[NOTE: See the GoodIT 2024 website for more presence-related topics and special tracks. –Matthew]
Call for Papers
Games as Entertainment and Educational Instruments
Special Track at the ACM 4th International Conference on Information Technology for Social Good (GoodIT ’24)
September 4-6, 2024
Bremen, Germany
Special Track: http://csc.dei.unipd.it/serious_games_at_goodit_2024/
GoodIT 2024: https://blogs.uni-bremen.de/goodit2024/
Submission deadline: May 17, 2024
Serious games and gamification techniques are often used to capture and maintain the user’s attention, engagement, and motivation in a wide variety of subjects and contexts, including but not limited to health and lifestyle, workplace training, formal, informal, and adult education, social inclusion, and social change. However, like with every other game, attention, engagement, and motivation must be earned, and can only be requested up to a point. It can be hard to design the right balance of interventions to encourage healthy behaviour change and effective education while preventing engagement in harmful behaviour. Designers of serious games seem to mostly keep their distance from entertainment products, perhaps missing opportunities to bring their content to the general population. On the other hand, entertainment game designers often struggle to incorporate educational elements effectively in their games, thus missing opportunities to create long-lasting impact through a form of entertainment enjoyed by a wide and varied demographic. Let’s see what the two sides can learn from each other.
SCOPE
This track invites contributions that bring together designers of serious games and entertainment games to investigate how to design games that naturally engage and retain players, to promote deep and long-lasting transfer and acquisition of knowledge, as well as positive behaviour change.
The track is aimed at researchers, doctoral students, practitioners, and anyone from academia and the industry interested in presenting, discussing, reflecting, and networking on the themes associated with developing entertainment games with a purpose. Papers on both theoretical aspects, as well as design and evaluation methods, are very welcome, as well as prototypes, case studies, and novel evaluation methods. In addition, the track welcomes full research, work in progress papers and educational cases.
Topic of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Games for formal and informal education
- Games for outreach, communication, and public education
- Games for people with disability
- Issues and techniques for safe and effective gamification
- Casual gaming with a purpose
- Mobile gaming with a purpose
- Extended Reality (VR, MR, AR) with a purpose
- Assistive technologies
- Persuasive games and technology
- Applications of entertainment games with a purpose
- Methods, models, and principles to design and evaluate entertainment games with a purpose
- Usability and accessibility issues
- Games for health and well-being
- Design and use of serious games as entertainment and communication instruments for social good
SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS
Please refer to the information on the conference’s website.
All the accepted papers will be included in the ACM Digital Library.
ACM GoodIT 2024 will follow the new workflow defined by the ACM called TAPS, so please read the instructions on the ACM page carefully. This new workflow allows having a final document in both PDF and HTML5 accessible formats.
Please use the official Microsoft Word and LaTeX (Overleaf) templates provided.
Submit your papers at goodit2024.hotcrp.com.
IMPORTANT DATES
Submission deadline: 17 May 2024
Notification of acceptance: 8 July 2024
Camera Ready: 19 July 2024
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
Andrea Franceschini, University of Padova, Italy
Thomas Bjørner, Aalborg University, Denmark
CONTACT PERSON
TECHNICAL PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Valeria Garro, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden
Antonio Rodà, University of Padova, Italy
Filippo Carnovalini, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
Simon Cutajar, Resolution Games, Sweden
Scott DeJong, Concordia University, Canada
Carlos Díaz, Aalborg University, Denmark
Fabio Pittarello, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy
Georgios Palamas, Malmö University, Sweden
Alessandro Russo, University of Padova, Italy
Giulio Pitteri, University of Padova, Italy
Anna Zuccante, University of Padova, Italy
… and more to be confirmed.