The GAMES track of PACMHCI (CHI PLAY) welcomes research that furthers an understanding of the player experience, as well as contributions on novel designs or implementations of player-computer interactions, and contributions to the theory of play and games. The GAMES track welcomes contributions on the effects of various technologies, software, or algorithms on player experiences; however, technical contributions without impact on players or game designers and developers are not within scope.
SUBMISSIONS
The PACMHCI GAMES track is the premier international venue for research in interactive games and play. Papers are published in the ACM Journal PACMHCI, in the GAMES track, and accepted papers are invited to present at the CHI PLAY conference series. We invite authors to submit their best research on all topics relevant to interactive play. Submission should present original and mature research work. High-quality, elaborated case studies and practice reports with generalizable findings will also be considered. We invite contributions across a variety of research techniques, methods, approaches, and domains, including, but not limited to:
- Novel input or output technologies for games and play
- Studies that contribute to our understanding of player experience
- Innovative game mechanics and playful interactions
- Theoretical contributions on play and games
- Accessible and inclusive design
- Esports, live streaming, and spectator experiences
- Advances in game user research, game evaluation methods, and methods for conducting games research
- Psychology of players and typologies of games and players
- Studies of applied, serious, and persuasive games (e.g., games and play for health, wellbeing, and learning)
- Gamification and motivational design
- Virtual and augmented reality in games and play
- New tools for game creation and co-creation
- Game analytics and novel visualizations of player experiences
- Developer experiences and studies of developers
- Applications of human-centered game AI (e.g., AI for game development or AI to improve player experience)
- Critical and reflexive approaches to games & play design and experience
- Industry case studies
PACMHCI GAMES welcomes contributions on the effects of various technologies, software, or algorithms on player experiences. Technical contributions without impact on players or other relevant people in the game community, such as moderators, streamers, developers, or designers (e.g., Procedural Content Generation for game levels without considering the human experience) are not within scope, nor are systems without a gameful or playful component (e.g., basic VR studies), nor are physical games without a digital element (e.g., board or tabletop gaming without digital components).
PACMHCI GAMES welcomes contributions that are translations of articles published in other languages, so long as the original authors remain, and the paper is clearly identified as a translation with reference to the original paper (in the PCS submission system, not in the anonymized submission draft).
IMPORTANT FACTS
- Papers submitted to PACMHCI GAMES will be peer reviewed and provided with one of three decisions: Accept with Minor Revisions, Revise and Resubmit, and Reject. If asked for revisions, authors will have 6 weeks to implement them and submit to a second round of review from the same members of the editorial board and external reviewers. We anticipate that the majority of papers will receive an Accept with Minor Revisions or a Reject decision in the first round, and that only a small number of papers will be carried forward into the Revise and Resubmit process.
- Papers accepted to PACMHCI GAMES will be invited to present at the CHI PLAY 2024 conference, held in Tampere Finland on Oct 14–17, 2024.
IMPORTANT DATES
(all times are 23:59 Anywhere on Earth or AoE)
(accept with minor revisions/revise and resubmit/reject) | |
| | |
| August 14, 2024 | Video submission deadline |
SUBMISSION PROCESS DETAILS
PACMHCI GAMES uses the Precision Conference System (PCS) 2.0: https://new.precisionconference.com/submissions. Selection “SIGCHI” as the Society and “CHI PLAY” as the Conference/Journal to make a new submission.
Authors submitting papers for peer-review to ACM publications must comply with the ACM Policy on Authorship including, but not limited to: That the paper submitted is original, that the listed authors are the creators of the work, that each author is aware of the submission and that they are listed as an author, and that the paper is an honest representation of the underlying work. That the work submitted is not currently under review at any other publication venue, and that it will not be submitted to another venue unless it has been rejected or withdrawn from this venue. Related to this policy, listed authors cannot be changed after the paper submission deadline. No new authors can be added during the revise and resubmit phase or for camera-ready publication. Making changes to the author list can be used as a method to manipulate the selected reviewers of a paper and can introduce conflicts with previously assigned reviewers. Thus, please make sure a) that you have added all authors including yourself, and b) that your PCS account email address is a valid one.
Confidentiality of submitted material will be maintained. Submissions should contain no information or material that is or will be proprietary and/or confidential at the time of publication (October, 2024), and should cite no publication that will be proprietary or confidential at that time. Final versions of accepted papers must be formatted according to detailed instructions provided by the publisher. Copyright release forms must be signed for inclusion in PACMHCI and the ACM Digital Library. Papers may be made available publicly up to two weeks prior to the conference date.
