The Acagamic

As I have been brows­ing the usual places on the web to retrieve infor­ma­tion about game edu­ca­tion and research, I came across a few places that sound inter­est­ing enough to pub­lish future aca­d­e­mic research find­ings there. This list is not com­plete, but rather my first attempt on find­ing good places for pub­li­ca­tions on game research. Some of the things, I found so far are:

 Journals

• JOGD — Journal of Game Development. This pub­lisher owned jour­nal seems to pub­lish peer-reviewed papers on all areas influ­enc­ing game development.
• Game Studies. An online jour­nal claim­ing to be the inter­na­tional jour­nal of com­puter game research. Peer reviews and good articles.
• ACM — Computers in Entertainment. Claims to be an online mag­a­zine with peer reviews from indus­try and acad­e­mia leaders.
• Games and Culture. A jour­nal of inter­ac­tive media. A quar­terly inter­na­tional journal.
• Simulation & Gaming. An Interdisciplinary Journal of Theory, Practice and Research. Probably more focused towards tech­ni­cal aspects and seri­ous games.
• Convergence. The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. More focused on gen­eral new media as it seems, but still inter­est­ing for game research.
• International Digital Media and Arts Journal. A jour­nal that is also avail­able online.
• IJIGS. International Journal of Intelligent Games & Simulation. A web-based jour­nal from the University of Wolverhampton. Despite the incred­i­bly ugly web site, it might actu­ally have some inter­est­ing articles.

Are there more good game related jour­nals you know? Please let me know about them!

Upcoming Conferences in 2007

• DiGRA 2007 — Situated Play. September 24^th — 28^th, 2007. Will take place in Japan.
• ACE 2007 — International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology. June 13^th — 15^th, 2007. In Austria.
• Futureplay 2007. A lit­tle bit closer to the indus­try, but still look­ing like a decent aca­d­e­mic conference.
• 2^nd Annual Microsoft Academic Days Conference on Game Development. February 22^nd — 25^th, 2007. On a cruise ship, USA.
• Game in’ Action. June 13^th – 15^th, 2007. In Sweden.
• CHI 2007. Computer/Human Interaction Conference. April 28^th — May 3^rd, 2007. In the United States.
• 12^th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction. July 22^nd — 27^th, 2007. In China.
• Sandbox Symposium. 2^nd Annual ACM SIGGRAPH Video Game Symposium. August 4^th — 5^th, 2007. In the United States.

Now that we know all about the things to come, let’s have a look at some basics that are already there.

Useful Papers (to get started)

• Formal Abstract Design Tools by Doug Church
• MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research by R. Hunicke, M. LeBlanc, R. Zubek
• Game Taxonomies: A High Level Framework for Game Analysis and Design by Craig A. Lindley
• Fundamental Components of the Gameplay Experience: Analysing Immersion by Frans Mäyrä, Laura Ermi
• Behavioral Game Design by John Hopson
• Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit Muds by Richard A. Bartle
• Playing Research: Methodological approaches to game analy­sis by Espen Aarseth

So much for a head start for the com­ing year. Let me know, if you think, I for­got some­thing impor­tant. I know that the selected papers sec­tion def­i­nitely dif­fers accord­ing to what kind of research you are plan­ning to dive into. Luckily, games are a diverse enough sub­ject to debate this. It is more a gen­eral start­ing point of impor­tant papers that I think every game researcher should have read in gen­eral. So long...

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