Program
Where?
- Room: MB 3.445
Morning — Slot 1 (8:45–10:30) · 105 min
| Time | Duration | Session |
|---|---|---|
| 8:45 | 15 min | Welcome & Opening Remarks |
| 9:00 | 40 min + 20 min Q&A | KEYNOTE: Opportunities for Esoteric Software Engineering Practices for Managing Uncertainty in Games Erik Fredericks – Associate Professor in the College of Computing at Grand Valley State University |
| 10:00 | 20 min + 10 min Q&A | Beyond Single-PR Issues: Understanding Multi-PR Issue Resolution in Game Development Nimmi Weeraddana — University of Calgary |
☕ Coffee Break (10:30–11:00)
Morning — Slot 2 (11:00–12:30) · 90 min
| Time | Duration | Session |
|---|---|---|
| 11:00 | 15 min + 10 min Q&A | Large Language Models in Game Development: Implications for Gameplay, Playability, and Player Experience Keeryn Johnson, Muhammad Ahmed, Charlie Lang, Sahib Thethi, Wilson Zheng, Ronnie de Souza Santos — University of Calgary |
| 11:25 | 15 min + 10 min Q&A | Agile Manifesto at Play: Lessons Learned from Student Game Design Teams William C. Tallarico, Max James White, Erika S. Mesh — Rochester Institute of Technology · Nicolas LaLone — Texas State University |
| 11:50 | 15 min + 10 min Q&A | Decision-Aware Information Sharing in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Game Testing Rishabh Agarwal, Richard Zhao — University of Calgary |
| 12:15 | 15 min | Closing Remarks |
| 12:30 | — | End |
Keynote
Title: Opportunities for Esoteric Software Engineering Practices for Managing Uncertainty in Games
Description: Uncertainty can impact games given the numerous uncertainties involved, from supporting a wide range of hardware architectures and interfaces to managing unexpected human interactions. The failure of systems in gaming due to uncertainty, whether a hard crash or a performance slowdown, can lead to player frustration and disengagement. In this talk I will discuss approaches that my lab has explored for both discovering and managing uncertainty from a software engineering perspective that can be applied to games, from requirements monitoring at run time to search-based fuzz testing. I’ll also cover its applications in other domains such as safety-critical systems and algorithmic art to demonstrate the domain-independence of these techniques. I’ll end with a discussion of potential future directions that can be explored in the context of uncertainty and game development.
Bio: Erik Fredericks is an Associate Professor in the College of Computing at Grand Valley State University. His research interests focus on search-based software engineering, evolutionary computation, requirements engineering, self-adaptive systems, embedded and safety-critical systems, video game development with a focus on procedural content generation, and algorithmic art. When not working on run-time testing techniques for robotics or self-adaptive systems he is probably working on a roguelike video game demo or an algorithmic art technique that inevitably ends up being a class demonstration rather than a released project. He received dual BS degrees from Lake Superior State University in both Computer Science and Computer Engineering, his MS in Computer Science and Engineering from Oakland University, and his PhD in Computer Science from Michigan State University. His website is https://efredericks.github.io/. He is also co-organizer of the SEGA workshop at FSE26 that directly follows this event and encourages everybody to check it out: https://sega-workshop.github.io/2026/.