The community of the VS-GAMES covers a broad variety of facets of virtual worlds and games including game design, software engineering, computer graphics, human-computer interaction techniques, pedagogical and psychological models and evaluations. The common denominator of the conference is that all of these different efforts and perspectives target serious application domains – from museum exhibitions over deep sea robotics interfaces to training and rehabilitation. The conference was recently ranked at top 20 venues in Google Scholar ranking relevant to games. VS-GAMES has a history of more than 10 years. The application-driven, interdisciplinary research topics presented and discussed at VS-GAMES render it a rather unique venue that promotes a dearly needed blend of technology and educational research. Given the very distinct needs and methodologies of both these great scientific fields, the conference has to ensure that the presentation and discussion of results is accessible to both audiences and still has great scientific value. It also has to serve different mindsets in terms of publications which is why, for instance, we offer post-conference invitations to the best submissions for inclusion in special journal issues which is greatly relevant especially to educational researchers. That being said, the audience is mainly academics from all over the globe but conference typically also attracts (a few) representatives from the industry. Overall we expect a crowd of 60 to 80 participants. This year, the conference will be held at the Natural History Museum in Vienna, Austria and is “Technically Co-Sponsored” by the IEEE Computer Society. You can find more information about the venue here.

CHI PLAY is the international and interdisciplinary conference (by ACM SIGCHI) for researchers and professionals across all areas of play, games and human-computer interaction (HCI). We call this area “player-computer interaction.” The goal of CHI PLAY is to highlight and foster discussion of current high quality (full paper acceptance rate is typically below 30%) research in games and HCI as foundation for the future of digital play. To this end, the conference features streams that blend academic research and games with research papers, interactive play demos, and industry insights. CHI PLAY grew out of the increasing work around games and play emerging from the ACM annual conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) as well as smaller conferences such as Fun and Games and Gamification. CHI PLAY is sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group for Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI).

The IFIP International Conference on Entertainment Computing (ICEC-2019) This is the longest lasting and prime scientific conference series in the area of Entertainment Computing. It brings together practitioners, researchers, artists, designers, and industry on the design, creation, development, use, application and evaluation of digital entertainment content and experience systems. The conference series is cross-disciplinary, and stretches over the domains of computer science, human-computer-interaction, content production, digital games, multimedia, media studies, art, and design. The IFIP Joint Conference on Serious Games (JCSG-2019) Serious games stretches across a broad spectrum of application domains, ranging from game-based learning, simulation and training, through games for health, well-being and behaviour change, marketing and business, to games for industries like defense, tourism and cultural heritage, emergency management, city planning, engineering, and politics, and games to raise awareness and provoke questioning on environmental, moral and social issues.

QUO VADIS ist die zentrale B2B-Veranstaltung als Teil der gamesweekberlin. Sie ist zentral, bequem und perfekt integriert in diese eine Woche voller Gaming-Events, die Wirtschaft, Technologie und Kultur verbinden. Bei diesem europäischen Hotspot für Spieleprofis dürfen wir natürlich nicht fehlen.

Die devcom ist die offizielle Veranstaltung für Spieleentwickler auf der gamescom und Europas jährliche Pflichtveranstaltung, die vom 22. bis 24. August stattfindet. Sie dient auch als perfekte Plattform, auf der man problemlos Branchen- und Medienvertreter aus der ganzen Welt treffen und mit ihnen in Kontakt treten kann.

Der gamescom congress ist Europas führende Konferenz für die Potenziale von Computer- und Videospielen in Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft. Mit jährlich rund 1.000 Teilnehmern und Speakern aus dem In- und Ausland gilt der gamescom congress mittlerweile als Think Tank für Digitalisierung weit über die Games-Branche hinaus. Die Konferenz richtet sich an Kulturschaffende, Pädagogen, Politiker, Wissenschaftler, Journalisten und Wirtschaftsvertreter aller Branchen.

Die ECGBL wurde vor 14 Jahren ins Leben gerufen. Sie wurde bereits in Österreich, Schottland, Spanien, Portugal, Deutschland, Griechenland, Norwegen und Frankreich abgehalten, um nur einige der Länder zu nennen, die sie ausgerichtet haben. Die ECGBL wird in der Regel von Teilnehmern aus über 40 Ländern besucht und zieht eine interessante Kombination aus akademischen Wissenschaftlern, Praktikern, Spieleautoren und Einzelpersonen an, die sich mit verschiedenen Aspekten des spielbasierten Lernens und Serious Games beschäftigen.