game conferences

This note last modified January 21, 2025

CHIPlay (see also the “Games and Play” track at CHI): Top conference for games, but is a bit limited in topics. It focuses on how players interact with games, and has a decent split between quantitative and qualitative studies.

FDG: Sells itself as the conference where technical and non-technical people meet. Focuses on automatically generating content in games, creating systems that bolster narratives in games, and design work in general.

DiGRA: Focuses on the artistic and social impacts of games. They look at gaming culture, gaming trends, and have interesting experimental game design.

EXAG: This is a track within the larger AI conference AIIDE. They look at AI in games. (Notably, most AI in games is unlike ChatGPT or LLMs. The Youtube channel “AI in games” has a good breakdown)

COG: Mostly technical conference, but still pretty general. Has an interesting track on “simulations”, which includes training simulations for firefighters and roleplay games to teach business students how to run a business.

There are plenty of conferences for educational games specifically, but they tend to be more local and held sporadically. Some of the bigger ones are Serious Play and Games 4 Change (non-academic conferences). For academic conferences, see Meaningful Play, GALA, ECGBL, Games Learning Society, Play Make Learn. Some notes from Erik Harpstead on edugame conferences

Learning and CS Education conferences:

  • SIGCSE (Late February)
    • Big conference, CS education research. A bit informal. A bit of pure research, a bit of implementation research (“I did something in my class, here’s what worked and what didn’t!”)
  • ASEE (Late June)
    • Similar to SIGCSE, but more broader STEM. Easy to get a paper into apparently.
  • ICER
    • International CS education research. Higher quality and smaller venue than SIGCSE
  • I/ITSEC
    • Simulations, VR, and training for health and military applications

Random Scratchpad Notes

I’ve heard of these two but have no idea what they are:

  • AERA
  • HSLS

CHI CHIPlay AIIDE FDG EXAG COG UBICOMP CSCW ISCRAM

Chaima’s recommendations: SAGE SIGCSE FDG Computers and Education

Serious games conference - Portnoy (Sue Boll?)

Most of the funding agencies fund STEM games

Civic something - game teaching civics iCivics (civics game)

conferences

Meaningful play ICA Conference Game Studies

ECGBL

DiGRA

GALA (edugames)

Games Com (Germany)

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