Dagstuhl Reports 2025

This month I got a chance to return to Schloss Dagstuhl, a research institute that doubles as a scientific retreat for computer scientists and related colleagues. We visit Dagstuhl for week-long seminars, which are spent talking and working with small groups of colleagues from particular research fields or, if we're lucky, beyond. Often we use the time to think about new research topics, share new skills with one another, or try out unusual ideas that we couldn't justify spending time on normally.

I've written about my time at Dagstuhl seminars in the past, including on Rock, Paper, Shotgun, my old blog, my new blog and now my new new blog here, but this is the first time that I've been on the organisational team for a seminar from start to finish. It was a chance for us to do things a bit differently to before, as well as invite a slightly different lineup of people, and the result was something that felt really exciting and fresh. Previous seminars I've been to were focused on 'game AI' (meaning anything from getting Super Mario to move around a level on his own, all the way through to people interested in using generative AI for various things), but for this one we broadened our scope to creativity tools, physical play and how AI techniques (both old and new) can learn from and support these things.

There's lots to say about the week and we have lots of reports to write and games to release, so I'll make this blog post a briefer summary than the daily update posts I used to do. I'm hoping other people who went to the event will also share their experiences, so you should be able to get multiple perspectives on the week soon!

Monday

I was joined by co-organisers M Charity (from the University of Richmond), Nico Vás (acting as an independent, off from his day job at LEGO) and Georgios Yannakakis (who kindly agreed to join us to provide some senior heft). Dagstuhl Seminars need to set themselves apart from previous seminars to get accepted, and so we swung for the fences a bit and emphasised a desire to focus on practical making, doing and experimenting. We also wanted to try and mix in some physical and hybrid design work too, so although AI for digital games was a big part of the proposal, physical crafts and hacking were also in the mix. To encourage this a little, we asked attendees to bring things to share and make with, and they embraced this enthusiastically - Kate Compton's suitcase full of watercolours appeared, Yuqian Sun demonstrated a Chinese diablo, M's box full of blank colourful USB sticks was upended on the table, and Nico and I (thanks to an excellent recommendation from V Buckenham) brought along some instant cameras that printed to receipt paper, along with a whole host of craft supplies from people.

Nico recommended opening the week with something hands-on and creative, so we spent the first day making our name badges, and then revealed a visual creative system Nico had designed for the week called Dagstyle, which the badge-making templates had been based on. Dagstyle inherited its shapes and forms from Dagstuhl's own branding, and gave everyone a shared creative language to work with through the week. This came to be quite influential for one group in particular that I was in later that week. After that we had our traditional process of pitching working groups for the week, followed by a show-and-tell of all the amazing things people had brought. Something I'm particularly proud of is that over 50% of the attendees were first-timers to Dagstuhl. Dagstuhl's invite-only format often leads to a centralisation of the community, where the same people come again and again (this was my fifth Dagstuhl). This time we had a huge propostion of newcomers, and many of them pitched and ran groups right on the first day, which was fantastic.

One major change that we made for our seminar was to introduce a traffic light system, suggested by Florence Smith Nicholls, for working groups. The lights indicated what the organiser's stance was on using generative AI in the group, from full encouragement to none at all. This really helped the room get a feel for what different people wanted, and to choose their groups based on their comfort level. I think it helped calibrate expectations each day and led to a better atmosphere generally.

Tuesday

Tuesday's working groups actually started on Monday for a few hours, but most continued through to Tuesday proper. I won't go into too much detail on any single group as I suspect the organisers might want to report on them at length, but rest assured we have games, writing and photographs to share with you for each one, and over the coming months we'll be putting as much online as we can. For Tuesday I joined a working group run by Younès Rabii, which was called 'Handmade Blaseball' but came to be more about the working group's unofficial title: Exquisite Corpse Game Design. The idea here was to explore game design through building systems for collaborative, co-operative game design. We designed several game-designing games intended to be played in a group, with each person making part of a game's definition and then mashing it all together.

We ended up with seven variants of processes for designing games, ranging from truly surreal processes mediated by a GM, to quite constrained processes played with pens and paper. We tested many of these processes and out of them came designs for games like FRUIT, a game about fruit and yelling the word fruit and moving some fruit around, and an untitled game about making heaven seem cool by playing rock, paper, scissors. As someone who thinks about game design in the context of AI research a lot, I found it really interesting thinking about how a procedural generator or simple AI system might be able to join in with these games, and also all the reasons why (non-LLM) game AI systems would struggle to play with humans in this space. But it was also interesting to think about how the design of these game-designing games was about shaping people's expectations and smoothing over gaps in understanding between all the player-designers. I genuinely think we created some fascinating things in this group and we're hoping to put all of our variants online so you, too, can try playing them with friends and designing games of your own.

On Tuesday evening Gillian Smith and I demonstrated some livecoding tools very quickly. Gillian showed off Gibber which she's used to perform with in the past, and discussed her approach to livecoding and how she's used the tools creatively. I gave a quick run-through of Strudel and Hydra, for music and visuals respectively. It was fun to share these tools with folks!