FORMATTING AND LENGTH
PACMHCI GAMES uses ACM Journals Primary Article Template found here: https://dl.acm.org/journal/pacmhci/submission-templates, which is available for LaTeX (and Overleaf), and Word.
No minimum or maximum page length is imposed on papers. Rather, reviewers will be instructed to weigh the contribution of a paper relative to its length. Typical papers are under 10,000 words, or about 17-20 pages in the single column ACM Master Article Template, excluding references, figure/table captions, and appendices. Papers that are widely over the typical length (e.g., above 12,000 words) will be examined carefully to ensure that the size of the contribution warrants the length of the paper. Papers whose lengths are incommensurate with their contributions will be rejected.
ANONYMOUS REVIEW POLICY
Papers are subject to anonymous reviewing. Submissions must have authors’ names and affiliations removed, and avoid obvious identifying statements. Any grant information that identifies the author(s) and their institution should be removed as well. Papers that violate the anonymization policy, including within the supplemental materials, will be desk rejected. Please check in particular the front page, headers and footers, and the Acknowledgement section. Also, check the meta information in papers prepared using Word.
Citations to authors’ own relevant work should be done without identifying the authors. For example, “Prior work by [authors]” instead of “In our prior work.”
PACMHCI GAMES does not have a policy against uploading preprints to preprint servers, such as SSRN or arXiv, before they are submitted for review at the conference.
REVISION CYCLES AND DECISIONS
PACMHCI GAMES will be returning submissions to the primary contact author with one of the following decisions, along with the reviews, after the first review cycle:
Accept with Minor Revisions: Submissions that receive this decision are ready or nearly ready for publication, though they may require a few small changes. The final version of the paper must be submitted by the revisions deadline for verification by the corresponding associate chair.
Revise and Resubmit: Submissions that receive this decision have real potential, but will require major portions rewritten or redone, and then re-reviewed. Authors should submit their revised manuscript at the revision deadline, along with a summary explaining how they addressed the reviewers’ comments and incorporated changes in the revision. To the extent possible, resubmissions will be assigned the same Associate Chair and reviewers for re-review. We anticipate that a smaller number of submissions will be accepted into this category, as compared to Accept with Minor Revisions, and that not all papers that were invited to provide a revised version will be accepted, and invited to present at CHI PLAY 2024.
Reject: Submissions that receive this decision have been determined to be not acceptable in their current form and also not able to complete the needed revisions within the 6-week revision period. Rejected papers are not able to submit a revision to the 2024 edition of PACMHCI GAMES, and will not be invited to present at CHI PLAY 2024.
Desk Reject: Authors should only submit completed work of publishable quality and within the scope of the GAMES track of PACMHCI. The Track Chairs and Editorial Board may Desk Reject any submission that they believe has little chance of being accepted if it goes through the peer review process. Papers may be desk rejected for the following reasons:
- Incomplete, non-anonymized, or concurrent submissions
- Incomplete submissions or working drafts of submissions.
- Non-anonymized submissions.
- Leaving the author names in the paper or having a description or an acknowledgements section that reveals authors or the institution (e.g. places where user studies were conducted and specific supporting grant information).
- Submissions that fail to declare concurrent submissions that are closely related to the submission.
- If you have a concurrent submission under review, you must include an anonymized version of that submission as supplementary material. The same rule applies if your submission is built directly on a project described in a paper that is unpublished or currently under review at other venues.
- Submissions that are flagged for plagiarism.
- Make sure you cite your prior publications by following our Anonymization Policy.
- Submissions that use the wrong format.
- All submissions must use the template specified in the Call for Papers.
- Submissions that are not written in English.
- Submissions that are very sloppy, e.g., lots of typos, missing references, formatting issues.
- Submissions in which something is so broken in the paper that makes it impossible to review.
- Submissions that are clearly out of scope of PACMHCI GAMES.
- Technical contributions without impact on people (e.g., Procedural Content Generation for game levels without considering the human experience) are not within scope.
- Systems without a gameful or playful component (e.g., basic VR studies) are not within scope.
- Physical games without a digital element (e.g., board or tabletop gaming without digital components) are not within scope.
- A viewpoint or opinion piece that does not fit the contribution types
- Submissions without sufficient substance or quality to make it through the peer review process
- Submissions that are obviously not an academic paper (e.g., patent disclosure, popular press article, a book).
- Submissions that fail to clearly communicate their contribution, e.g., claim a specific research goal but do not contribute toward it through the presented research.
- Submissions in which the contribution is much too small given the length of the submitted paper or is considered as a work in progress.
- Submissions that demonstrate fundamental methodological flaws or do not follow best practices for the applied methods.
