Rapid Communications

By bringing research and industry closer, the game research, design, and development community can benefit. ‘Rapid Communications’ is an innovative track at CHI PLAY focusing on specific topics of interest to the community, highlighting significant work from both industry and research. The track is particularly suitable for individuals, studios, and companies who want to showcase their work and share lessons learned from success and failure. We especially invite contributions from practitioners and researchers within the game development, gamification, UX, game user research, and games education industries in the form of short papers and “lightning talks” intended to bridge the gaps between academic research and applied practice.

Submission

This year the track intends to shed some light on the ‘black boxes of games industry and scholarship’. We see the rapid communications track as an opportunity to open up the black box of the games industry and are thus specifically soliciting submissions exploring the following themes:

1. Open questions in game development practice: Here, submissions are welcome that address issues such as: What are the problems that developers do not have time to solve? What kinds of questions arise during development that are shelved because they are too big? Where are there productive opportunities for research interventions and collaborations with industry?
2. Cultures of information in games industry and academia: How do people pitch and promote new ideas within the games industry? How does industry make use of research inputs and generate research outputs? How do developers balance the need to protect trade secrets and intellectual property against the desire to share ideas and further develop the industry of games? How do researcher translate scholarly results into formats that are better absorbed by industry?
3. Applied research within the games industry: via this theme, researchers could present their work, which they think addresses a critical issue within the game industry. Furthermore, representatives from the games industry could showcase and discuss workflows, processes, and technologies that are based on scientific efforts. Some questions could be considered through this topic: Which research results in the games field had a significant impact in the games industry? Apart from established disciplines (e.g., computer science, digital arts) – which other disciplines are/could be relevant for the games industry?

Examples

• Adopting Best Practices from the Games Industry in Development of Serious Games for Health
• Crunch time: the reasons and effects of unpaid overtime in the games industry
• The emergence of industry of playful hybrids: developer’s perspective
• What do game developers expect from development and design tools?
• Critical skills for game developers: an analysis of skills sought by industry
• Defining the expectation gap: a comparison of industry needs and existing game development curriculum
• Just keep digging, and other principles for videogame R&D
• Are the old days gone?: a survey on actual software engineering processes in video game industry
• Is Java relevant in the game industry?
• Learnings from the Finnish Game Industry

Submissions can be up to 10 pages long (in SIGCHI Extended Abstract format), references excluded. Authors are strongly encouraged to submit videos to support and accompany their submission when applicable. Papers may refer to these videos. Submissions must NOT be anonymized before submission.

Submissions must be made using the Precision Conference System (PCS). We strongly encourage authors to submit a video to support and accompany their submission when applicable. Papers may refer to these videos.

Review Process

Rapid Communication papers will be subject to non-archival, peer reviewing and all identifying information about authors must NOT be anonymized before submission.

Upon Acceptance

Authors of accepted submissions will be invited to give a short talk at CHI PLAY in Barcelona. In addition, authors will be encouraged to bring a demonstration of their work that will be discussed with the audience after the presentation. The authors work could, for example, be demonstrated using posters, videos, tech-demos, or prototypes.

After the Conference

Rapid Communication papers will be available in the CHI PLAY 2019 Conference Extended Abstracts proceedings available in the ACM Digital Library.

Please direct any questions to Rapid Communication Chairs.