Category: Events

IEEE Games, Entertainment, & Media (GEM) 2018

Call for Papers, Special Sessions, Tutorials and Industry Contributions

 

Continuing the grand tradition & broadening the scope of the IEEE International Games Innovation Conference (IGIC, 2009 – 2013) and IEEE Games Entertainment & Media (GEM, 2014 – 2016) we introduce the GEM 2018 conference to be held on-campus at the National University of Ireland Galway, August 16^th – 18^th .

 

Introduction:

The Games, Entertainment and Media (GEM) Conference began in London 2009, and moved to venues in the US and Canada until 2016. For 2018 the IEEE Consumer Electronics Society will re-boot GEM outside of North America for the first time in a decade at the National University of Ireland Galway (NUIG).

 

Situated on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean the West of Ireland has traditionally been the site of the first trans-Atlantic air-flights and there are many historic links between Ireland, the US & Canada stretching back to the times of the Irish famine. Today you can explore the rich heritage & history of the West of Ireland via the Wild Atlantic Way and Galway is conveniently situated at the mid-point of this 1,500 mile long costal adventure.

 

Today, our aim is to build a bridge between gaming and digital media research in North America and in Europe and the UK. Ireland, with unique historic links to North America, coupled with a pivotal role as a technology European technology hub and strong economic ties with the UK, offers a unique venue for gaming and digital media researchers to meet and share the latest innovations.

 

Conference Scope

In scope GEM encompasses all aspects of gaming and interactive digital media ranging from theoretical advances in algorithmic and mathematical techniques, to new enabling technologies, advanced consumer electronics systems, novel sensing technologies, to socio-economic impacts and unique and original uses and applications of these technologies. GEM is for scientists, engineers, psychologists, sociologists, mathematicians, programmers and games researchers of all disciplines, united in their interest and enthusiasm for digital games, interactive entertainment & media and the significant uses and impacts these technologies have on our lives.

 

If you would like to see your personal area of GEM research represented in Galway in 2018 please contact Peter Corcoran, Sam Redfern, or Charlotte Kobert to share your ideas and vision for a special or panel session, a tutorial or a hands-on demonstration or workshop.

 

Conference Research Themes

The main conference theme reflects recent technology developments in consumer technologies, in particular the availability of advanced AR software, advances in sensing and computer vision & display technologies and the growing sophistication of new cloud computing services; thus we find ourselves in a world open with new technological capabilities to create “Augmented Spaces and Virtual Worlds”.

GEM delegates are encouraged to submit original research works exploring these new, emerging possibilities to create exciting, engaging, authentic digital gaming and interactive-media experiences for end-users. The main conference tracks are:

 

Academic Research Themes

• GEM in the Cloud
• Mobile & Wearable Technologies for GEM
• Augmented & Virtual Reality in GEM
• Social and Economic Aspects of Digital GEM
• Societal & Behavioural Impacts of GEM
• Medical Applications of GEM
• Augmented Spaces for GEM
• Emerging Technologies:
  • User Interface,
  • Location-Awareness,
  • Touch & Haptics,
  • Motion Capture,
  • Distributed Intelligence,
• eSports
• Serious Gaming
• Education & Learning through GEM
• Artificial Intelligence in GEM
  • AI Engines & Accelerators
  • Deep Learning & Neural Networks

 

Industry Research Themes

• GEM Design, Development & User Experience
• Serious Gaming & Industry Applications
• Practical Case Studies of GEM
• GEM Platforms & Infrastructure
• Standards & Open-Source GEM

 

Peer & Invited Contributions

Peer-Reviewed Contributions (Academic)

• Long/Short Paper + Oral Presentation (20 mins)
• Long Paper + Poster

 

Peer-Reviewed Contributions (Industry)

• Long Oral Presentation (PPT slides, 20 mins)
• Industry Demo (Tabletop – Slides optional)

 

Invited Contributions

• Keynote Talk (PPT slides, 30-45 mins)
• Panel Session
• Special Oral Session (3-5 long papers)
• Special Poster Session (8+ posters)
• Tutorials & Hand-on Workshops

 

Plenary Keynote Sessions:

GEM will feature 6 plenary keynote sessions. Details will be available shortly on the conference website, accessible via the short link: http://bit.ly/GEM2018 .