- Submissions in which the presented analyses are insufficient to validate the stated claims.
- Submissions too poorly written to be assigned to external reviewers, (e.g., stated contributions are not situated within extant literature or discussed, details are insufficient for reviewers to interpret the methods or findings).
Authors of desk-rejected papers will be notified before the review process concludes.
CONTRIBUTION TYPE FOR REVIEW HANDLING
When uploading the paper to the PCS reviewing system, authors will be able to indicate the primary and secondary contribution type of their paper for appropriate reviewer assignment:
- Empirical-Qualitative, e.g., ethnography, qualitative user studies.
- Empirical-Quantitative, e.g., quantitative user studies, statistical methods, data modelling.
- Empirical-Mixed Methods, e.g., combined qualitative and quantitative empirical research.
- Artefact-Technical, e.g., building novel systems, algorithms, visualizations, architectures, implementing novel features in existing systems.
- Artefact-Design, e.g., research through design, envisionments, guidelines, methods, techniques.
- Theoretical, e.g., conceptual frameworks, theory underpinning interactive play studies/domains, theoretical analysis, and essays.
- Meta-Research, e.g., meta-analyses, systematic reviews
OPEN AND TRANSPARENT SCIENCE
Authors are encouraged to submit supplementary material when possible and when aligned with their methods. For example, interview guides, additional illustrations of their designs, or videos that further describe their systems, and to submit links to pre-registrations on the Open Science Framework (OSF) when appropriate for their work. Authors should further consider using open access repositories and make their data and other material available when appropriate for their work. Authors are encouraged to upload data, analysis scripts, and method artefacts as supplementary material to be accessed by reviewers during the review process; these materials will not be made public. Please note that all supplementary materials must be anonymized for the review process.
ACM POLICY ON USE OF GENERATIVE AI IN SUBMISSIONS
All authors should be aware of the ACM Policy on Authorship, which articulates the authorised use of generative AI in submitted works. In particular, it notes that the use of generative AI tools (such as ChatGPT) is permitted, but all authors are responsible for the content created by these tools, the use of the tools must be disclosed (e.g., in the acknowledgements), and the tool cannot be listed as an author of the submission. As such, authors are responsible for plagiarism, misrepresentation, fabrication or falsification of content and/or references generated through the use of generative AI tools, and could be sanctioned with penalties, such as a publication ban.
ACM PUBLICATIONS POLICY ON RESEARCH INVOLVING HUMAN PARTICIPANTS AND SUBJECTS
All authors of full papers conducting research involving human participants and subjects must meet appropriate ethical and legal standards guiding such research, as detailed in the ACM Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects, including:
- minimization of potential harms, making sure any risks are justified by potential benefits
- protection for the privacy and right to self-determination of participants and subjects
- adhering to relevant institutional, local, national, and international regulations
- adhering to the principle of informed consent
- adhering to the principle of justice
- adherence with all other applicable ACM policies.
To ensure that authors are in compliance with these policies, authors of papers involving human participants will be asked to confirm having read the policy and provide a mandatory description of how participants were selected, what consent processes were followed (i.e., did they consent and if so what they were told), how they were treated, how data sharing was communicated, and any additional ethical considerations.
VIDEO FIGURES
Video figures are mandatory for submissions that draw from custom-built games or systems that are not freely available (e.g., novel systems, interaction techniques, game designs, mechanics, or envisionments). Figures should showcase the game or system comprehensively (i.e., demonstrate core game mechanics or offer a playthrough) so that reviewers can explore all relevant aspects. Please note that this applies to submissions that contribute systems (i.e., artefacts) and those that study systems (i.e., empirical work). Generally, authors of all papers should consider submitting a video that illustrates their work as part of the submission if appropriate. Videos should be no more than three minutes long.
PRESENTING AT THE CHI PLAY CONFERENCE
Accepted papers will be invited to present at the ACM CHI PLAY conference in Fall 2024. Presenting at the conference is strongly recommended but not required. All presenting authors will also be required to submit an 8-minute video presentation of their paper.
OVERLEAF FORMATTING INSTRUCTIONS
- Go to the “Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) – Official Primary Article Templates” in Overleaf
- As PACM HCI Games Track is a journal, click on the ACM Journals Primary Article Template.
- Delete the following files:
- sample-lualatex.tex
- sample-sigconf.tex
- sample-xelatex.tex
- sample-franklin.png
- Acmart.pdf
- Go to the file sample-authordraft.tex
- You can rename this file to be clear to you that this is the main file that you will edit.
