Introducing the 'AI and Games Conference' | AI and Games Newsletter 14/08/24
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Hey all, I’m , this is the Newsletter and today we’re breaking the rules a little! Our (now fortnightly) newsletter is all about a big announcement we’re rolling out today: the first ever AI and Games Conference!
Running on November 8th at Goldsmiths, University of London, we’re delivering the first dedicated event for the game AI community in Europe since 2017. Myself and a team of fantastic collaborators are bringing to you a very special event, and in this issue we’re going to be digging into what it’s all about, our goals for creating this new event, how you can take part, and what our future aspirations are for this project.
But first, let’s cover some other announcements, AI in the news, and of course, a word from our sponsor.
Special Thanks to our Sponsor
This edition of the AI and Games Newsletter is brought to you courtesy of Scenario.
Scenario offers the most complete suite of features offering creative precision to game studios and indie developers. Scenario’s training capabilities facilitates the creation of AI models by anyone from anywhere and at any time to easily incorporate style-consistent assets in current game production workflows for ideation, conception, production and marketing. Private by default with full data traceability, Scenario is available as Webapp or API that can directly be integrated within popular engines such as Unity and Unreal or directly in-game. Backed by Play Ventures, Decasonic, Anorak Ventures, Oculus, Riot games, Blizzard and more.
Go to scenario to find out more: https://www.scenario.com/
Announcements
Not many new announcements this week, but it’s worth reminding you of upcoming events and projects.
While I’m running my own event, that isn’t going to stop me talking at others! As mentioned previously, I will be speaking next month at the NEXUS Games Conference which runs on September 25th and 26th in Dublin, Ireland.
The GamesIndustry.biz HR Summit event is running on September 18th 2024. I’ll be there to discuss the potentials and pitfalls of AI in the games industry but from a HR perspective.
Be sure to check out my upcoming ‘Large Language Models (LLMs) for Game Designers’ course I’ll be running with Gamaste. You can pre-register here with the course running on October 7th in Paris, and October 9th in Lyon.
AI in the News
A handful of stories that caught my eye, and certainly worth sharing if you haven’t see them already.
The EU AI Act is now Active!
Yes indeed the EU’s new regulations on AI are now active, but in practice it’s a little more complicated than that. While the law is now active, the first provisions listed in the law do not come into effect until February of 2025. The entire act does not come into force until August 2026. Outside of the 'high-risk' AI regulations, companies have around 2 years to get their act together. So it’ll be a while before we begin to see any real change. And what does that mean for the games industry as a whole? Well, we’ll find out in time. Though I really should dedicate a future issue to digging into this.Understanding the IP Law in a World of Generative AI
A really good piece that dropped just yesterday on GamesIndustry.biz with Andrew Velzen of law firm MBHB discussing the issues that generative AI will have when dealing with intellectual property law.The SAG-AFTRA Strike Could Impact Fortnite?
A piece from the BBC giving a breakdown of the current situation with the SAG-AFTRA strike. While games that started development after September of 2023 aren’t affected by the strike, this means that pretty much every major live service title - Fortnite, Apex Legends, League of Legends, Dota 2, Overwatch, Valorant and more - may well be the first casualty, given they’re both project that pre-date the strike cutoff, and are still in active development. We will be returning to this story next month in the newsletter. In fact, it would have been this weeks issue, but of course we announced a conference today!
The 2024 AI and Games Conference
So yeah, lets dig into our big story, which I’ll concede looks like a horrendous bout of self-promotion, but in truth this is something much larger than me and my work. Today we announced the very first AI and Games Conference, an event dedicated to bringing together experts in AI for game development. We’ll be hosting two tracks of talks on Friday 8th November at Goldsmiths, University of London.
You can visit our website now to grab your early-bird tickets, plus see our first round of announced talks from the likes of Oxide Games, Sony AI, Electronic Arts, Hawkswell, and more. With even more talks to be announced in the coming weeks.
Plus we’re grateful to our partners AWS for Games, Creative Assembly, and Riot Games, who will not only be presenting talks of their own, but have sponsored the event to help us make it a success, and provide tickets at accessible price points for developers.
We Need More Game AI Events
The AI and Games Conference is intent on resolving a grave disservice to the game development community: we currently have no dedicated event for professionals who work in AI for games in Europe. The last European event that catered specifically to people working in and around AI for the video games industry was Game AI North, which ran in Copenhagen in 2017. This event was, in itself, a reaction to the closure of nucl.ai (previously called the Game AI Conference) after its final run in 2016. These events provided a venue for developers, but also academic researchers, students, hobbyists, and more to exchange knowledge, recruit talent, showcase their wares, and perhaps most critically, build their personal and professional networks.
Both nucl.ai and Game AI North were fantastic events, and were also incredibly valuable not just to my personal development, but my content creation work too! As discussed recently in my ‘10 Years Reflections’ episode on the AI and Games YouTube channel, my AI breakdowns of games such as Alien: Isolation, Spec Ops: The Line, Ghost Recon Wildlands, Halo Wars 2, and Sea of Thieves and more emerged courtesy of those events.