 

Publication Opportunities:

The conference proceedings will be published on IEEE Xplore.

In addition, there will be opportunities for special sections in several IEEE Journals and technical Magazines including:

• IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics
• IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine

IEEE Technology in Society Magazine

Selected papers will receive mentoring & advice from members of the GEM organising committee develop their articles for archival publication in relevant IEEE Journals.

 

Technology Demonstration Sessions:

GEM has a tradition of emphasising new and emerging technologies and their role in improving and enhancing the user experience, interactivity and social aspects of gaming and interactive media.

This year we will have several industry-led sessions with a focus on new audio & display technologies and other novel approaches to providing enhanced and augmented interactive spaces. Details will be available shortly on the main conference website or at the short link: http://bit.ly/GEM2018 .

 

Conference Venue:

GEM 2018 will be held in the Alice Perry Engineering Building on the NUI Galway campus. The venue is close to the Corrib Student Village where reserved accommodation is available for delegates. The venue is a 15 minute walk from downtown Galway.

 

Conference Organization:

Conference Chair: Peter Corcoran of NUI Galway; founding editor, IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine; dr.peter.corcoran@ieee.org

Program Chair: Sam Redfern, university lecturer & game programmer;  sam.redfern@nuigalway.ie

Publicity Chair: Lee Stogner; l.stogner@ieee.org

Publications Chair: Tom Wilson; tom.wilson@ieee.org

Conference Manager: Charlotte Kobert; ckobert@ieee.org

Conference Timeline (indicative)

Submissions should be made via the EDAS conference management system (www.edas.info); if you do not yet have an EDAS account then please register; submit a paper via the menu; select the GEM 2018 conference.

Submissions should be in standard IEEE two-column format. For additional details or queries please contact the publication chair or conference manager.

Submission deadlines:  31^st March 2018

Notification:  May 2018

Camera-Ready papers: June 2018

Conference Venue: National University of Ireland Galway (NUIG), August 15^th-17^th.

Getting There:

Delegates are recommended to fly into Dublin Airport where there are coach services every 30 minutes to Galway. These are comfortable modern coaches with onboard WiFi. Alternatively it is possible to fly into Shannon Airport but transport to Galway is less frequent so this is only advised if you plan to hire a car to explore the Wild Atlantic Way (https://www.wildatlanticway.com/ )

 

For Further Information on the conference please consult the official IEEE GEM 2018 website at http://sites.ieee.org/ieeegem/

 

For Further Information on Galway and the West of Ireland:

https://www.wildatlanticway.com/

https://www.galwaytourism.ie/

http://thisisgalway.ie/events/

 

 

 

Elena Bertozzi, PhD. Associate Professor

Game Design & Development

Quinnipiac University * 203-582-7998* CAS 1 327 *

elena.bertozzi@qu.edu *  ardeaarts.org  * familyplanninggame.qu.edu

A one-day conference hosted by the Digital Culture Research Network, and supported by the Midlands3Cities DTP (M3C) Cohort Development Fund

 

Date: Friday 20th April 2018
Venue: University of Nottingham

Abstract Submission Deadline: Friday 9th February 2018

 

‘Digital⇌Culture 2018’ explores the varied links between digital and cultural processes. Digital tools such as social media, mobile devices, video games, data analysis infrastructures, and networked technologies increasingly permeate our everyday lives. As a result, the production and expression of ‘meanings’ or ‘values’ – like the experience and performance of identity, gender, embodied lived experience, political activism, linguistic engagement, knowledge and power relations – are increasingly co-constituted by digital platforms.

This one-day conference, which includes keynote speeches from Prof. Tim Jordan (University of Sussex, UK) and Dr. Katrin Tiidenberg (Aarhus University, Denmark), aims to bring together researchers from a wide array of disciplines with an interest in digital culture. Visit https://digitalculture2018.wordpress.com/
for more information and updates.

Submission

We invite proposals from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to present theoretical and empirical research in response, but not limited, to the following topics:

– How can we meaningfully study the relationship between digital platforms and the activities they enable?
– What is the relationship between features of digital platforms and the communicative acts they mediate?
– How can we understand the value landscape of digital entertainment?
– How do features of digital platforms become re-appropriated as resources for the construction and performance of identity, and to what extent does this in turn shape perceptions of the platform?
– How do digital platforms participate in knowledge-creation and the establishment of dominant discourses?
– How do digital platforms affect the aesthetic and artistic practices of mediation?

