Dom Ford gave talk and workshop at DiGRA ’25 in Malta

Both the workshop and talk dealt with “the fictional”, using examples of games “that were never played” and the use of Communicative AI for NPC characters.

ZeMKI-member Dom Ford gave a workshop at the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) conference on “Fictional, Fake, Nonexistent, Nonactual, Imaginary, Impossible and Unplayable Games” together with Riccardo Fassone and Nele Van de Mosselaer. The workshop seeks to establish links between the burgeoning study of fictional games and other fields and sites of enquiry, such as media studies, narratology, philosophy of fiction and imagination, literary theory, and speculative design.

Additionally, Dom Ford gave a talk about “Communicative Artificial Intelligence for Nonplayer Characters in Digital Games: Mapping the Field” in which he maps the current state of applications of and critical resarch into the use of communicative artificial intelligence for nonplayer characters in digital games. What has been done, what are researchers writing about it, and what are they not writing about it? He lays out a potential fruitful area of theoretical discussion for the philosophy of fiction.

Link to conference website: https://digraconference2025.org/conference-about