang and Max Kreminski	104
Quantum Checkers: The Development and Analysis of a Quantum Combinatorial Game	Marien Raat, Luuk van den Nouweland, Matthias Müller-Brockhausen, Mike Preuss and Evert van Nieuwenburg	107
General Game Playing Hyper-Agents for Ludii	Nicholas Thompson and Matthew Stephenson	110
A Multimodal Architecture for Endpoint Position Prediction in Team-based Multiplayer Games	Jonas Peché, Aliaksei Tsishurou, Alexander Zap and Guenter Wallner	114
A New Rules Balance Track for the Pokémon VGC AI Competition 2.0	Simão Reis, A. Lucas Martins, Rita Novais and Fernando Alves	119
PillagerBench: A Benchmark and Framework for LLM-Based Agents in Competitive Multi-Agent Minecraft Environments	Olivier Schipper, Yudi Zhang, Yali Du, Mykola Pechenizkiy and Meng Fang	143
NeuroPAL: Punctuated Anytime Learning with Neuroevolution for Macromanagement in Starcraft: Brood War	Jim O’Connor, Yeonghun Lee and Gary Parker	150
Game-Oriented ASR Error Correction via RAG-Enhanced LLM	Yan Jiang, Yongle Luo, Qixian Zhou and Elvis S. Liu	172
Evaluating AI Cooperation with Humans in Codenames	Christopher Archibald, Koby Cutler, Tyler Barney, Matthew Sheppard and Blake Peterson	173
JSON-Bag: A generic game trajectory representation	Dien Nguyen, Diego Perez Liebana and Simon Lucas	176

Track: Designing Games, Serious Games and Playful Experience

Title	Authors	ID
Virtual Reality Game-Based Classification of Arachnophobia: A Two-Step Clustering Approach	Susanna Brambilla, Simone Abate, Giuseppe Boccignone, Nunzio Alberto Borghese, Marco Ligabue and Laura Anna Ripamonti	7
AI Agents: Design and Evaluation of Gamified Conversational Agents	Christian Poglitsch, Maria Seiser, Markus Buchsteiner and Johanna Pirker	22
Quantitative Analysis of Visual Guidance in Level Transitions Using Multimodal Visual Metrics	Kaijie Xu and Clark Verbrugge	35
Finding mechanisms to build analog prototypes of serious games for spatial planning and city building	Micael Sousa	46
Gamifying the World Wide Web: Competitive and Interactive Play on Real Websites	Yoshinari Shirai, Yasue Kishino, Sanae Fujita, Tessei Kobayashi and Hiroki Higuchi	57
Designing with Player Paths: Presenting a Game Design Framework	Martin Schacherbauer and Daniel Dyrda	95
How Task Complexity Moderates the Impact of AI-Generated Images on User Experience in Gamified Text Labelling	Fatima Althani, Chris Madge and Massimo Poesio	96
A Study on Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment using Real-Time Stress Detection in Virtual Reality	Susanna Brambilla, Sadra Heidary Moghadam, Laura Ripamonti and Pierluca Lanzi	111
NutricARe – An Augmented Reality Serious Game to Educate Type 2 Diabetics During Hospital Stays	Jannik Waldraff, Christian Eichhorn and David Plecher	131
Coin Catcher: a Mobile Serious Game to Predict the Morality Personality Trait	Patrícia Alves, Raul Coelho, Joana Neto, Luis Conceição and Goreti Marreiros	157
We Never Took the Kobayashi Maru Test Until Now. What Do You Think of Our Solutions? – Journeys of the Mind Through a No-Win Game	Kenji Saito, Riki Toriyama, Kokone Noguchi, Tomoyoshi Yamamoto, Jonah Egashira and Rei Tadika	160
Gameplay Evolution: A Game Design Method Based on Evolutionary Theory	Xing Sun and Hongjie Ge	164
Exploring Aim Assistance in a Foot-Based Target Shooting Game in Virtual Reality	Ren Boz	175
Balance Masters: A Heart Rate Biofeedback Game for Enhancing Emotion Regulation in Adolescents	Xinyu Li, Siqi Liu, Qihui Chou, Xing Sun and Shiguang Ni	181
Empowering through Posture: Power Poses in MR Exergames to boost Self-Efficacy	Mary Linke and Sabiha Ghellal	182
Sonic Doom: Enhanced Sound Design and Accessibility in a First-Person Shooter Game	Ibrahim Khan, Thai Nguyen Van, Mustafa Can Gursesli and Ruck Thawonmas	186

