DareFightingICE Competition: A Fighting Game Sound Design and AI Competition

TL;DR

The DareFightingICE Competition at CoG 2022 introduced a novel fighting game platform with tracks for sound design and blind AI, aiming to enhance accessibility for visually impaired players and advance AI research in sound-based gaming.

Contribution

This paper presents the first competition combining sound design and AI for fighting games, promoting accessibility and AI development in a new gaming context.

Findings

Effective sound design strategies identified for visually impaired players

Baseline deep-learning blind AI demonstrated in competition setting

Synergy between sound design and AI approaches explored

Abstract

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.