And so today I’m announcing not just a new conference, but a new approach towards ensuring we have an accessible and high-quality event in Europe that supports the game AI community. This is far from an individual endeavour, and I’m joined by a team of collaborators who all recognised the gap that exists in our industry, and strove to do something about it in a way that will ideally ensure we continue for many years to come.
We didn’t just build an event: we setup a non-profit dedicated to supporting our community.
Supporting the Game AI Community
To ensure the success and longevity of the AI and Games Conference, we have founded a community interest company (CIC) in the UK: Game AI Events CIC. This company is dedicated to providing high-quality, accessible, and informative events that cater to students, hobbyists, and professionals interested in AI for games across the UK and Europe. We will service this community by hosting events that enable networking and knowledge exchange.
This remit must be followed, given Game AI Events CIC is a registered UK charity, and must report to the UK Charity Commission on an annual basis on how money made by the company is invested to service the community. While our conference is branded as an AI and Games production, this is to enable for greater outreach and engagement courtesy of the audience I have accrued over a decade across various media platforms - be it YouTube, Substack, and others. The CIC has licensed my company’s brand for a minimal fee - and I paid the fee out my own pocket (which sounds really dramatic, but I set the fee at £1).
So let me stress, this isn’t a money making enterprise: our goal (and legal mandate) is to invest profits attained from hosting these events to do it again, and to do it better.
Without further ado, let me introduce the founding members of Game AI Events CIC:
Board of Directors
Dr Tommy Thompson (y’know, me), Director of AI and Games
Alan Zucconi, Director of Studies (Games) at Goldsmiths, University of London
Advisory Board
Duygu Çakmak, R&D Director at Creative Assembly
Matthias Siemonsmeier, Head of Artificial Intelligence at Splash Damage
Dr Gabriel Robert, Lead R&D Developer, Ubisoft La Forge (Montreal)
Why go through all of this effort? There’s an underlying aspect to all of this that is critical to our future success: an institution which is not controlled by a single entity. It is our goal that over time we will welcome new members both to our advisory board, as well as the board of directors. Thus allowing for organisers to cycle in and out over time, while ensuring the CIC persists, and our activities can continue over time.
But of course, while we’re all experts in the field - and can manage editorial and overall business management - we don’t know how to run an event. So I want to take a moment to highlight that the first person we brought in to help us make this happen was none other than my good friend
: the writer of the who I know can help us deliver on our goals for 2024 and ensure we survive long enough to do this all over again in 2025!The 2024 Conference
So yeah, this all sounds really exciting, but let’s hear more about the conference. The event itself is split across two tracks of talks:
AI for Gameplay:
Utilising AI technologies for the purposes of gameplay, ranging from navigation tools, behavioural systems for NPCs, strategy systems, procedural content generation, experiment management (director AI), and more.AI for Game Production:
Looking at how to utilise AI as part of production. This includes things like art upscaling, animation systems, quality assurance, gameplay balancing, matchmaking systems, toxicity detection, player analytics and of course the recent trends of generative models for asset creation.
Our first round of speakers is now live on the conference website, including talks from Electronic Arts, Hawkswell, Oxide Games, and Sony AI, plus academic researchers from the University of Hertfordshire, and Queen Mary University of London.
We not only have even more talks to announce in the coming days, but also we’re opening up submissions for game developers and researchers to submit their own talks. Submissions are open now and close on September 6th.
Our Partners
I’m proud to announce we launch the conference today with a big thank you to our three partner sponsors, who will also be delivering talks at this years event:
Amazon Web Services: Amazon’s is one of the largest providers of online solutions in the games industry (and that includes AI solutions), They have supported studios across the industry such as Epic Games (Fortnite), WB Games (Mortal Kombat, Hogwarts Legacy), Sony Interactive Entertainment (Gran Turismo), Gearbox Software (Borderlands), Rovio (Angry Birds), and Capcom (Street Fighter, Resident Evil, Monster Hunter)
Creative Assembly: One of the UK’s most beloved games studios and home to the Total War franchise. Plus the creators of Halo Wars 2 and Alien: Isolation.
Riot Games: The creators of the massively popular League of Legends, plus the online shooter Valorant and titles such as Legends of Runeterra, Teamfight Tactics and the upcoming 2XKO.
Plus a special thank you to Bitpart AI who have came on board as our lanyard sponsor too. We still have a variety of sponsorship packages available for the conference, plus table space for companies to present their wares or open up recruitment. You can find out more over at the conference website.
Wrapping Up
You can expect further updates on the AI and Games Conference in the coming weeks, both on social media but also here on the Substack, as I’ll be keeping you up to speed as we announce more speakers and their talks.
In the meantime, early bird tickets for the conference are now live, and I look forward to seeing you some of you in London in November.
In the meantime, we will resume our regular newsletter activities with the next issue. Thanks as always for your support of the work we do here at AI and Games, and we’ll see you all next week!
Not quite AI, but AI adjacent-sometimes-overlapping, my university (Breda University of Applied Sciences) runs the Everything Procedural conference each year. Also, I loosely know Alan Zucconi and guest lectured/external board stuff at Goldsmiths for the Games master's run by Phoenix then Fede.