CGCO Conference

Video games have recently emerged as an art, industry, and modern medium. They’ve gone far beyond simply entertaining audiences to gain significance in areas as vast as culture, communication, media, strategic advertising, business, education, and medicine. Video games are highly versatile: a profitable industry; a powerful, engaging medium; an exciting novel approach to education, medicine, and business; and an effective media strategy for establishing new lifestyle, cultural, and sociological models.
Research on video games has many aspects: psychology, sociology, communication, education, management, economics, business, engineering, art, and medicine, among others. It’s a nascent and rapidly growing field in modern academia.
Most game-related events in the country have involved speeches by experts in the field. However, the University of Isfahan was the first academic institution to establish a holistic conference on game research, with article submissions, a peer-review process, and specialized talks and panels.
Following an agreement between the University of Isfahan Center of Video Games and the National Foundation of Video Games, the first National Conference on “Video Games: Challenges and Opportunities” was held in January 2016 at the University of Isfahan. The conference focused on three aspects of video games: engineering, humanities, and art. It was an opportunity for practitioners and researchers to exchange ideas and experiences and form new relationships. The event served to enhance the foundations of game development, research, and analysis in the country.
This research event needs to stay consistent to become successful and fulfill its role in expanding research on game development. The next step in its evolution is becoming an international event with successful game developers and academics from around the world.
As the first university in the country to invest in video game research, the University of Isfahan established the permanent Secretariat of the Conference on Video Games: Challenges and Opportunities in July 2016, as a part of the University of Isfahan Center of Video Game. The Secretariat aimed to turn the conference into an annual event for the scientific community of game developers and researchers.

 

The First National Conference on Computer Games: Challenges and Opportunities, January 2016,

The Second National Conference on Computer Games: Challenges and Opportunities, January 2017,

The Third National and First International Conference on Computer Games: Challenges and Opportunities, January 2018,

The Fourth International Conference on Computer Games: Challenges and Opportunities, January 2019,

The Fifth International Conference on Computer Games: Challenges and Opportunities, January 2020,

The Sixth International Conference on Computer Games: Challenges and Opportunities, January 2021,