The International Conference on Computational Creativity

The next International Conference on Computational Creativity published its Call for Papers this week, which is normally only interesting to researchers who like receiving emails that start with “Sorry if you receive this more than once”. However, I want to write a little something about it on here, because this year’s conference is going to be bigger than ever, and is branching out to be more inclusive, well-defined and full of potential than ever. If you’re a developer, researcher, coder, hacker or anyone else interested in the field, please read on!

First things first: if you want to read the Call for Papers in its entirety, you can find it on the official site here. Notice that there are lots of categories of papers described there. I want to draw your attention to a few of them:

System Description Papers do what their name suggests – you made something that’s technically complex or solves some difficult challenges, but maybe you haven’t had time to do a full evaluation with lots of experiments and analysis. These papers let you write up that work and present it to the Computational Creativity community. A lot of stuff done in the line of games development might fall under this banner – you don’t have time to test hypotheses about this tool you made, you just know that it does something interesting. We want to know about it!

Cultural Application Papers are about creative software ‘in the wild’, so to speak. If you’re working with creative software in the context of public engagement, or you’re exhibiting something somewhere, or perhaps a piece of software made a contribution to a competition like a game jam and you want to document that – this kind of paper lets you do that. Again, extensive analysis of the software you’re writing about isn’t the most important thing here. We want to know about what you did, how it went, and what the response was.

These two paper types are really important. There’s a lot of people whose work I’d love to see at ICCC 2014, but who might not be able to do complex evaluations expected of standard technical papers. ICCC still wants to see your work! Please consider submitting something to us.

We’re interested in software that takes on some creative responsibility somewhere along the line. Not all software does this – sometimes a random generator is just a random generator. But if you think you’ve been working with software and tools that exhibits creativity in some way – through demonstrating appreciation or imagination, perhaps, or by surprising or innovating, or by showing an ability to evaluate its work – then consider submitting something to the conference! I’d love for this year to be the year that gaming breaks into ICCC in full. Come join us!

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