The growing adoption of gameful experiences make their development increasingly complex due to, for example, the number and variety of users, goals, potential mission criticality, and their inherent interdisciplinary nature. This complexity is exasperated by current limitations in theoretical grounding and methodologies to engineer the intended solutions. To help address this complexity, the ICSE 9th International Workshop on Games and Software Engineering (GAS 2025) seeks to highlight the opportunities and challenges involved in emerging trends and issues related to the development of gameful systems (entertainment games, serious games, and gamified applications). The workshop provides a forum to explore issues that crosscut the software engineering and game engineering communities. This on-going workshop series is co-hosted with the premier conference series on software engineering research: the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering (https://conf.researchr.org/home/icse-2025).

Goals

The goals of GAS 2025 are to:

• Bring together the greater communities of  Software Engineering and Game Engineering in a highly interactive programme that encourages discussion and scholarly debate from interdisciplinary perspectives. The programme includes keynotes, research presentations, and a lively panel discussion. 

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

• Explore advanced technologies (e.g., AI, HCI/CHI, UX, assessment, automation) that are essential in the development of gameful applications.

• 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 

The GAS 2025 workshop welcomes submissions addressing topics at the intersection of software engineering and entertainment games, serious games, and gamification such as:

• engineering activities (requirements engineering, architecture, design, testing, playtesting) tailored for gameful systems.

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

• AI in game development and game play.

• automated, adaptable 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.

• HCI/CHI methods and technologies (AR/VR/MR, wearable computing for games).

• maintenance and evolution of games.

• metrics, biometrics for game development and game play.

• model based representations, analyses, and transformations.

• procedural content generation.

• QoS properties (e.g., accessibility, privacy, usability, 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.