Games, Queries, and Argumentation Frameworks: Time for a Family Reunion!

Combinatorial game theory in the form of two-player games has played an important historical role in formal argumentation, logic programming, nonmonotonic reasoning, database query languages, and more recently in data provenance. While such game-based approaches played an integral role early on in formal argumentation, in the study of expressiveness of query languages, and in the quest to find well-behaved semantics for logic programs with recursion through negation, these areas seem to have largely separated from their historical connections, following their own, separate paths with distinct concepts, terminologies, and research results. We touch upon this history and highlight how the use of a single, unstratified logic rule continues to underly many of the approaches developed today within these different communities. We argue that a fruitful line of research exists by reconnecting the communities, in a kind of "family reunion", where results from one community may be transferable to the other (mutatis mutandis), leading to new insights in the neighboring fields. We describe some initial correspondences and connections and invite the community to join our exploration of additional ones.