Call for Submissions
Workshop: Games and the Metaverse
At Foundations of Digital Games (FDG) 2022 conference
Athens, Greece and AoE
Workshop: https://sites.google.com/view/fdg-metaverse-workshop/
FDG 2022: http://fdg2022.org/
Submission deadline: June 17th, 2022
Join us for our (hybrid) workshop on games and the metaverse at the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG) conference from Sept 5 – 8, 2022.
We have 2 submission tracks, to make attendance available to a broader games audience from both industry and academic perspectives. One is a “talk” track; submission for this is a short abstract/outline of a talk you would like to give surrounding games and the metaverse. The other is a “paper” track; 4 page max submissions through Easychair, will be peer reviewed and published alongside FDG proceedings. The deadline for submissions is June 17 🙂 – Please share widely with anyone that might be interested!
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The metaverse has become a topic of interest in both industry and academic settings. Research and development that focus on the ‘metaverse’ explore the immersive future of the internet, where distributed people from around the world can connect through virtual social environments. Research on the metaverse is distributed throughout varying sub-domains of games research, thus bringing these groups together will help unify and provide a launching point for future progress in the field. Unsurprisingly, the term has gained traction in the digital gaming realm as many related games and play research topics directly contribute to the metaverse. We are hosting a workshop at FDG 2022 which will bring together researchers in the field and discuss the current landscape of the metaverse in game research, and opportunities and challenges to propel the future evolution of research in this area.
We are looking for researchers, practitioners, and industry professionals who work on topics within games and the metaverse to join our hybrid half-day workshop at the Foundations of Digital Games conference in Athens, Greece this September. Our goals are to provide a point of connection for those conducting research on the metaverse in general, as well as a forum for discussing the future of our research community, so that we can plan how to best serve this community in future years at FDG and other game conferences. Below we list the topics of games and the metaverse of which this workshop focuses. These broader topics include potential areas for position papers submitted, however these should be treated as guidelines, and papers from other areas relating to the metaverse/games will be considered.
Topic Areas:
- CONTENT CREATION: Topics relating to exploring frameworks for enabling user-generated content and the use of automation to help create more content are already established tactics in game development.
- ACCESS AND SOCIAL CONNECTEDNESS: As users move seamlessly between work and play, topics will include how merging personas affects experience and how work-life boundaries can be protected within social digital spaces
- IDENTITY AND REPRESENTATION: Topics relating to how identity and representation matter, and must be supported, in the metaverse .
- ASSESSMENT, VALIDATION, AND USER RESEARCH: Topics relating to how to assess the impacts of persistent and integrated digital social spaces on the social interactions we have within the material world.
You do not need to be a metaverse expert to join this workshop. We are looking for people with a range of backgrounds and experiences. If your research questions might be of interest or tangentially related to the topics listed above, or you would like to design new metaverse experiences, this workshop is for you.
For this workshop, we will support multiple contribution types, making the workshop accessible to a broader range of participants to join us in varying capacities. We will have a paper track, which will consist of 4-page maximum abstracts submitted to easychair and double-blind peer reviewed, and a talk track, which will involve a google form abstract submission to highlight the attendees interest in the workshop, and a talk proposal.
Paper Track:
The paper track will include 4-page maximum abstracts, which should clearly articulate the prior expertise you will bring to this workshop. You may frame the abstract as an articulation of the research questions you would like to explore, as a summary of the game and/or interaction design space you are most interested in, or as a vision statement of potential futures for games and the metaverse. Abstracts should be in ACM Extended Abstract format. Please see the FDG 2022 website for this information.
Paper Submissions will be made through easychair here and will be double-blind peer reviewed. All workshop participants must register for both the workshop and for at least one day of the main FDG conference. Accepted papers will be published in accordance with FDG proceedings, and might be invited to submit to a special issue on games and the metaverse.
Talk Track:
The talk track will include a google form submission, outlining the abstract of your proposed workshop talk.
ORGANIZERS
Pejman Mirza-Babaei is an Associate Professor at Ontario Tech University. He is a co-editor of the Games User Research (2018) book and a co-author of The Game Designer’s Playbook: An Introduction to Game Interaction Design (to be released in Spring 2022). His research and professional work is carried out in collaboration with more than 25 companies spanning different sectors. He currently works at Roblox Insight Lab on various metaverse research projects
Raquel Robinson is a postdoctoral fellow at Ontario Tech University. She obtained her PhD at the University of Saskatchewan in 2022. Her research interests broadly include socially connecting people over a distance using physiological signals. Throughout her PhD, she organized two inaugural workshops on live streaming, the first at FDG in 2018, and the second at CHI in 2019.
Johanna Pirker is an Assistant Professor at TU Graz in Austria, leading the research group Game Lab Graz, and researches games with a focus on AI, HCI, data analysis, and VR technologies. She has lengthy experience in designing, developing, and evaluating games and VR experiences and believes in them as tools to support learning, collaboration, and solving real problems.