We are delighted to announce the 1st Workshop on Artificial Intelligence & Game Aesthetics (AIGA 2013) to be held on the 14th of October, 2013 in Boston, USA in conjunction with the Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE'13).

The interactive nature of games sets them apart from other popular media such as television, film and music. Indeed, games are unique in that their components (from the rules and goals of the game to the appearance of avatars and their dialogue) must encompass both functional and aesthetic prerequisites. Artificial intelligence usually focuses on the functional quality of such game components, e.g. ensuring that an avatar can traverse a level in minimal time or that an AI can win over any human in a strategy game. However, there are many different aesthetic considerations that artificial intelligence can address:

• which AI behaviors maximize player satisfaction while still being challenging?
• what is a believable response of an NPC to a player action?
• what weapon, avatar, background music, or quest would appeal to this particular player?

The purpose of this workshop is to address the “human” aspects of games from a computational perspective. “Game aesthetics” is a broad and ambiguous term which encompasses believability, challenge, surprise, novelty, visual and aural appeal, interestingness, and more. Seen from an Artificial Intelligence perspective, these aesthetics should be studied as computational models grounded in theory, derived from human-based computation or extracted from gameplay or survey data. Of particular importance is the evaluation of these computational models; while submitted papers can present preliminary work with no conclusive evaluation, the issue of evaluating game aesthetics will be a core topic of the discussion portion of this workshop.