Best Paper Awards

EARLY CAREER AWARDS: 

Games Pedagogy & Games Beyond Entertainment
Wenjun Liu, Charlie Hargood, Wen Tang and Vedad Hulusic. Evaluating the Impact of User and Learning Experience in Three Cultural Heritage VR Applications 

Game Analytics & Visualisation & Game Criticism and Analysis
Huajing Pan. “Between Illusion and Reality: A Philosophical Reflection on the Fantasy Created by Video Games” 

Technical Game Development & Game AI
Analysis of Robustness of a Large Game Corpus" by Bazzaz and Cooper 

Game Design
Prabhav Bhatnagar, Markus Laattala, Supriya Dutta, Tom Cole and Perttu Hämäläinen. Beyond Satisfaction: Game Feel Design for Emotionally Impactful Experiences 

HONORABLE MENTIONS: 

Games Pedagogy & Games Beyond Entertainment
Britton Horn. LEGO Prototyping in an Introductory Game Development Course
Dimitra Petousi, Akrivi Katifori, Pantelis Sakellariadis, Katerina Servi, Lori Kougioumtzian, Georgia Koutiva, Maria Roussou and Yannis Ioannidis. The Intersection of Play and History: Integrating Historical Content in Tabletop Role-Playing Games for Education 

Game Analytics & Visualisation & Game Criticism and Analysis
Pablo Gutiérrez-Sánchez, Diego Pérez-Liébana and Raluca D Gaina. Explaining and Clustering Playtraces Using Temporal Logics 

Technical Game Development & Game AI
Ross Mawhorter and Adam M. Smith. Analytic Procgen with Composable Design Space Expressions
Qianwen Lyu, David Millard and Nicholas Gibbins. Stories from the Bottom Up: Emergent Narratives with Composable Story Sifting Patterns 

Game Design
Hamza Bashandy. A Design Toolkit of Ludic Contentious Politics: The case of Protest in Videogames
Erin J.K. Truesdell. "Pull the Lever, Kronk!": Mapping Controller Affordances to Collaborative Sense-Making in Play 

BEST PAPER AWARDS: 

Games Pedagogy & Games Beyond Entertainment
Qiao Zhang, Glen Smith, Ziyu Li, Yuxuan Dong, Erik Harpstead and Christopher Maclellan. Dice Adventure: An Asymmetrical Collaborative Game for Exploring the Hybrid Teaming Effects 

Game Analytics & Visualisation & Game Criticism and Analysis
Ps Berge. “Anti-Games, Fantasy Consoles, and the Rise of Speculative Game Development on Itch.io” 

Technical Game Development & Game AI
Lasantha Senanayake and Stephen Ware. Language Models as Narrative Planning Heuristics 

Game Design
Dave Hawey. Understanding Game Art Practice Beyond Technical Expertise: A Qualitative Study