Proceedings of the First Workshop on Design Patterns in Games

Welcome to the first Workshop on Design Patterns in Games, held May 29, 2012 and co-located with the 7th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games. This workshop focuses on advancing design patterns as a means to formally describe a solution to a game design problem. Design pattern approaches have long been used in diverse fields such as architecture, software engineering, and interaction design. With the emergence of game scholarship, there has been interest in applying design patterns to aspects of game design. There are many potential benefits to design pattern approaches, including generation of frameworks for teaching and communicating about game design and practical usage in brainstorming ideas and tuning designs. Furthermore, deeper understanding of the patterns implicit in their games can help designers explore previously unused ideas and expectations of player behavior. This workshop features presentation of novel research papers followed by group discussion of emerging issues in the study of design patterns and games. We received ten paper submissions, of which we accepted six after a rigorous peer review process. Each paper received a minimum of three reviews. To insure high-quality contributions, each accepted paper was shepherded by a committee member before the submission of the final version. All accepted papers are available in the ACM Digital Library due to our in-cooperation agreement with SIGCHI.