CoGames 2014 - Second International Workshop on Collaboration and Gaming (CoGames 2014)

The video game industry has grown from being a small industry that produces products mostly for young boys to a huge industry targeting the whole population. The development of video games is by definition a multi disciplinary process involving several professions, ranging from artists to engineers. The AAA game titles produced today require rather large teams with a high level of competence (technology, programming, networks, architecture, etc.), creativity and skills. Compared to traditional software development, game development is characterized by rapid changes of hardware, high performance requirements, and software requirements that are unstable and hard to predict. Video games are also used for other purposes than pure entertainment, e.g., for education, training, exercising, and simulation. In addition, game developers are focusing more and more on games where players must collaborate to achieve goals in the game. Collaborative games introduce challenges for the game developers to handle technical issues, performance issues, network issues, distributed environments, sharing of information, and heterogeneous networks and devices. Further, collaborative games open new areas and applications for games to be used for new purposes that can benefit from more than just being fun. As players expect that games can be played anywhere, the integration of mobile gaming, hand-held and online-gaming on PDAs, smartphones, consoles and PCs is becoming ever more important. This integration introduces new challenges and leads for new opportunities.
This Workshop on Collaboration and Gaming - to be held as part of the 2014 International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems (CTS 2014) - will focus on the area of collaboration and gaming, with emphasis on new game concepts, new technologies, technology evaluations, new usage areas of collaborative games, and games prototypes. Special attention is dedicated to serious games, in particular for learning. The aim is to have a dedicated track that fosters closer interactions among researchers, industry and users communities, providing an excellent opportunity for them to meet and discuss their ideas. We invite original contributions from researchers in academia and computer industry on these emerging and important areas of information technology. Papers should contribute to an advancement over the state of the art, preferentially providing empirical results from new tools/systems and/or user studies.
CoGames Topics of Interest include (but are not limited to):
Collaborative games, game technology and game frameworks
Collaborative serious games
Platforms for collaborative games
Usability of collaborative games
Mobile collaborative games and game frameworks
Quality of service in collaborative games
Online collaborative games
Computational and artificial intelligence to support collaborative gaming
User profiling and performance assessment in collaborative games
Modelling of users and interactions
Learning and Adaptation in collaborative games
Reliability and availability in collaborative games
Real-time issues (e.g., networking, computation) in collaborative games
Integration and interoperability in collaborative games
Pervasive/ubiquitous collaborative games
New software engineering tools and methods for designing collaborative games
Requirement engineering of collaborative games
Design and software architecture of collaborative games
Data mining in collaborative games
Database support for collaborative games
Testing and prototyping of collaborative games
Context-aware gaming
Privacy and Security in collaborative games
Repository and content management of collaborative games
Tools (authoring, assessment, etc.) and sub-systems for collaborative games
Human-Computer Interaction (devices, methodologies and tools) to support collaboration
Serious games aimed at supporting collaboration
Animation and Virtual Reality in game design
Learning and Adaptation in Collaborative Games
Human, social and psychological aspects of games
Business modelling and economic aspects of collaborative games