Workshops provide an informal setting for presenting, discussing and demonstrating new developments on a specific theme or domain of the CHI PLAY core areas, focusing on novel perspectives and ideas. Workshops provide great opportunities for community-building at CHI PLAY. In prior conferences, some workshops have resulted e.g. in special journal issues, books, and research projects. Others created communities and evolved into their own conferences. We especially welcome workshop proposals that bridge the gap between practitioner and researcher knowledge.

Accepted Workshops

EyePlay Revisited: Past, Present and Future Challenges for Eye-Based Interaction in Games

  • Websitehttps://hci.sbg.ac.at/sites/eyeplay18/
  • Description: What are current and future challenges that incorporating eye tracking into game design and development creates? The Second EyePlay workshop brings together academic researchers and industry practitioners from the fields of eye tracking and games to explore these questions. In recent years, gaming has been at the forefront of the commercial popularisation of eye tracking. In this workshop, we will share experiences in the development of gaze-enabled games, discuss best practices and tools, and explore future challenges for research.
    The workshop will be made up of 2 parts: a discussion phase (focus on theory of EyePlay), and a interactive hands-on design experience (design phase). In the discussion phase a common understanding of the research field shall be established, submissions are categorized, and challenges of EyePlay will be formulated, while in the design phase workshop participants will collaborate to create conceptual or rough interactive prototypes to address challenges of EyePlay.
  • Main Contact: Michael Lankes – Department of Digital Media, University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, Hagenberg, Austria
  • Other Organizers: 
    • Joshua Newn – Interaction Design Lab, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia
    • Bernhard Maurer – Center for HCI, University of Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria
    • Dr Eduardo Velloso – Interaction Design Lab, School of Computing and Information Systems, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
    • Martin Johannes Dechant – Computer Science, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada
    • Hans Gellersen – Lancaster University, Lancaster, United Kingdom

New Research Perspectives on Game Design and Development Education

  • Website: https://gameseducationresearch.wordpress.com/
  • Description: This one-day workshop brings together researchers and practitioners to share knowledge and practices that support teaching game design and game development. Open to participants with a diverse range of interests and expertise the workshop will facilitate discussion across a range of discipline areas. The outcomes from the workshop will include an archive of participants’ initial position papers along with the materials created during the workshop. The result will be a roadmap to games education, focusing on how best to support active and engaged learning and teaching processes that create work-ready graduates, identifying the challenges that need to be addressed in order to do so.
  • Main Contact: Dr Peta Wyeth – Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia
  • Other Organizers:
    • Joshua Hall – Bondi Labs, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
    • Dr Marcus Carter – The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia
    • April Tyack – Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, Australia
    • Roger Altizer – University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah, United States

Forum on Video Games for Mental Health

  • Website: https://chiplaymhforum.wordpress.com
  • Description: The Forum on Video Games for Mental Health invites researchers and practitioners working on mental health, video games, and/or digital health care to discuss their work under the auspices of the annual CHI PLAY conference. Participants can also look forward to three thought provoking keynotes, addressing the use of video games in therapy, issues with the clinical implementation of digital health technologies, and the production of games for mental health.
  • Main Contact: Max Valentin Birk – University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada
  • Other Organizers:
    • Vero Vanden Abeele – HCI – eMedia, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium
    • Greg Wadley – School of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia
    • John Torous – Department of Psychiatry, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, United States

