Write with us

There are currently four things you can publish with us:

• Short Viewpoints. Opinion pieces from established and new voices in games and playable media. These are edited and curated by our Senior Associate Editors –just email us if you have an idea. They are published on this website and in the ACM Digital Library.
• Longer Case Studies. Written accounts of how you solved a game design, development, research, or education problem in practice. These undergo academic peer review and are published both in the ACM Digital Library and on this website. Check our author guidelines about how to write and submit them.
• Low Friction Technical Blogs. For those who prefer sharing details on a novel technique, trick or result quickly, our technical blogs provide a fast path to open access publishing in web form on the ACM Games site. If you have a new blog, thread, technical presentation in the works, some notes on paper, or even an existing recent post to relay to your wider ACM Games community, email us right away.
• Other longer Research Articles, including tutorials, reviews, or datasets (see our article types). These undergo academic peer review and are published in the ACM Digital Library, with a short news article summarizing their findings appearing on this website. Again, check our author guidelines about how to write and submit them.
• News articles appearing on this website, such as Downloads. Summaries about highlights from a recent conference. If you want to write these, get in touch with our Editors-in-Chief

For community groups sharing a collection of articles on a special topic, we also provide the Special Issue option. Too often, submitting papers for publication is daunting or a source of uncertainty. So, if you have an idea for writing something but are unsure how to proceed, just e-mail Clarrisa Nemeth, and she’ll point you to the right place.

Are you an academic author already familiar with peer-reviewed publishing? Go straight to our author guidelines for all detail questions on how to prepare your submission. You can then submit your ready manuscript through our ManuscriptCentral portal.

Our litmus test for a good contribution to our journal is: Does this advance how we understand, make, or teach games and playable media? We don’t limit ourselves to any topic, but we especially invite submissions on the following topics, which are covered by Associate Editors in our Editorial Board:

• AI and Data: AI, data science, and visual analytics in games and playable media
• Alternative Play: Novel, critical, alternative, and boundary-crossing phenomena and interventions in games and playable media
• Applied Gaming: Serious games, gamification, and game- and play-based interventions in education, health, and other domains
• Audiences and Communities: Community management, content moderation, community health and safety, Esports, streaming, and players as producers
• Audio and Music: Music and sound design and technology for games and playable media
• Business and Production: Business, marketing, monetization models, production processes, structures, workflows and life cycles for games and playable media, including analyses of industry shifts, production cultures, and working conditions
• Computing: Architectures, engines, operations, and tools for game and playable media development
• Design: Principles, methods, and practices of designing games and playful experiences
• Education: Teaching and learning game and playable media design, development, research and scholarship
• Ethics, Politics, Society: Ethical, political, and societal issues and impacts of games and playable media, their industries and communities
• Game User Research: Understanding, studying, and modeling players, their experience and behavior
• Graphics: Graphics algorithms, techniques, rendering and pipelines for games and playable media
• Hardware and haptics: Computing devices, controllers, sensors, actuators, peripherals, and haptics for games and playable media
• Immersive Experiences: Embodied, extended (AR/XR/VR), persistent and shared realities in games
• Inclusive Gaming: Accessibility, localization, culturalization, and inclusion and diversity, making games and playable media welcoming for all
• Narrative: Narrative design and technology for games and playable media
• Simulation: Games physics and physical authoring in games
• Visual Arts: Visual design and art direction for games and playable media.