SUBMISSIONS ARE CLOSED - This page is still available for reference only!

Submissions are sought from games researchers, professionals, and practitioners in academia and industry. Graduate students are also encouraged to submit either jointly with an academic/member of industry or alone.

Important Dates

  • Jun 12, 2024: Submission Deadline
  • Jul 12, 2024: Decision Notification
  • Sept 14, 2024: Camera Ready Deadline

Submission Types

  • Full Papers
  • Games and Prototypes (both analog and digital)
  • Microtalks
  • Hosted Sessions (Panels, Roundtables, and Workshops)
  • Posters

Specific requirements for each type of submission are available below.

Conference Submission Topics

While any topic related to games for entertainment and learning is appropriate for submission to Meaningful Play, topics of particular interest include:

Exploring meaningful applications of games

  • Games to change attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors
  • Games for health
  • Social impact games
  • Games to stimulate creativity or innovation
  • Games to build social skills
  • Games to advertise and persuade
  • Games to exercise specific cognitive functions
  • Games to explore personal beliefs and help make decisions
  • Games to build knowledge and skills (games for learning)
  • Serious games for history and cultural heritage learning
  • Games to promote civic, social, and humanitarian organization and participation
  • Spectatorship, eSports, and streaming

Issues in designing meaningful play

  • Game design for specific audience segments
  • Player types and play styles
  • Story and storytelling in games
  • Diversity in games (gender, race, sexuality, etc.)
  • Characters and avatars in games
  • Competitive and cooperative play (single player, multiplayer and massively multiplayer)
  • Balancing entertainment and serious goals
  • Repurposing entertainment games for serious purposes (and vice versa)
  • Unintended and unexpected effects of games
  • Using psychology and neuroscience to design and understand games
  • Emerging design research methods to help create better games
  • Measuring game impacts
  • Innovative techniques and technologies for the design of meaningful play (e.g. game mechanics, reward systems, and user interfaces)
  • Gamification
  • Virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality

Learning, Education & Games

  • Demonstrations of game technology or design frameworks that are grounded in pedagogy
  • Research on games that support empathy and inclusion in education
  • Co-creating games, art and technology with students
  • Civic engagement and citizenship education through games
  • Practicing skills through games, such as media literacy, STEM, argumentation, or writing
  • Humanistic education through games

Full Papers

The Full Papers track welcomes contributions from researchers and practitioners in industry and academia that advance our understanding of meaningful play broadly construed. The purpose of the Full Papers Track is to present the community’s understanding of the current state of the art, practice, science, and/or discipline of Meaningful Play. To that end, submissions should present original, unpublished research or design work that is not currently under review by any other venue.

Games and Prototypes

The Meaningful Play Game Exhibition and Competition invites academic, independent, experimental, serious, transformational, and/or student game developers to showcase and gain recognition for their creative/innovative work in game design and development. Analog and digital games are all welcome. The purpose of the Games and Prototypes track is to highlight the things that the community has built and allow us to play with each other’s work. Games and prototypes at Meaningful play will be showcased in an exhibition during the conference that provides attendees opportunities to play with them.

Microtalks

The Microtalks track encourages Individuals to submit proposals for microtalks which discuss any of the subtopics relevant to the conference. The purpose of Microtalks is to present perspective or pose challenges to the community toward energizing new or ongoing work. To that end we encourage insightful, speculative, or creative content in addition to descriptions of ongoing work.

Hosted Sessions

The Hosted Sessions track invites submissions of engaging interactive sessions to be organized by members of our community. The purpose of the Hosted Sessions track is to provide opportunities for community building and community engagement around topics of interest to the broader community. These sessions could take the form of a panel or roundtable discussion among community members, a game play session, or an interactive workshop to get people working together.

Posters

The Posters track invites original, unpublished research or design work that is directly advancing topics of interest to Meaningful Play. The purpose of the Posters track is to present where the state of the art, practice, science, and/or discipline is going in the near future. To that end, late-breaking advances and work-in-progress reports from ongoing research or design are particularly encouraged to be submitted to the poster session.

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