Call for Papers

Also available here: PDF format

Games are a popular form of entertainment and, due to their nature (i.e., interactive, immersive, etc.), strongly lend themselves for use beyond this original intent. Serious games, or games with a purpose, have been introduced to integrate the entertainment value of games with domain specific objectives on important topics within education, health, and the environment to mention a few. In addition, gamification has been used to enhance non-entertainment applications with game elements; it aspires to foster behavioral changes, engagement, motivation, and participation in activities. In this context, the actions performed have meaning/value in the game experience in order to improve workplace performance or learn something in real life. The  growing adoption of gameful experiences in all of the previous contexts make their design and development increasingly complex due to, for example, the number and variety of users, and their potential mission criticality. This complexity is nurtured, among the other factors, by a lack of theoretical grounding and adequate frameworks to engineer the intended solutions. GAS 2025 seeks to bring the attention of interdisciplinary researchers and practitioners to the opportunities and challenges involved in new trends and issues related to the development of entertainment games, serious games, and gamified applications. It provides a forum to explore issues that crosscut the software engineering and the games development communities.

The goals of GAS 2025 are to:

• Bring together the greater communities of Software Engineering and Game Engineering in an interactive program that encourages discussion and scholarly debate from interdisciplinary perspective.

• Identify and explore emerging opportunities, research challenges, costs, and benefits for entertainment games, serious games, and the gamification of traditional (non-games) applications and activities.

• Identify and explore emerging research challenges, trends, costs, and benefits on enabling socio-economic change through games or game-based applications, with SE techniques.

• Generate a new research agenda, identify topics of interest for this community, and how future workshops and social media groups may explore these topics.

Topics of Interest

GAS 2025 welcomes submissions addressing topics at the intersection of software engineering and entertainment games, serious games, and gamification. Topics include, but are not limited to tailored, interdisciplinary approaches on:

• engineering activities (requirements engineering, architecture, design, testing, playtesting).

• umbrella activities (adherence to standards (e.g., Code of Ethics), build management, configuration management, lifecycle processes (e.g., Agile, DevOps), traceability).

• adaptable game development and game play.

• artificial intelligence in game development and game play.

• biometrics in game development and game play.

• competitions (e.g., game jams).

• data analytics and visualisations.

• domain specific languages and formal methods for games.

• emerging approaches for testing games.

• games in the metaverse and virtual environments. 

• maintenance and evolution of games.

• metrics for game development.

• model based representations, analyses, and transformations.

• monitoring, analysis, and visualization of game play data at scale.

• procedural content generation.

• QoS properties (e.g., accessibility, privacy, user experience)

• qualitative and quantitative impact evaluation methods for games 

• re-use in games (e.g., franchises, modding, product lines).

• software engineering education and training.

• tools, infrastructure, and services.

Submission Guidelines

We will accept three types of submissions: 

• Long Research Papers: max. 8 pages.

• Short Research Papers:  4 - 6 pages.

• Extended Abstracts (e.g., demo., position statement): max. 2 pages.

Authors should use the official “ACM Primary Article Template”, as can be obtained from the ACM Proceedings Template page (word, LaTeX). 

LaTeX users should use the sigconf option, as well as the review option (to produce line numbers for easy reference by the reviewers). The following LaTeX code can be placed at the start of the LaTeX document:

\documentclass[sigconf,review]{acmart}

\acmConference[GAS 2025]{9th International ICSE Games and Software Engineering Workshop}{April/May 2025}{Ottawa, Canada}

All workshop papers should be submitted electronically in PDF format through the EasyChair workshop website at https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=gas2025. The submissions will be desk checked to ensure they meet the submission requirements (e.g., page limitations, format) and are within the scope of the workshop. A single blind review process will be used.  

The accepted papers will become part of the workshop proceedings. The official publication date of the workshop proceedings is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Library. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of ICSE 2025. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work. 

If you have any questions or wonder whether your submission is in scope, please do not hesitate to contact the co-organizers by e-mail: icse.gas.workshop.2025@gmail.com.

Important Dates

• Submission deadline: Monday Nov. 11, 2024 

• Notification of acceptance: Sunday Dec. 1, 2024

• Camera-ready version: Wednesday Feb. 5, 2025

Organization 

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact the co-organizers (icse.gas.workshop.2025@gmail.com). 

Organizing Committee 

• Jeremy Bradbury, Ontario Tech University, Canada 

• Antonio Bucchiarone, Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK), Italy 

• Carlos Cetina, Universidad San Jorge, Spain 

• Kendra M. L. Cooper, Independent Scholar, Canada 

• Beatriz Marin, Universitat Politècnica de Vaència, Spain 

• Mathieu Nayrolles, Ubisoft Entertainment, Canada 

Program Committee 

Leaders in the international community spanning academia, research labs, and industry are being invited to form the program committee. The complete list is available at the GAS 2025 homepage (see above).