Special Session:


Matchmaking in Games

When you are playing a game, it makes sense that the game is supposed to be fun to play. Inextricably linked to this idea is the concept of video game matchmaking: You should play against an opponent that is fun to play against. However, people have different ways of having fun – some would like an extremely challenging opponent, which gives opportunity for learning. Others would like to play against only weaker opponents, to win constantly. Others again would like to play against equals, to have a concept of mathematical fairness. The different ways to approach the concept of fun is what makes game matchmaking a difficult probl

Through your mobile phone, your computer or consoles or even through retro boardgames, people have access to more games than ever before. The popularity of gaming in general has also risen to the point where mainstream media is reporting on gaming trends. However, game matchmaking is an underresearched field given the secrecy of the industry. Some public matchmaking models are available – ELO, TrueSkill and Glicko are notable examples – but there are many more private game matchmaking models especially within video games. These private models are built on private research data, which limits the potential of the models.

We thus propose a special session where we introduce public matchmaking models capable of handling real-world data (or at the very least bots assigned a certain ELO rating). Further, we would like to formalize matchmaking such that the subject can become more readily available for analysis, in an attempt at opening up game matchmaking to make it better at entertaining people.

Any papers contributed to this special session will be at forefront of an underresearched field of study. The papers might build on our own work on the subject or they might find a different angle.

Topics

Topics are as follows:

Organising team

Reviewers

Submission

For the submission, authors need to follow this EasyChair link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf= cog19

Further details on paper submissions can be found at https://www.ieee-cog.org/cfp/