Authors:
Aloïs Rautureau, Eric Piette, Tim Penn, Summer Courts, James Goodman, Walter Crist, Dennis J. N. J. Soemers

Venue:
ICGA Journal, 2026 (accepted)

Topics:
GameTable, human-like AI, cultural heritage, imperfect-information games, interdisciplinary research, game studies

Links: PDF

This paper reports on the GameTable COST Action meeting held in Prague on 19–20 February 2026, which opened the third Grant Period of the network. The meeting focused on collaborations between humanities researchers and game AI researchers, as well as discipline-specific projects related to tabletop games, cultural heritage, and artificial intelligence.

A central theme of the discussions was the development of human-like game AI, alongside research on imperfect-information games and AI methods for cultural heritage. Participants also discussed how to strengthen collaboration across disciplines and how to continue these efforts beyond the formal duration of the COST Action.

The report summarises contributed talks, key discussions, and future directions for interdisciplinary research on games, both as computational systems and as historical and cultural artefacts.

This meeting report is important because it captures the maturing scientific vision of the GameTable COST Action during its final phase. In particular, it highlights a growing convergence between artificial intelligence, cultural heritage, and the study of human-like play.

Several contributions discussed how AI can support the study of historical games through simulation, recognition, and reconstruction, while others focused on imperfect-information games and cognitively plausible search under memory constraints. The report also emphasizes the importance of concrete case studies and shared resources to bridge disciplinary vocabularies and methods.

More broadly, the paper positions human-like AI as a major future direction for the GameTable network, not only for building stronger or more believable agents, but also for generating gameplay models that better reflect human behaviour in past and present gaming cultures.

Rautureau, A., Piette, E., Penn, T., Courts, S., Goodman, J., Crist, W., Soemers, D. J. N. J. (2026). Game AI for Cultural Heritage: Outcomes from the GameTable 3rd Grant Period Opening Meeting. ICGA Journal. Accepted.

@article{rautureau2026gametable_opening,
  author  = {Rautureau, Alo{\"i}s and Piette, Eric and Penn, Tim and Courts, Summer and Goodman, James and Crist, Walter and Soemers, Dennis J. N. J.},
  title   = {Game AI for Cultural Heritage: Outcomes from the GameTable 3rd Grant Period Opening Meeting},
  journal = {ICGA Journal},
  year    = {2026},
  note    = {Accepted}
}