Track: Game HCI, Player Experience, Game Analytics, e-sports

Title	Authors	ID
Matchmaking Beyond Elo: Why Teams Are More Than the Sum of Individual Skill	Nico Elbert, Christoph Flath, Victor Klockmann, Fabian Kosse, Alicia von Schenk and Nikolai Stein	5
Inter-Player Data for the Prediction of Emotional Intensity in a Multiplayer Game	Alexander Brooke, Matthew Crossley, Huw Lloyd and Stuart Cunningham	11
How Size Shapes User Behavior in Playful Full-Body Interactive Experiences: Insights on Territoriality and Social Distance	Sena Beste Ercan, Isabel Lorena Alessandrini, Laura Guàrdia Vela, Olga Gali and Narcis Pares	15
How do Players Perceive Gender Discrimination? On the Differences of Harassment in Online Games	Ronja Fuchs, Jakob Droste and Alexander Dockhorn	31
Fair Play and Identity: In-Game Behavioral Biometrics for Player Identification in Competitive Online Games	Franziska Zimmer, Mhd Irvan, Maharage Nisansala Sevwandi Perera, Ryosuke Kobayashi and Rie Shigetomi Yamaguchi	51
Trajectory Analysis and Prediction in Counter-Strike with LSTM Models	Dan Trong Thai and Marco Scirea	59
From Fads to Classics — Analyzing Video Game Trend Evolutions through Steam Tags	Nicolas Grelier, Johannes Pfau, Stéphane Kaufmann and Nicolas Mathieu	72
What Makes a Level Hard in Super Mario Maker 2?	Carlo A. Furia and Andrea Mocci	76
CDOPS: Complex Dynamics of Online Professional Squads	Brianna Duffy, Jonathan Gallagher, Jocelyn Rego, Wael Fatnassi and Michael Warren	85
Investigating Complex Dynamics in Eye-Aspect-Ratio of Expert Tetris Players Using Recurrence Quantification Analysis	Gianluca Guglielmo, Michal Klincewicz and Pieter Spronck	87
Path Generation and Evaluation in Video Games: A Nonparametric Statistical Approach	Daniel Campa, Mehdi Saeedi, Ian Colbert and Srinjoy Das	93
Precision Under Fire: Analysis and Predictive Modeling in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive	Xinyao Xia, Abel Salinas and Fred Morstatter	105
PIE: Permutation-Invariant Multi-Entity Evaluation	Xue Yan, Haifeng Zhang, Yali Du and Jun Wang	115
Exploring the (Placebo) Effect of an AI-Powered Dialogue System on Player Experience	Sarita Sridharan, Steeven Villa, Alena Denisova and Johanna Pirker	132
AI vs. the Algorithm: Measuring Success on Twitch	Alan Pedrassoli Chitayat	133
Deceptive Game Design? Investigating the Impact of Visual Card Style on Player Perception	Leonie Kallabis, Timo Bertram and Florian Rupp	144

Track: Game Technology

Title	Authors	ID
Detecting Memory Editing Cheats by Validating Host Memory Integrity from GPU	Naoki Hashimoto and Soramichi Akiyama	8
A Continual Offline Reinforcement Learning Benchmark for Navigation Tasks	Anthony Kobanda, Odalric-Ambrym Maillard and Rémy Portelas	28
Perspectives of Sound Designers on Real-Time Sound Propagation in Games	Yiping Han, Alena Denisova, Christina Vasiliou, Danjeli Schembri, Michael Jones and Damian Murphy	63
Go Game Capture and Reconstruction of Missing Moves using Deep Learning Techniques	Roman Gerloff, Manja Marz and Florian Wahl	88
Measuring the Power Consumption of Video Games	Julien Lukasewycz and Torben Weis	121
The Maximum Number of Sets for 12 Cards is 14	Justin Stevens, Duncan Wilson and Richard Kelley	170

