Your one stop shop for all things interactive narrative + AI!
Back to the '80s
Date and time: November 9th, 2025 - 09:00 to 17:00 (China Standard Time)
Location: Suzhou, China
Shared task: Official website
Submission website: OpenReview
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, and ACL 2024. 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:
Opening Remarks
Pacific Time 16:55 – 17:00 (Nov 8)
Invited Talk 1
Pacific Time 17:00 – 17:45 (Nov 8)
Invited Talk 2
Pacific Time 17:45 – 18:30 (Nov 8)
Coffee Break (30 minutes)
Pacific Time 18:30 – 19:00 (Nov 8)
Common-sense Persona-Grounded Dialogue Challenge (CPDC) 2025
Pacific Time 19:00 – 20:00 (Nov 8)
Lunch Break and Posters (60 minutes)
Pacific Time 20:00 – 21:00 (Nov 8)
Lightning Talks
Pacific Time 21:00 – 22:00 (Nov 8)
Invited Talk 3
Pacific Time 22:00 – 22:45 (Nov 8)
Invited Talk 4
Pacific Time 22:45 – 23:30 (Nov 8)
Coffee Break (30 minutes)
Pacific Time 23:30 – midnight (Nov 8)
Invited Talk 5
Pacific Time 00:00 – 00:45
Closing Remarks
Pacific Time 00:45 – 01:00
Outstanding Papers
Spotlight Papers
Poster Papers
University of California, San Diego (UCSD) & Nvidia
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
Microsoft Research
University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC)
Sony AI
University of California, San Diego (UCSD)
Central University of Finance and Economics
Microsoft Research
We are grateful to our sponsors for their generous support of Wordplay 2025. Their commitment helps make this workshop possible and supports the advancement of research in language-based interactive environments.
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We gratefully thank Sony for their support in organizing the Wordplay workshop, especially in organizing the CPDC challenge!
Interested in Sponsoring?
If you’re interested in sponsoring the Wordplay Workshop, please contact us at wordplay.workshop.organizers@gmail.com for more information about sponsorship opportunities.
