GameTable
Computational Techniques for
Tabletop Games Heritage
Computational Techniques for
Tabletop Games Heritage
Our mission
The main aim of the GameTable network is to create an international and interdisciplinary network of scholars and stakeholders from all career stages across academia, industry, and heritage institutions to inspire methodologies and applications on how to use game AI to study, reconstruct, and preserve the intangible cultural heritage of games.
The context
Games have been a research topic across many disciplines that have long been disconnected from one another.
In computer science and mathematics, games have been used as testbeds for the development of state-of-the-art methods in economics, engineering, and Artificial Intelligence. Archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists have examined the motivations behind human play and its social implications on the individual and societal levels. Games have also long been the subject of pedagogical development, and are increasingly becoming recognized as part of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity. Nevertheless, much of the heritage of games around the world has been lost due to colonialism, imperialism, and commercialisation.
An interdisciplinary approach
More holistic methodologies will be achieved by developing more human-like AI techniques, using them to analyse mathematical properties of games, and combining them with gametheoretic models, and guiding them with knowledge of games of the past and a cross-cultural understanding of human gameplay.
Collaboration and outcomes
These collaborations will include conferences, workshops, and other cross-disciplinary interactions that will produce publications and digital tools to advance the theoretical and practical applications of research on games. From this, we will develop sophisticated methods for the preservation of games as a form of ancient and modern cultural heritage and game-centric educational programs. The GameTable Action will address the following key challenges:
Five scientific challenges
To explore new ways to study games in diverse fields such as history, archaeology, mathematics, and education by collaborating with AI researchers to design new algorithms, methods, and techniques able to undertake the challenge of efficiently playing all tabletop games in a more human-like manner.
How to use innovative approaches to study, reconstruct, and preserve the intangible cultural heritage of games;
How to to reconstruct the missing rules of incomplete games and simulate their play at a human level to understand their origins, development, and transmission;
How to apply AI approaches to study games from the past and to develop new ways to identify previously unrecognised games, measure the ways they change through time, or track their transmission across space and time;
How to develop new pedagogical tools in all the fields involved in GameTable in using games to introduce or develop mathematical ideas or new AI approaches;
How to develop innovative general approaches efficient enough to be compared to any human player and to use Game AI in a more culturally diverse way is thus crucial to the study of heritage games.