Wednesday

On Wednesday I joined a group run by Florence Smith Nicholls, that almost half the seminar signed up to initially before we broke the groups up a bit. Florence is interested in making and studying keepsake games, which are games where the act of playing creates a physical (or digital) memento of the play experience. The canonical example of this is Shing Yin Khor's A Mending, and Florence and I also collaborated making one earlier this year for the Internet Archive's game jam, called ArchaeOS. For the working group, Florence wanted to explore how procedural content generation can shape, inform or expand keepsake games in new ways. We had an incredible discussion about all the ways we could think of to play around in the space, and then came up with some cool projects to work on in the afternoon.

In the end we came up with four playable games, including an instructional art game for making postcards for people at Dagstuhl (more on that later), a game of reading and making linked zines, a game about using a procedural town generator to create a postcard, and another linked game about using the same generator to write the postcard and design a stamp for it. This working group was really mind-expanding, and it made me really appreciate how fun making keepsake games is. Florence's idea to bring in PCG to the process was really inspiring, and it fits so, so well in so many cases. We have more ideas to continue exploring along these lines, PCG is a natural fit in many ways and I think it's the start of a very rich vein to mine.

In the evening, Tiago Machado ran a tango workshop for people! I didn't attend as I was absolutely exhausted, but a bunch of people took their first steps on the dancefloor and had a great time. As usual, we also continued the Dagstuhl tradition of playing games together in the evening with people. Matthew Guzdial in particular brought some incredible RPGs and very kindly ran games with people all week long - Fall of Magic especially looked stunning.

Thursday

On Thursday I joined a group run by June, who was interested in using the Dagstyle system to design a visual game description language. Her idea was that it would result in games that could be described using little symbols and even printed onto cards, and then scanned and interpreted into a game. She was interested in what affordances this might open up, as well as whether it might enable new kinds of game creation for people. We had a great initial discussion where June rapidly focused us on adapting VGDL - a game description language invented originally at Dagstuhl - to a visual format. We immediately started hacking together a symbolic representation of one of its games, and then printed it out and started thinking about physical arrangement.

So many interesting affordances came out of this - for example, there's a limit to how many symbols you can fit on a postcard-sized bit of paper, especially if you want the symbols to be of a decent size. How much of your language can you remove and still make it readable? How much can you compress space by reusing symbols in a crossword-like format? We experimented with all kinds of fun things, like using the whitespace in our game cards for player comments or decoration. I think this has so much potential to explore further, and June is hoping to continue to build a working digital version that can interpret the visual designs next.

In the evening we had two projects, one was a collaborative game-making exercise by Emily Short that I won't spoil here as it's due to be released later - I had a lot of fun doing this though, and I think the exercise in general was a very interesting and community-oriented way to end the week. Then after, Claus Aranha organised some slideshow karaoke which we all submitted slides to. I really enjoyed taking part in this and Claus was so full of energy (along with their helpers making slideshows). It brought everyone together at the end of the week in a very communal way.

Friday

On Friday as is traditional we held a feedback session to discuss improvements. Many of the changes we made to the seminar format seemed to go down well, in particular changes to onboarding, introductions and icebreakers. However there's always more that we can do, and I think that as we solve older problems it makes people feel more able to talk about other issues, as well as more confident that we can maybe fix them. The feedback raised really interesting points about supporting each other, avoiding burnout, and especially looking after first-timers and more junior researchers. I have at least one post where I want to write about how to host Dagstuhls too, so we can support more people in applying for these and bringing their own communities in.

After that, we arranged a very relaxed morning session where we closed the week out with crafting, making and chatting. This was unexpectedly good as a way to end the week, as it meant people could properly say goodbye, share things with people, and relax. Anne Sullivan ran a huge session of her instructional art game and people made postcard gifts for one another, and Matthew Guzdial herded people into completing the zine tree that had been started in Florence's workshop on Wednesday. It was a very chill way to end the week - which I personally badly needed at that point!

This summary is just a small slice of how the week went and mainly focuses on the groups I was in, but there's so much else that could be said - first of all we were joined by a number of game developers who took time out of their schedules and spent their real money to come spend a week with us, which was an incredible honour for us and it was so exciting to hear how the first-timers among them found the week and what they got out of it. The week also changed my attitude towards Dagstuhl seminars and what they can be for, too. As organisers we wanted to tweak the direction of this seminar a bit, and it ended up being more freeform and design-oriented, as we hoped. I think for me personally, this worked really well because rather than working groups being tailored around specific game AI problems, many were instead about exploring new design territory and then reflecting after the fact on what new research questions exist in this space. I realised later that this is actually how most of my favourite Dagstuhl working groups had been in the past, so it was helpful to finally figure out why I liked that so much.

What Next

Every Dagstuhl seminar results in a formal written report, which we'll spend the next few months writing. When that's out you'll be able to read about all the working groups and what they did. We also expect there'll be more blog posts, like this one, about the week and people's experiences too.

Given the number of games made at the event, we are also trying to co-ordinate more of a presence on itch.io so that we can collect everyone's stuff in one place. That's still ongoing as we've only just gotten back, but you can expect to see the first few things from the event go online very soon!

Finally, I'm hoping to write at least one more blog post about this Dagstuhl I think, but I'm not sure exactly when. I'll just close by saying thank you again to everyone who came last week - it was one of the best weeks I can remember having for a very long time, it reminded me why I love this space so much and the people in it, and it felt like a culmination of a lot of thinking and talking to people about what it means to mix academic and game developer spaces and styles more - and how to host short-lived, intense community events in a healthier, more open and more caring way. We will do this again! We will do it more! We will do it in different places with different people! But for now, some rest I think.