This large conference, scheduled in Amsterdam July 25 to 27, features an interesting track on Gaming:

“As gaming becomes more pervasive we are challenged in our job, learning and personal life by the growing
access to virtual spaces and communities that offer opportunities for everyday needs and aesthetic
experiences.
‘Creative Industries’ have a need for design measures that reveal new interaction methods,
scenario metaphors and in-depth co-creation. This conference bring together research and best practices in
creative media design for this new challenging field.
Gaming appeals to our wits, our senses and emotions; game design is provoked to engage our expressive and
experiential capabilities. Theoretical, empirical or semiotic analyses of games may help to explain how.
Effective design needs evaluation methods for exploring new concepts. Game design also needs the testing
of usability, playability, and methods for involving players.
Gaming also appeals to our social needs. We see developing communities and social networks around (online)
games. Recent research indicates that game and sociability design can stimulate social capital in these
communties. New platforms and interfaces for gaming may create new ways of shaping our social world.
Games are becoming a more substantial part of training and education in different sectors. Serious games
need rich, engaging (social) interaction, but still a lot is to be learned on the trade-off between various
design criteria, and the need to blend existing genres into unpreceeded future worlds.”

here is the call for papers, deadline 31 March 2008

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