Track: Procedural Content Generation

Title	Authors	ID
On-Device, Diverse, Difficulty-Driven Level Generation for Match 3D Puzzles via Reinforcement Learning	Koya Ihara, Tomomi Takahashi, Kazuya Kuroda and Naoyuki Jimbo	2
From a Single Design to Multiple Variations: AI-Guided In-App Image Generation	Gali Hod, Dvir Ben Or and Eyal Regev	39
From a Single Design to Multiple Variations: AI-Guided In-App Image Generation	Gali Hod, Dvir Ben Or and Eyal Regev	39
IPCGRL: Language-Instructed Reinforcement Learning for Procedural Level Generation	In-Chang Baek, Sung-Hyun Kim, Seo-Young Lee, Dong-Hyeon Kim and Kyung-Joong Kim	113
Controllable Procedural Generation of Race Track Surroundings for Iterative Level Design	Petr Šimůnek, David Šosvald, Martin Kahoun and Vojtěch Černý	138
Non-Uniform Tile Wave Function Collapse	Rolf Piepenbrink and Rafael Bidarra	139
A Case Study on User Perception of Parameterized LLM-Generated Narratives	Nicholas Treynor and Joshua McCoy	183

Auxiliary Papers

Vision

Title	Authors	ID
Procedural Generation and Games at the Dawn of Fault Tolerant Quantum Computing	Daniel Bultrini and James Wootton	254
On the need for reproducibility guidelines for open-source games: A itch.io case study	Claudio Di Sipio, Andrea D’Angelo, Riccardo Rubei and Cristiano Politowski	256
A Call for Deeper Collaboration between Robotics and Game Development	Iolanda Leite, William Ahlberg, André Pereira, Alessandro Sestini, Linus Gisslén and Konrad Tollmar	307
Abduct, Deduct, Induct, Respawn! A Retroductive Perspective on Games	Anne Vetter and Sebastian von Mammen	364

