The GAMES track of PACMHCI (CHI PLAY) welcomes research on player-computer interactions including understanding the player experience, contributions on novel designs or implementations of player-computer interactions, and contributions to related theory. The GAMES track also welcomes contributions on the effects of various technologies, software, or algorithms on player experiences that further our understanding of the relationship between players and technology.
SUBMISSIONS
The PACMHCI GAMES track is the premier international venue for research in interactive digital 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 player-computer interactions and digital 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 of digital play
- Innovative game mechanics and playful interactions
- Theoretical contributions on digital play and games
- Accessible and inclusive design of player-computer interactions
- Esports, live streaming, and spectator experiences
- Advances in digital game user research, game evaluation methods, and methods for conducting games research
- Psychology and typologies of digital games and players
- Studies of applied, serious, and persuasive digital games (e.g., games and play for health, well-being, and learning)
- Gamification and motivational design
- Virtual and augmented reality in games and play
- New tools for digital game creation and co-creation that directly affect player experience and/or player-computer interactions
- Game analytics and novel visualizations of player-computer interactions
- Developer experiences and studies of developers of digital games
- Applications of human-centered game AI with implications for HCI games research (e.g., AI for digital game development or AI to improve player-computer interactions)
- Critical and reflexive approaches to digital games & play design and experience
- Gaming 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 (e.g., non-digital board or tabletop gaming) without a digital element and/or core contribution to player-computer interaction.
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 2025 conference, held in Pittsburgh, USA on Oct 13–16, 2025.
IMPORTANT DATES
(all times are 23:59 Anywhere on Earth or AoE)
| February 19, 2025 | Submission deadline |
| April 14, 2025 | Notifications given (accept with minor revisions/revise and resubmit/reject) |
| June 2, 2025 | Revisions due |
| July 4, 2025 | Final notifications given |
SUBMISSION PROCESS DETAILS
PACMHCI GAMES uses the Precision Conference System (PCS) 2.0: https://new.precisionconference.com/submissions. Select “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, as 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, 2025), 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.
Please ensure that you and your co-authors obtain an ORCID ID, so you can complete the publishing process for your accepted paper. ACM has been involved in ORCID from the start and we have recently made a commitment to collect ORCID IDs from all of our published authors. The collection process has started and will roll out as a requirement throughout 2022. We are committed to improve author discoverability, ensure proper attribution and contribute to ongoing community efforts around name normalization; your ORCID ID will help in these efforts.
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 (i.e., 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 supplementary 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 editorial board member.
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 editorial board member and reviewers for re-review. We anticipate that a smaller number of submissions will be selected 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 2025.
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 2025 edition of PACMHCI GAMES, and will not be invited to present at CHI PLAY 2025.
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 (see ANONYMOUS REVIEW POLICY).
- 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 do not include a video figure or sufficient detail in text if the submission includes custom-built games or systems that are not freely available as part of the core contribution (e.g., novel systems, interaction techniques, game designs, mechanics, or envisionments.
- 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 and/or core contribution to player-computer interaction (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 that are insufficiently contextualized in the body of existing HCI Games and wider HCI literature.
- 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 that 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 without enough clarity or structure 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
By submitting your article to an ACM Publication, you are hereby acknowledging that you and your co-authors are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM’s new Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects. Alleged violations of this policy or any ACM Publications Policy will be investigated by ACM and may result in a full retraction of your paper, in addition to other potential penalties, as per ACM Publications Policy.
All authors of full papers conducting research involving human participants and subjects must meet appropriate ethical and legal standards guiding such research, 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). Submissions that do not include such a figure (or sufficient detail in text) may be desk rejected if it is impossible to assess the game or system. 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 2025. Presenting at the conference is strongly recommended but not required for publication in PACM HCI.
For more information, visit https://chiplay.acm.org
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.