Wordplay: When Language Meets Games @ EMNLP 2025

Date and time: November 5th-9th, 2025
Location: Suzhou, China
Shared task: Official website
This workshop focused on exploring the utility of interactive narratives, think everything from classic text-adventures like Zork to modern Twine games, to fill a role as the learning environments of choice for language-based tasks including but not limited to storytelling. A few previous iterations of this workshop took place very successfully with hundreds of attendees, at NeurIPS 2018, NeurIPS 2020, & NAACL 2022. Since then, the community of people working in this area has rapidly increased. This workshop aims to be a centralized place where all researchers involved across a breadth of fields can interact and learn from each other. Furthermore, it will act as a showcase to the wider NLP/RL/Game communities on interactive narrative’s place as a learning environment. The program will feature a collection of invited talks in addition to contributed talks and posters from each of these sections of the interactive narrative community and the wider NLP and RL communities.

We like all things:

• Interactive narrative: game playing RL agents, game generation, etc.
  
• Interactive language learning
  
• Natural language generation
  
• Improvisational storytelling
  
• And more! Anything you can think of that involves narrative, interactivity, and language!
  
  
  Check out the full version of our overview!