[Dutch-chapter] next meeting Friday 8 December 2006

[Jeroen Jansz]

Dear members of the DiGRA 'Dutch chapter' mailing list,
 
last week, a couple of wonderful gaming days passed in Utrecht (The Capital of Gaming). Some of us participated in the Nederlandse Game Dagen, others were busy at Gameplay06, and the dedicated ones did both.
 
Now it is time to look ahead. This is to remind you that our next DiGRA/AGS meeting is coming up in ten days. It is necessary to announce your participation through the AGS website http://www.gameresearch.nl/gamedag.html <http://www.gameresearch.nl/gamedag.html>  (free of charge).

The meeting will be held in English. One of our presenters, Istvan Szita, is from Hungary, and he is so kind as to give his talk in English. Elly Konijn and Marije Nije Bijvank from the Vrije Universiteit will follow suit, and present in English too.

I invite you all to participate in our meeting on December 8, 15.00 - 18.00 hrs.We will meet again at the Faculty Club Helios (Universiteit Utrecht; http://www.helios.uu.nl/ <http://www.helios.uu.nl/> ) adress : Achter de Dom 7, Utrecht (Directions: http://www.helios.uu.nl/route.htm <http://www.helios.uu.nl/route.htm> ). Drinks will be served after our meeting, providing to opportunity to meet and chat.

We have two presentations on our program, reflecting the multi-disciplinary character of DiGRA.nl/AGS.

Violent Video Games: Negative Emotions Are A pleasant Side Effect Too.

Elly A. Konijn, Marije Nije Bijvank, & Brad J. Bushman  (Dept. of Communication Sciences, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam )

In this presentation, we will discuss an experimental method to investigate effects of playing video games. We will place the results within the context of the &#8216;violent video game debate&#8217; and elaborate on the underlying mechanisms that may account for its effects. This presentation will trigger some discussion!


Brute-force optimization, done cleverly - and its applications to games

Istvan Szita (visiting researcher at Maastricht University)

The cross-entropy method of Rubinstein is a relatively new general optimization algorithm, with simple learning rules and robust performance. After a short introduction of the algorithm, I will present three reinforcement learning applications. All three applications are games, but the CE method is used for diverse purposes in each: learning an evaluation function for Tetris, learning a control script for Pac-Man, and learning a diverse set of "interesting" behaviors for the role-playing game environment MiniGate.


Our next meetings are 9  March  2007,  and  11  May  2007.

Participating in the DiGRA.nl/AGS  meeting is for free, but it is necessary to announce your participation in advance, because we must inform the faculty club about the number of participants.

Announcing your participation proceeds through the AGS website http://www.gameresearch.nl/gamedag.html <http://www.gameresearch.nl/gamedag.html> 

All the best to you, and hope to see you all at the 8th of December

Jeroen Jansz

also on behalf of

Marinka Copier and Joost Raessens (DiGRA.nl ) and Marc Overmars (AGS)   

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