Gaming with the Subaltern: A Workshop on Diversity and Inclusion in Games

  • Website: https://subalterngur.wordpress.com
  • Description: How do individual differences affect results and methods in games user research, and individuals’ gameplay experiences? What perspectives and experiences are shared by people across gender, ethnicity, age, ability, class, and other social power dynamics? Which of these identity effects are unique and which are shared across dynamics of oppression? What do game researchers and developers need to understand regarding identity dynamics when gathering data, interpreting results, or presenting information? What does intersectionality (i.e., the living combination of multiple identity and power dynamics) look like in gaming, game development and research? Our workshop is built around these key questions in the hope that shared insights will allow us to move from simply valuing “diversity” toward successful intersectional practices in research, development, and play.
    This workshop represents an effort to gather a community of identity, power, and diversity researchers to share our knowledge and practices with one another, collectively understand the intersections of identity-factors (race, gender, sexuality, ability, neuroatypicality, etc.) and cross-cultural issues in games research and game design. Our shared knowledge will begin with the mutual building of known biases, player experience effects, and identified sites of player exclusion/marginalization. This will form a snapshot of gaming and research’s current strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to real diversity in games and games user research (GUR). The group will map common identity factors to key research areas, revealing shared and unshared dynamics. This map will advance our collective practices and identify current, recurring barriers to diversity. It will also support the construction of a later summary document on key considerations for researchers and game developers working with diverse populations. The results of our workshop will be published to an online, publicly-available website for comment, critique, and open development.
  • Main Contact: Cale Passmore – University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada
  • Other Organizers: 
    • Cayley MacArthur – Systems Design Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
    • Sarah Schoemann – School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, United States
    • Mark Hancock – University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
    • Mahli-Ann Butt – University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia
    • Dan Gardner
    • Dr. Theresa Jean Tanenbaum – Department of Informatics, Transformative Play Lab, University of California: Irvine, Irvine, California, United States
    • Regan Mandryk – Department of Computer Science, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada

CFP

Workshop format is up to the organizers, they may open their workshops to all conference participants, regardless of whether they are authors or not. Organizers may plan different activities for their workshop such as discussions, paper presentations, brainstorms, work sessions, etc.

Concise workshop proposals (max. 4 pages in SIGCHI Extended Abstract format) should include: an extended abstract, the objectives and expected outcome of the workshop, the planned activities, the background of the organizer(s), the anticipated number of participants, and the means for soliciting and selecting participants.

The page limit excludes references. Workshop submissions should not be anonymised.

Preparing and Submitting

A workshop submission must be prepared according to the Conference Extended Abstracts Format. It must be submitted via the PCS Submission System by 25 May 2018, as a single PDF file. The proposal must be no more than 4 pages (excluding references) and have the following structure:

Background: Provide a strong rationale for the workshop, describe the issues to be addressed, and state concrete goals for the workshop.

Organizers: Present the organizers’ backgrounds, including the main contact person.

Website: Provide details of the planned website, including the URL.

Pre-Workshop Plans: State your plans for recruiting and community-building (e.g. through a website or other communication with participants).
Workshop Structure: Explain in detail the workshop structure, including activities, timing, and resources.

Post-Workshop Plans: State your plans for follow-up and creation of tangible outcomes (e.g., poster presentation, publication of a workshop report, plans for a special issue of a journal).

Call for Participation: Provide a 250-word Call for Participation that will be posted on the conference site to recruit participants for your workshop. This should appear at the end of your Extended Abstract, and should include the following:

  • The format and goals of the workshop
  • The participant selection criteria
  • Requirements for position papers from prospective attendees (e.g. topics to address, page length, format)
  • Where these papers should be submitted
  • The requirement that at least one author of each accepted position paper must attend the workshop and that all participants must register for both the workshop and for at least one day of the conference.
  • A link to the workshop website.

References: Please add any relevant references using the updated SIGCHI reference format.

This Extended Abstract is the only document from the workshop which will be included in the CHI PLAY conference proceedings.

Review Process

Workshops are a curated track and highly selective.

Upon Acceptance

Please note the following milestones which must be met for all CHIPLAY Workshops:

  • Workshop organizers will be notified of acceptance or rejection by 24 June 2018.
  • Authors of all accepted workshops will receive instructions on how to submit the publication-ready copy of their Extended Abstract.
  • Workshop organizers will have until 6 July 2018 to submit their final workshop descriptions and publicize their CfPs.
  • Workshop position paper submissions from prospective workshop attendees should be due no later than 1 August 2018.
  • Final acceptances for position papers must be completed by 31 August 2018. This will give participants enough time for early registration to the conference.

After the Conference

It is expected that workshop results will be communicated to a larger audience. We ask workshop organizers to consider producing a report for publication in ACM Interactions. We encourage additional avenues of communication, such as organizing an informal Special Interest Group (SIG) at the conference, preparing an edited book or special issues of journals following the conference, or maintaining a website or email list to network with others who might be interested.

Workshop proposals, but not participants’ submissions, are archived in the companion proceedings in the ACM Digital Library. Approved workshops will take place at the conference, with attendees (and, possibly, specific submissions to the workshop – e.g. position papers) solicited and selected by the organizers.

Workshop Chairs:
Pejman Mirza-Babaei, Rafael Bidarra, workshops@chiplay.acm.org