Call For Papers


VS-Games 2013, the fifth outing of the International Conference on Games and Virtual Worlds for Serious Applications will be hosted at Bournemouth University, UK between the 11th and the 13th of September 2013. With the conference organized in previous years at locations such as Coventry (UK), Braga (Portugal), Athens (Greece) and Genoa (Italy), it will take place, for 2013, at the state of the art Kimmeridge House building of Bournemouth University, situated at the main Talbot campus of the institution.

The development and deployment of games with a purpose beyond entertainment and with considerable connotations with more serious aims is an exciting area with immense academic but also commercial potential. This potential presents both immediate opportunities but also numerous significant challenges to the interested parties involved, as a result of the relatively recent emergence and popularity of the medium. The VS Games 2013 conference aims to address this variety of relevant contemporary challenges that the increasingly cross-disciplinary communities involved in serious games are currently facing. This will be achieved by, amongst other ways, the comprehensive dissemination of successful case studies and development practices, the sharing of theories, conceptual frameworks and methodologies and, finally, the discussion of evaluation approaches and their resulting studies.

For VS Games 2013 we are therefore seeking contributions from researchers, developers from the industry, practitioners and decision-makers which aim to advance the state of the art in all of the technologies related to serious games. The following listed topics are particularly encouraged, though it should be mentioned that they are not the only ones of interest to VS Games 2013 and that the list below is not exhaustive by any means:

• Game design
• Virtual environments
• Game-based learning methodologies
• Mixed and augmented reality
• Computer graphics
• Gamification
• Case studies/user studies for serious games and virtual worlds
• Mobile gaming
• Interactive storytelling
• Application areas
• AI for serious games
• Educational/learning theories and their application
• Visualization
• Pervasive gaming
• Human-computer interaction
• User modeling
• Alternate reality
• Simulation
• Platforms and tools

The following are the dates of submission for the different tracks of the VS Games 2013 conference:

• Full Papers (8 pages): 25th March 2013 extended to 22nd of April 2013
• Short Papers (4 pages): 25th March 2013 extended to 22nd of April 2013
• Poster Papers (2 pages): 25th March 2013 extended to 22nd of April 2013
• Call for Workshops (2 pages): 25th March 2013 extended to 22nd of April 2013

These are the notification dates for all the different tracks of the VS Games 2013 conference, all authors will be receiving the review outcomes by then:

Full Papers: 5th of June 2013
Short Papers: 5th of June 2013
Poster Papers: 5th of June 2013
Workshops: 5th of June 2013

These are the camera-ready dates for the VS Games 2013 conference, all authors need to follow instructions sent to them by email to submit the final version of their paper, they also need to complete the registration payment by this date. This is very important in order to ensure that their paper is included in the conference proceedings and in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library.

• Full Papers: 25th of June 2013
• Short Papers: 25th of June 2013
• Poster Papers: 25th of June 2013

The authors of the best papers will be invited to write an extended version for inclusion in the Elsevier Entertainment Computing journal (subject to additional review) and IGI Global's International Journal of Game-Based Learning. Authors of selected technical articles with a focus on computer graphics will be invited to submit extended versions of their works to be considered for publication in Elsevier's Computers and Graphics Journal. All accepted VS Games 2013 papers, full, short and posters, plus workshop ones, will be included in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library after the completion of the event. The conference is technically co-sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society.