SGAMES 2015 - 5th International Conference on Serious Games, Interaction and Simulation

Games are structured contexts where players have clear objectives, with victory as end goal. In a game, players must overcome challenges and face opponents (real or game characters) but always respecting a clearly-defined set of rules. Failure to follow these rules implies a punishment or penalty. Games can involve one player acting alone, two or more players acting cooperatively, or players or teams of players competing between themselves. Games can offer an incredibly immersive and engaging environment where users ‘learn by doing’ and from their own mistakes in a controlled environment that is able also to improve teamwork, social skills, leadership and collaboration.
Serious Games focus on the design, development, use and application of games for purposes other than entertainment. Education and training represent the main areas of application of Serious Games but they have been used, with success, for health, research, emergency planning, advertisement and military purposes. The most striking effect in the use of Serious Games is an increased motivation and engagement. As such, Serious Games require specific design, recreating real scenarios through interactive and/or immersive environments.
However, in spite of the existing evidence of success, there is still a limited use of Serious Games. This has mainly to do with social concerns and stereotypes about the relation of games and serious purposes. Other issues relate to physical and cost barriers, hardware and license cost, access (for online games), maintenance and support. But this limited use is also related to the lack of extended evidence of effective application.
The International Conference on Serious Games, Interaction and Simulation is a multidisciplinary approach to the presentation of research, theory, application, practice and validation in the field of Serious Games for any level and any area. As such it will cover areas like cognition, psychology, technology-enhanced education, evaluation and assessment, multimedia and information technology. SGames 2015 is interested in new scientific approaches and results from experiments and real-life applications.
HIGHLIGHTS
The event is endorsed by the European Alliance for Innovation, a leading community-based organisation devoted to the advancement of innovation in the field of ICT.
SGames 2015 will be collocated with the International Conference on e-Learning e-Education and Online Training, eLEOT 2015.
Selected papers, particularly those nominated for the Best Paper competition, will be automatically considered for publication in the EAI Endorsed Transactions on Serious Games.
TOPICS
We invite submissions that deal with issues including, but not limited to:
Technology, tools and systems for Serious Games
Game platforms, toolkits, frameworks, engines, APIs and libraries
Game interfaces (input devices, speech, gestures)
Content generation tools
Immersive Environments, virtual environments, virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality use for Serious Games
Games for education and training
Games for emergency and disaster management, crowd simulation, crime scene investigation
Games for health, medical training, therapy
Games and art
Serious Games for other purposes
Games for science and research
Game platforms
Online, Multi-user games
Games for mobile, handheld, and connected systems
Game Security and Networking
Future Issues of Serious Games
Accessibility and inclusive design for Serious Games
Serious games design
Gaming communities, games and society
Evaluation of Serious Games