Call for Papers

GAS 2016 explores issues that crosscut the software engineering and the game engineering communities. Modern games entail the development, integration, and balancing of software capabilities drawn from algorithm design and complexity, artificial intelligence, computer graphics, computer-supported cooperative work/play, database management systems, human-computer interaction and interface design, operating systems and resource/storage management, networking, programming/scripting language design and interpretation, performance monitoring, and more. Few other software system application arenas demand such technical mastery and integration skill. Yet game development is expected to rely on such mastery, and provide a game play experience that most users find satisfying, fun, and engaging. Computer games are thus an excellent domain for which to research and develop new ways and means for software engineering.

Themes and Topics

Game developers share a common community of interest: how to best engineer game software. They focus their attention on entertainment market opportunities as well as game-based applications in non-entertainment domains such as education, healthcare, defense, and scientific research (i.e., serious games). This Workshop seeks contributions from academic researchers and commercial game developers, addressing topics that span the emerging and current research challenges in the area:

Large-scale game software engineering
Game software requirements engineering
Game software design (architecture, component)
Game software testing, including usability, playability
Teamwork processes in game software engineering
Automated generation of computer games
Global software game development
Cloud-based computing infrastructure and services to support online games
Analysis of data from large scale game playing
Crowd-sourced play, or games with a purpose.
Gamification, or gaming for productivity (serious games).
Game-based software engineering education.

Goals

The goals of GAS 2016 build upon the previous 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2015 GAS Workshops with a greater focus on sharing and advancing game engineering and software engineering techniques. GAS 2016 will:
- Bring together the greater community of software engineers and game engineers in an interactive program that encourages discussion and scholarly debate from interdisciplinary perspectives.
- Identify and explore emerging and new research challenges, costs and benefits for enabling playful experiences in traditional (non-game) applications and activities.
- Identify and explore emerging research challenges, costs and benefits on enabling socio-economic change through games, or game-based applications, with software engineering techniques.
- Generate a new research agenda, identify topics of interest for this community, and how future workshops may explore these topics.

Workshop Program

Join us! This workshop is structured to be highly interactive, encourage discussion, and appeal to participants from academia and industry. The workshop will feature a keynote, short and long paper presentations with discussions, a game demonstration session, and a social event to build strong, lasting relationships among the participants.

Important Dates
Paper submissions: January 22, 2016
Notification of authors: February 19, 2016
Camera-ready copies: February 26, 2016


Submission Instructions

All papers will be refereed by three members of the program committee. Accepted papers will be published as an ICSE 2016 Workshop Proceedings in the ACM and IEEE Digital Libraries.

Paper submissions are accepted in two lengths:
Long papers (7 pages)
Short papers (4 pages)

Submissions must follow the ICSE 2016 submission instructions (http://2016.icse.cs.txstate.edu/formatInstr) using the ACM templates (http://www.acm.org/publications/article-templates/proceedings-template.html). Note that the names and ordering of authors in the camera ready version cannot be modified from the ones in the submitted version.

GAS 2016 requires that at least one author on each accepted paper will register for, and physically attend, the GAS 2016 workshop, and give a presentation on the results.

Papers submission is via the Easychair system (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=gas2016).

The official publication date of the workshop proceedings is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of ICSE 2016. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

Co-Organizers

Aida Azadegan
Bournemouth University, U.K.
Reading University, U.K.
aazadegan@bournemouth.ac.uk

Kendra Cooper
Bournemouth University, U.K.
UT-Dallas, U.S.A.
kendra.m.cooper@gmail.com


Program Committee (still in progress)

Navid Ahmadi, University of Lugano, Switzerland
Judith Bishop, Microsoft Research, Inc., USA
David Callele, University of Saskatchewan, Canada
Kuan-Ta Chen, National Taiwan University, Taiwan
Robert Hall, AT&T Labs, Inc., USA
Letizia Jaccheri, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway
Gail Kaiser, Columbia University, USA
Chris Lewis, Google, Inc., USA
Fabio Petrillo, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
Walt Scacchi, University of California Irvine, USA
Kari Smolander, Lappeenranta University of Technology, Finland
Ioannis Stamelos, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
Clark Verbrugge, McGill University, Canada
Jim Whitehead, University of California Santa Cruz, USA
Tom Zimmerman, Microsoft Research, Inc., USA