Call for Papers

Dear colleagues! We cordially invite you to share your knowledge, findings and experience at the seventh annual International Conference on Game Jams, Hackathons, and Game Creation Events (ICGJ 2023). The one-day conference will be hosted online in August 2023.

ICGJ is an interdisciplinary conference that welcomes educators, researchers, professionals, and event organizers across various fields related to game jams and hackathons. We aim to publish the proceedings in the ACM Digital Library, as in previous editions.

You can check the previous ICGJ proceedings available in the ACM Digital Library.

Aims & Scope

Conference topics cover all the aspects of game jams, hackathons and other game creation events. 

With thousands of game jams and hackathons held every year, with hundreds of thousands total participants, plenty of valuable data is generated and can be used to study all aspects of the activity. For example: Who participates in these events? What kind of games or prototypes do they make? How do the events influence the future projects of the participants? Analysis of the data might lead to unexpected and exciting findings, which will be really valuable for the scientific community. 

Topics

Major topics of interest this year will include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Communication skills

• Community building

• Creativity

• Educational dimension of game jams and hackathons

• Game design issues in game jams

• Games Done Quick

• Game jam and hackathon attendance: who and why?

• Game jam and hackathon impacts

• Game jam and hackathon methodologies

• Game jam and hackathon resources and assets

• Group dynamics

• History of game creation events

• Ideation

• Incentives and rewards in game jams and hackathons

• Learning in game jams and hackathons

• Makerspaces

• Online game jams and hackathons

• Rapid game development

• Team formation

• Theme development

Submissions

Three categories of original submissions are considered:

• Full Papers: Full papers should be 6-8 pages long (excluding references), ready for publication in the conference proceedings.

• Short Papers: Short papers should be no more than 4 pages long (excluding references), ready for publication in the conference proceedings.

• Game Jam or Hackathon Event Reports: Game jam or hackathon event reports are for organizers and scholars who want to present a report on a game jam or a hackathon at the conference. Reports should highlight lessons learned and eventually provide guidelines about event format, dynamics and organization. The evaluation will be based on usefulness of the takeaway for other organizers or scholars. Event Reports should be no more than 4 pages (excluding references), ready for publication in the conference proceedings.

Full and short paper submissions will undergo a double-blind review process (i.e., identification of authors or their institutions must not appear anywhere in the submission’s text). The previous conference proceedings have been published in the ACM Digital Library, the same is expected for 2023 after ACM approval. Paper submissions should use the double column ACM template which is available at https://www.acm.org/publications/taps/word-template-workflow. These submissions need to be anonymized (remove all authors and affiliations) and uploaded to EasyChair before the deadline. 

EasyChair link: https://easychair.org/cfp/icgj23

Event report submissions will undergo a single-blind review process (i.e., identification of authors have to be in the text of the report). Accepted submissions will be published in the ACM Digital Library as short papers. Report submissions should use the double column ACM template which is available at https://www.acm.org/publications/taps/word-template-workflow. These submissions do NOT need to be anonymized. They should be uploaded to EasyChair before the deadline.

For LaTeX users, please use the following to enable the double-column format in the ACM template:

\documentclass[sigconf,authordraft]{acmart}