Short

Title	Authors	ID
AI vs. AI: Comparing Artificial Intelligence with Actual Intelligence for a Gameplay Task	John Aycock, Katie Biittner, Syeda Zainab Khaleel, Carl Therrien, Allie Querengesser and Hailey Sikstrom	189
REVIVE – Studying Social Dynamics of Stroke Survivors using a Monitoring VR-based Platform	Sérgio Oliveira, Bernardo Marques, Paula Amorim and Beatriz Sousa-Santos	195
ADAPT – Empowering Healthcare Professionals to Tailor Collaborative VR-Games for Stroke Recovery	Inês Figueiredo, Sérgio Oliveira, Bernardo Marques, Paula Amorim and Beatriz Sousa-Santos	196
LUSITANOS LET’S GO! From Banal to Joking Nationalism in Portuguese Esports Spectatorship	Carina Assuncao	200
Emotion Regulation Through Play: A Serious Game for Preschool Children	Catarina Gonçalves, Eliana Silva and Luís Paulo Reis	215
Action Window Planning for Stealth Missions	Kaijie Xu and Clark Verbrugge	205
Empirical Validation of the Independent Chip Model	Juho Kim	212
Training a Reinforcement Learning Agent for Tales of Tribute	Sebastian Lashmet and Alexander Dockhorn	209
Anamorphic Projection as a Novel Game Mechanic for Investigating Impossible Spaces in 3D Puzzle Games	İrem Aydındoğan and Sema Alaçam	219
AI-Buddies in MMORPGs: Player Perceptions of Conceptual LLM-Driven NPCs in World of Warcraft	Rasmus Ploug and Marco Scirea	221
Liminal Procedural Horror	Diogo de Andrade, Phil Lopes and Nuno Fachada	220
The Co-Design process behind CogniSpace: A Serious Game for Cognitive and Psychosocial Rehabiliation	Eliana Silva, Carolina Figueira, Luís Paulo Reis, Marta Parreira, Ana Ramos, Catarina Fernandes, Marta Reis and Sara Araújo Silva	222
Emotion Odyssey: Promoting Emotion Regulation Skills in Families through a Serious Game	Eliana Silva, João Pedro Silva, Luís Paulo Reis and Sara Araújo Silva	223
Play-Style Identification Using Low-Level Representations of Play Traces in MicroRTS	Ruizhe Yu Xia, Jeremy Gow and Simon Lucas	224
Open-Ended NPC Dialogue Favors Casual Players: A Pilot Comparison of Three LLM-Driven Dialogue Systems	Anthon Kristian Skov Petersen, Emil Rimer, Rasmus Ploug and Marco Scirea	225
Using Psychophysiological Insights to Evaluate the Impact of Loot Boxes on Arousal	Gianmarco Tedeschi, Rune K. L. Nielsen and Paolo Burelli	228
Population-based Evaluation for Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment in Repeated Rock-Paper-Scissors	Johannes Büttner and Sebastian von Mammen	231
On the dynamics of affective states during play and the role of confusion	Thomas Volden, Oleg Jarma Montoya, Paolo Burelli and Marco Scirea	232
AntiCheatPT: A Transformer-Based Approach to Cheat Detection in Competitive Computer Games	Mille Mei Zhen Loo, Gert Lužkov and Paolo Burelli	261
ScriptDoctor: Automatic Generation of PuzzleScript Games via Large Language Models and Tree Search	Sam Earle, Ahmed Khalifa, Muhammad Nasir, Zehua Jiang, Graham Todd, Andrzej Banburski-Fahey and Julian Togelius	265
Toward a Game Design Engineering Process Centered on Player Experience	Daniel Dyrda and Gudrun Klinker	267
Evaluating Quality of Gaming Narratives Co-created with AI	Arturo Valdivia and Paolo Burelli	277
Toward a Unified Spatial Interface for Controlling Procedural Content Generation	Achim Bunke and Daniel Dyrda	280
Play x Discuss: A Digital Cooperative Discussion Game About Women in Science	Chrysa Bika, Shobhana Narasimhan, Johannes Barth, Gudrun Klinker and Daniel Dyrda	283
Fostering AI Literacy through Strategic Play: A Competitive Pathfinding Game for Middle School	Claire Aguiar, Dan Carpenter, Jessica Vandenberg, Wookhee Min, Veronica Catete and Bradford Mott	287
Constraint Propagation for Reasoning in Single-player Deduction Games	Fandi Meng, Kaijie Xu and Simon Lucas	290
Framework for Generating State-Space Graphs	“Michael Joseph Ericson, Sindri Sigthorsson, Hrafn Orlygsson, Yngvi Bjornsson and Stephan Schiffel”	296
Generating Ensembles of Search Policies to Solve Baba Is You Levels	Robert Ronge, Erik Albrecht, Dominik Woiwode and Alexander Dockhorn	297
Narrui: Visual Dialogue System Tool featuring Interactive Editor Playback for Better Usability	Rui Kremsmayr and Jeremiah Diephuis	301
Pixels to Play: One Model, Any Game	Yuguang Yue, Chris Green, Samuel Hunt, Irakli Salia, Wenzhe Shi and Jonathan Hunt	300
Prototyping Video Games for Understanding Abstract Concepts	Hainan Yu and Pedro Cardoso-Leite	306
Designing a Narrative-Centered Game to Promote AI Literacy and Health Career Exploration	Bradford Mott, Jessica Vandenberg, Carlos Penilla, Sean Hennigan, James Lester and Elizabeth Ozer	308
Development of a Measure of Copresence, Social Interaction, and Engagement During Online Gameplay for Older Adults with and without Mild Cognitive Impairment	Kara Mumma, Patricia Griffiths, Kayci Vickers, Kala Jordan and Maribeth Gandy Coleman	309
Using Vertical Dynamics Actuators in the Car as Haptic Feedback for Entertainment Applications	Simon Stolz, Gudrun Klinker, David A. Plecher, Johanna Pirker and Christian Eichhorn	316
Targeting Muscular Dystrophy with Serious Games for Exercise Rehabilitation based on Mixed Reality	Wenzhe Zhuge, Elisabetta Gazzerro, David A. Plecher, Gudrun Klinker, Johanna Pirker and Christian Eichhorn	319
Learning Representations in Video Game Agents with Supervised Contrastive Imitation Learning	Carlos Celemin, Joe Brennan, Pierluigi Vito Amadori and Timothy Bradley	324
A Virtual Reality Serious Game to Teach about the Bullwhip Effect in Supply Chains	Nils Hothum, Mrunal Manohar Mohadikar, David Wuttke, David Plecher and Christian Eichhorn	326
Generating 3D Terrain with 2D Cellular Automata	Nuno Fachada, António Rodrigues, Diogo de Andrade and Phil Lopes	330
God’s Innovation Project – Empowering The Player With Generative AI	Ritvik Nair, Timothy Merino and Julian Togelius	333
Round Outcome Prediction in VALORANT Using Tactical Features from Video Analysis	Nirai Hayakawa, Kazumasa Shimari, Kazuma Yamasaki, Hirotatsu Hoshikawa, Rikuto Tsuchida and Kenichi Matsumoto	335
Learning Dark Souls Combat Through Pixel Input With Neuroevolution	Jim O’Connor, Gary Parker and Mustafa Bugti	337
An Empirical Evaluation of UI Element Detection in Mobile Games for Automated Testing	Nozomu Karai, Koya Ihara, Tatsuya Ishimoto, Daiki Kubo and Kotaro Kikuchi	340
Where are the Frontlines? A Visualization Approach for Map Control in Team-Based Games	Jonas Peche, Alexander Zap and Guenter Wallner	344
Exploring the Potential of an AI-based Twitch Moderation and Toxicity Detection Bot	Julian Huth, Christian Eichhorn, David A. Plecher and Johanna Pirker	345
Modeling Uncertainty: Constraint-Based Belief States in Imperfect-Information Games	Achille Morenville and Eric Piette	346
Designing for Engagement: A Co-Created VR Game for Upper Limb Rehabilitation	Andreia Pinto de Sousa, Teresa Freitas, José Karnikowski, Leonor Oliveira, Micaela Fonseca, Pill Lopes and Filipe Pinto	351
Gender-Based Behavioral Patterns in Twitch Gaming Live Streamers: An Observational Study	Danielle Dolan-Sanchez and Lila Boz	353
Measuring Time Delay Tolerance in Third-Person Live Commentary for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate	Ryosuke Matsushita, Koki Fukuda, Ryosuke Sakai, Shinnosuke Takamichi, Kota Iura, Yuki Saito, Graham Neubig, Katsuhito Sudoh, Hiroya Takamura and Tatsuya Ishigaki	354
Design and Evaluation of Farm Farce: AI as Improvisational Comedy Director in Farming Simulation Games	Yuantong Yun and Xinyu Kang	357
Gamified VR Environment with Second-Screen Web Interface for Therapist-Guided Exposure Therapy	Gabriel Marques, André Antunes, Rui Nóbrega and Rui Madeira	361
Viewport Tracking Model for Automatic Observing in League of Legends	Yu-jin Kim, Hyun-woo Lee, Ho-taek Joo and Kyung-Joong Kim	370

