After two rounds of review, CHI PLAY 2022 has accepted 40 full papers to be presented at the conference. Over two rounds, a total of 166 papers were submitted for review.
Among the 40 accepted full papers, 28 papers were accepted with minor revisions in Round 1. All 28 papers were ultimately accepted in Round 2. 30 papers received Revise and Resubmit in Round 1. Authors of all 30 papers chose to resubmit. Out of the 30 resubmitted papers, 12 were ultimately accepted.
In terms of contribution type, of the 40 accepted papers, they were identified by authors with the following primary contribution types:
Artifact-Design: 7
Artifact-Technical:5
Empirical-Mixed Methods: 11
Empirical-Qualitative: 8
Empirical-Quantitative: 6
Meta-Research: 1
Methodological: 1
Theoretical: 1
After the second round of submissions, committee members and external reviewers were given the opportunity to engage with the revised pieces of work, and then engaged in extensive discussion within themselves and with the Papers Chairs during which we determined which papers should be accepted or rejected. Considering the second round of selection for Revise and Resubmit was still highly competitive, we introduced a 7-category scale rather than a simple Accept/Reject to better reflect reviewers’ recommendations, which helped ACs and Papers Chairs make final decisions:
- Choose “Strongly Accept” if a reviewer believes that this paper should definitely be included in CHI PLAY 2022. Only the ACs will look at the paper again before publishing.
- Choose “Accept” if the paper is acceptable with only copy edits at this stage. Only the ACs will look at the paper again before publishing.
- Choose “Discussion-Accept,” “Discussion-Unsure,” and “Discussion-Reject” if more discussion is needed for this paper and how positive or negative you feel about this paper.
- Choose “Reject” if a reviewer believes the authors have not addressed appropriately the list of changes requested after the first review round, or the paper still requires revision.
- Choose “Strongly Reject” if a reviewer believes the authors have not addressed appropriately the list of changes requested after the first review round, and the revised paper should definitely not be included at CHI PLAY 2022.
After all second-round reviews were entered, the Papers Chairs first went through all second-round submissions to identify papers where there was clear consensus and borderline papers or papers with conflicting recommendations. For papers where there was clear consensus among committee members (i.e., 1AC and 2AC) and reviewers, there was only a brief exchange with the Papers Chairs to confirm the final decisions. Only lightly touching papers with clear consensus allowed us to focus our time and energy on those submissions that required more consideration.
For borderline papers or papers with conflicting recommendations, we followed up with a one-week committee discussion period, during which Papers Chairs, 1ACs, 2ACs, and in some cases also other committee members engaged in an effort to resolve all remaining issues and make final decisions. These papers were discussed primarily via text chat in private Slack channels dedicated to each paper.
Congratulations to all authors of accepted submissions. We would like to acknowledge the efforts that our community has made in ensuring a rigorous reviewing process during an ongoing global pandemic, working together with the submitting authors to achieve high-quality scholarship. We thank our dedicated team of ACs, external reviewers, and paper authors, who gamely embraced our revised review process and timeline, contributing to the maturation and growth of the CHI PLAY community, and resulting in 40 exciting and highly relevant articles.
Finally, we would like to highlight that the papers were authored and reviewed during the still ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, a time when our global community continues to face unprecedented challenges. The accepted 40 papers reflect the importance of play in times of disconnection, isolation, and challenge, and also represent a significant effort of our community in coming together to produce a collection of research that highlights the multifaceted value of play.
Guo Freeman, Scott Bateman, and Lennart Nacke