DareFightingICE Competition: A Fighting Game Sound Design and AI Competition
This competition addresses the needs of visually impaired players in gaming, an often-overlooked group, though it is incremental as it builds on an existing game platform.
The paper introduces the DareFightingICE Competition, which tackles the problem of promoting AI research and sound design in fighting games, specifically to aid visually impaired players, by featuring two tracks for sound design and blind AI development.
This paper presents a new competition -- at the 2022 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG) -- called DareFightingICE Competition. The competition has two tracks: a sound design track and an AI track. The game platform for this competition is also called DareFightingICE, a fighting game platform. DareFightingICE is a sound-design-enhanced version of FightingICE, used earlier in a competition at CoG until 2021 to promote artificial intelligence (AI) research in fighting games. In the sound design track, participants compete for the best sound design, given the default sound design of DareFightingICE as a sample, where we define a sound design as a set of sound effects combined with the source code that implements their timing-control algorithm. Participants of the AI track are asked to develop their AI algorithm that controls a character given only sound as the input (blind AI) to fight against their opponent; a sample deep-learning blind AI will be provided by us. Our means to maximize the synergy between the two tracks are also described. This competition serves to come up with effective sound designs for visually impaired players, a group in the gaming community which has been mostly ignored. To the best of our knowledge, DareFightingICE Competition is the first of its kind within and outside of CoG.