- Please use the “review” and “anonymous” styles: \documentclass[manuscript,review,anonymous]{acmart}
- The review option adds line numbers to your paper
- The anonymous option replaces the authors section for “ANONYMOUS AUTHOR(S)”. In case of anonymous submission, please remember that your submission must be anonymized whether you use this style or not.
- There are other files that you may delete or replace later:
- sample-base.bib: this is a sample bibliography. You can create your own bib file and use it for your references.
- sample-franklin.png: this is a sample png image. You will delete and replace it later with your proper figures.
- Now you are ready to begin. You can rename your files if you want.
Citing Games with Ludographies in CHI PLAY Papers
Citing games, whether commercial or academic, has become common in the CHI PLAY community as they represent important scholarly resources for our work. Games are cited to support statements, exemplify abstract ideas, and acknowledge practice; they may also be a form of primary data, on which the research is built. While authors have taken a number of approaches to this, including adding URLs to game websites in brackets, using footnotes, or adding games to their list of references, these have not quite fit; in content, volume, and style. Phoebe O. Toups Dugas started the practice of a “Ludography” in some of her papers several years ago, drawing from the practice of the Game Studies journal. We would like to encourage authors to adopt the idea of a Ludography, a special list of game references that comes after the normal list of references in your paper. Submissions are not required to have a Ludography; however, if games are going to be referenced in your paper we would encourage you to help standardize through a Ludography. Regardless of whether or not a ludography is used, it is important to note details of which version of a game was used (often its platform and release date).
For the format of referencing games, we will follow the recommendations put forward in the “Citing Games” section of “Author Guidelines” for CHI PLAY 2020 (https://chiplay.acm.org/2020/guidelines/), which has been reproduced below and augmented with additional guidelines.
Below we detail the recommended format for citing games and provide a link for Latex support for easily creating Ludographies.
Please note: This is not a requirement for CHI PLAY 2024 for submission or the final version of your papers; only a recommendation. Future CHI PLAY committees may consider adding this as a requirement. For this year, authors may also decide to submit their paper with another format and upon acceptance decide to submit their final version using these guidelines.
LudograPhies and Citing Games
Authors are encouraged to create a game reference list labeled as “Ludography,” wherever appropriate. The Ludography should appear after the typical “References” list at the end of a paper and follow the same general rules as a typical reference list. In-text citations should follow the same format as the typical paper citations but use the “G#” format. For example:
… a similar effect to draw the player’s attention can be seen when Mario flashes after getting a star power-up in Super Mario Bros [G1].
Word users can follow the guidelines; LaTeX users should use the BibTeX information below. An example of the game reference format follows:
Nintendo R&D1 and Intelligent Systems. 1994. Super Metroid. Game [SNES]. (18 April 1994). Nintendo, Kyoto, Japan. Last played August 2011.
General Pattern (note that for each entry, you should cite a specific version (e.g., platform) for a game): <developer>. <release year>. <game title in italics>. Game [<platform>]. (<game release date in <day> <month> <year> formats>). <publisher name>, <publisher address> (optional) Last played <last played date>.
LaTeX / BibTeX users should use the @misc entry type; the data fields should be filled as follows (the running example is at the end):
Author: Use the developer or developers of the version being cited. To avoid having the system treat the developer(s) as a first and last name, use curly braces around each developer.
Year: The release year for the version being cited.
Title: The game title, which has to be manually italicized (using \emph).
How published: The word “Game” followed by the platform in square brackets.
Day: The release day, if known, for the version being cited.
Month: The release month, if known, for the version being cited.
Note: The publisher’s name and location, followed optionally by “Last played” and the date last played.
Publisher and Address: The template will not read these (hence the need to enter them as a note).
Example:
@misc{SM,
Address = {Kyoto, Japan},
Author = {{Nintendo R\&D1} and {Intelligent Systems}},
Day = {18},
Howpublished = {Game [SNES]},
Month = {April},
Note = {Nintendo, Kyoto, Japan. Last played August 2011.},
Publisher = {Nintendo},
Title = {\emph{Super Metroid}},
Year = {1994}
}
Latex Support for Creating Ludographies
To support the practice of creating Ludographies, Josh Aaron Miller and Kutub Gandhi have thoughtfully created a GitHub repository and instructions for creating a Ludography following these guidelines. See Josh’s repository for instructions on how to use it:
This approach relies on a Latex package called multibib, which allows creating multiple bibliographies in the same document. As of writing, TAPS (The ACM Publishing System) has not added multibib to their list of “Accepted Latex Packages,” but they have assured us that it is an accepted package and practice.
If you have any questions about citing games with ludographies in your CHI PLAY papers, Please feel free to email the paper chairs (papers@chiplay.acm.org).
