The metaverse has become a topic of interest in both industry and academic settings. Research and development that focus on the ‘metaverse’ explore the immersive future of the internet, where distributed people from around the world can connect through virtual social environments. Research on the metaverse is distributed throughout varying sub-domains of games research, thus bringing these groups together will help unify and provide a launching point for future progress in the field. Unsurprisingly, the term has gained traction in the digital gaming realm as many related games and play research topics directly contribute to the metaverse. We are hosting a workshop at FDG 2022 which will bring together researchers in the field and discuss the current landscape of the metaverse in game research, and opportunities and challenges to propel the future evolution of research in this area.

We are looking for researchers, practitioners, and industry professionals who work on topics within games and the metaverse to join our hybrid half-day workshop at the Foundations of Digital Games conference in Athens, Greece this September. Our goals are to provide a point of connection for those conducting research on the metaverse in general, as well as a forum for discussing the future of our research community, so that we can plan how to best serve this community in future years at FDG and other game conferences. Below we list the topics of games and the metaverse of which this workshop focuses. These broader topics include potential areas for position papers submitted, however these should be treated as guidelines, and papers from other areas relating to the metaverse/games will be considered.

Topic Areas:

1. Content Creation: Topics relating to exploring frameworks for enabling user-generated content and the use of automation to help create more content are already established tactics in game development.

2. Access and Social Connectedness: As users move seamlessly between work and play, topics will include how merging personas affects experience and how work-life boundaries can be protected within social digital spaces

3. Identity and Representation: Topics relating to how identity and representation matter, and must be supported, in the metaverse .

4. Assessment, Validation, and User Research: Topics relating to how to assess the impacts of persistent and integrated digital social spaces on the social interactions we have within the material world.

You do not need to be a metaverse expert to join this workshop. We are looking for people with a range of backgrounds and experiences. If your research questions might be of interest or tangentially related to the topics listed above, or you would like to design new metaverse experiences, this workshop is for you.

Please fill out this google form submission, outlining the abstract of your proposed workshop talk or email raquel.robinson@ontariotechu.net with your letter of interest. Participation in the workshop does not require you to be a speaker or submit an abstract. Workshop registration guidelines can be found here.