Competition

Title	Authors	ID
Fit to Fling: Genetic Prompt Optimization for the LLMs4PCG Competition	Jesse Grabowski, Yi Xia, Pratch Suntichaikul, Haekal Damar Qudsi Madani and Ruck Thawonmas	249
Sound Judgment: A Multi-Year Evaluation of Audio Aesthetics and Gameplay Impact in DareFightingICE Sound Design Competition	Ibrahim Khan, Mustafa Can Gursesli, Thai Nguyen Van and Ruck Thawonmas	352
Can Multimodal LLMs Reason About Stability? An Exploratory Study with Insights from the LLMs4PCG Challenge	Mury Fajar Dewantoro, Febri Abdullah, Yi Xia, Ibrahim Khan, Ruck Thawonmas and Wenwen Ouyang	366

Demo

Title	Authors	ID
AI-Assisted Wordle Demo: Combining LLMs and Rule-Based Solvers for Enhanced Gameplay	Colin Murphy and Chang Liu	193
Modeling Conflict De-Escalation in Shakespeare through Hybrid NLP & Symbolic Approaches	Nicholas Treynor, Kyle Mitchell, Nick Toothman, Gina Bloom, Colin Milburn, Michael Neff and Joshua McCoy	334
Talking to NPCs: Three LLM-Driven Approaches to Dynamic RPG Dialogue	Emil Rimer, Rasmus Ploug, Anthon Kristian Skov Petersen and Marco Scirea	234
Voice-Controlled AI Companions for Natural Language Collaboration in a Survival Game	Kehao Liu and Fandi Meng	292
SketchTiler: Co-Creative Sketch-to-Tilemap Conversion Using Wave Function Collapse	Blythe Chen, Raven Cruz-James, Justin Lam and Jim Whitehead	339
Anonymized: A Narrative-Centered Educational Game for AI-Infused Biomedical Career Exploration	Bradford Mott, Jessica Vandenberg, Carlos Penilla, Sean Hennigan, James Lester and Elizabeth Ozer	291
Within the mirror: A narrative RPG to empathize about mental health	Isabella Garcia Merlano, Eduard Sierra-Ballen and Sandra Molano-Pacheco	320
Tone – an Interactive Music Learning Experience	Willi Schorrig, Manuel Danze, Manuel Eberhardinger and Sabiha Ghellal	347
Prompt Override: LLM Hacking as Serious Game	Roberto Gallotta, Antonios Liapis and Georgios N. Yannakakis	197