To encourage proposals from doctoral students, we are awarding six joint-travel/accommodation grants to successful proposals. Further details below. There will be no  fee charged for presenting at, or attending, this conference.

Submissions should follow the below format and be submitted to digitalculture2018@gmail.com by 23:00 GMT on Friday 9th February 2018.

 

Paper Title
Speaker Name
Speaker Contact Email
Abstract (Up to 250 words outlining the paper’s main arguments, methods, and relevance to the conference theme)
Speaker Biography (Up to 100 words)
Keywords (3 terms relevant to the paper)

 

Funding

We are pleased to offer six joint-travel/accommodation grants, each of which includes one night’s accommodation at the University of Nottingham (arranged by the organising committee) and up to £50 travel expenses.

The grant is open to all doctoral applicants, but at least three of the grants are reserved for non-M3C-funded applicants based at the DTP’s six institutions (Uni. Of Nottingham; Nottingham Trent; Birmingham City; Uni. of Birmingham; De Montfort; Uni. of Leicester). Those currently funded by M3C are not eligible to apply for this grant. This grant will only be offered to doctoral students whose papers have been accepted for the conference.

If you wish to apply for the grant, please complete a Grant Application Form which can be found here and submit it along with your abstract. Grants will be awarded on the basis of the conference organising committee’s collective consideration of submitted applications.

 

 

Betti Bodi

AHRC/M3C Doctoral Candidate

https://vpp.midlands3cities.ac.uk/x/488uAQ

Dept of Culture, Film and Media

University of Nottingham
Room B57, Trent Building
University Park

NG7 2RD

PLAY/PAUSE Symposium – 24^th January 2018, University of Birmingham, B15 2TT

CALL FOR PAPERS:

Gaming the System: Play, Procedure and Procedurality in Videogames and Virtual Reality

Procedures are embedded ways of understanding our cultural, social and political systems; they provide fixed guidelines and rules to be followed. While procedures are seemingly fixed, procedurality, on the other hand, is a constantly evolving mechanism for ‘creating, explaining or understanding processes’ (Bogost, 2007). For our inaugural event, PLAY/PAUSE welcomes papers that will analyse procedures and procedurality in relation to videogames and Virtual Reality (VR).

Does the procedurality of videogames offer us, as programmer Brie Code argues, the tools to adapt to a twenty-first-century ‘overwhelmed with shock, with information, with change’? Or are videogames an embodiment of the controlled degrees of freedom offered to individuals under late-capitalism and neoliberalism? Does VR technology offer unprecedented immediacy and the potential to be, as Jennifer Alsever calls it, ‘the ultimate empathy machine’? Or does it further indulge a misguided impulse towards mastery of our physical environment? And what of ‘metagames’, Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux’s term for the games ‘occurring before, after, between and during games’? Are the hacks, speed-runs and fan-made mass-involvement games like Twitch Plays Pokemon (2014) a creative flourishing of the commons? Or do they simply indicate the outsourcing of labour by media industry discourses?

This symposium provides a meeting place for researchers within and outside the field of game studies, and seeks to broaden the academic consideration of videogames and VR: away from the consideration of them as niche, relatively new technologies, towards mediums that have the capacity to encourage and create academic discourses that reflect the cultures they are created in.

We welcome a broad range of proposals for 20-minute papers on the role or significance of procedurality in regards to (but not limited to) the following topics:

• The interplay between narrative and ludic elements of videogames
• Embodiment and modes of perception in videogames and/or VR
• Gaming, metagaming, and fan cultures
• Videogames and philosophy
• Representing and playing history in videogames
• The influence of videogames on other media, e.g. novels, films, plays, etc.

 

Abstracts of no more than 250 words, along with a bibliography and short bio, should be sent to playpauseuob@gmail.com by Friday 22nd December 2017. We particularly welcome proposals from PGRs and early career researchers.

PLAY/PAUSE is part of the Centre for Digital Cultures at Birmingham, fuelling academic discussion of Videogames and Virtual Reality.

Twitter: @PLAYPAUSE_UOB
Blog: playpauseuob@wordpress.com