Topics for this conference include "Bridging the Gap with Application of Skills and Content," "Applying Research to Teaching," "Assessing Our Work," and "Keeping Ourselves and Our Students Inspired." The keynote speaker is Michael Welch "a cultural anthropologist and media ecologist who explores the impacts of new media on human interaction."

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"SVW '08 will address the live issue of how virtual worlds will cross boundaries both between the real world and virtual worlds and between virtual worlds. As people spend increasing time in virtual worlds, how will they interoperate between these virtual and real spaces? SVW '08 is the only international event that takes these leading edge issues and addresses them in a compact 2 day event."

One of the keynote speakers for this event is David Wortley from the Serious Games Institute.

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MODSIM World 2008 is the premier international conference and exposition for researchers and practitioners in modeling and simulation and related areas, and for the diffusion of knowledge in modeling, simulation, visualization, and game-based learning.

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The program for this conference has not yet been determined; but the call for papers asks for research in a variety of areas: interfaces, education and training, healthcare, social and human factors, digital storytelling, mobile devices, virtual reality, robots and cyber pets, sound and music.

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"Meaningful Play 2008 is an interdisciplinary academic conference that explores the potential of games to entertain, inform, educate, and persuade in meaningful ways. The conference includes thought-provoking keynotes from leaders in academia and industry, peer-reviewed paper presentations, panel sessions (including academic and industry discussions), innovative workshops, roundtable discussions, and exhibitions of games."

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"The Vienna Games Conference will address issues related to the "Future and Reality of Gaming" (F.R.O.G.) sharing cutting edge research and insights on the future of the games industry, game design, game theory, game culture and education. The conference aims to facilitate the exchange of ideas and current research findings regarding innovative theories, concepts and practice models in an engaging and convivial atmosphere."

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This conference, hosted by the ALA, focuses on research on gaming and libraries, gaming and literacy, and going beyond videogames. Designing games, gaming industry perspectives and how to work with industry, accessibility, and assessment and evaluation of gaming programs may be covered.

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The program for this conference has not yet been determined; however the call for participation is as follows: "The gaming strategies and toy design that incorporate both individual and social activities will offer a significant opportunity for researchers to investigate the long-running research issues of technology enhanced learning such as attention, motivation, and emotion. It will not be a surprise that in the distant future when this emerging research is proved to be fruitful, most technology enhanced learning will incorporate some elements of digital games. Despite the surging interest in this emerging research, there are plenty challenging research issues to be investigated. For example, can one really learn meaningfully and deeply from games? Will there be new theories that explain phenomena of learning with fun? What constitute game pedagogies? How this genre of technology enhanced learning can be adopted to formal and informal learning settings? What are the possible dark sides of game and toyed education and how to prevent them? The Second IEEE International Conference on Digital Games and Intelligent Toys Based Education (DIGITEL 2008) provides a forum for researchers various disciplines and practitioners to share and exchange of this emerging research area."

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"The conference has four broad themes, listed below. Papers, workshops, symposiums, posters and in-world events submitted to these themes should draw on existing research or planned programmes of inquiry. The conference organisers are keen to construct a programme that features diverse and innovative research approaches to learning and teaching in virtual worlds. Given the emerging practice associated with virtual worlds, the conference committee are also keen to receive papers reporting on the experience of learning and teaching using virtual worlds that relate practice and outcomes to literature and research in this area. We anticipate that submissions will reflect a range of research methods and will examine issues such as rigour, methods of sampling, relationships between researchers and researched, and the ethics and politics of the research process."

Themes:

• Crossing boundaries and making connections
• Opportunities and challenges of virtual worlds for learning and teaching
• Approaches to research
• Implementing and sustaining innovation

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"Living Game Worlds IV will focus on the theme of networked play and engage dialogues on the rapidly growing domain of multiplayer games and virtual worlds, including online networked entertainment as well as pervasive, mobile and tangible gaming. The symposium will explore various aspects of networked play from an historical, cultural, technological and design perspective, as well as current and future trends such as user-created content and the rising use of virtual worlds in the workplace."

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"The ie08 conference offers you the theme of resonating experiences in order to encourage you to look beyond the immediate much traveled terrain of engagement and immersion and into the kinds of futures of interactive entertainment where we design for experience which not only calls upon the real but which we also expect to have resonance beyond the instance of the interaction." The call for papers asks for research in the areas of e-learning, the roles of games in pedagogy, education and training technologies, mobile technologies, cultural and media studies of games, digital storytelling, sound and music.

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This conference "aims to bring together leading researchers and practitioners from both academia and industry to discuss recent advances and explore future directions in this field." These include learning in games, board and card games, economic and mathematical games, imperfect information and non-deterministic games, console and video games, player satisfaction in games, games for mobile or digital platforms, games involving physical simulation, and more.

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"The first International Conference in Games and Virtual Worlds for Serious Applications 2009(technical co-sponsorship with the IEEE Computer Society pending) aims to meet the significant challenges of the cross-disciplinary community that work around these serious application areas by bringing the community together to share case studies of practice, to present new frameworks, methodologies and theories and to begin the process of developing shared cross-disciplinary outputs. In order to achieve this main aim the conference will pioneer new methods for bringing together and supporting communities of practice emerging in themed areas beyond the duration of the conference. Using the conference as an ignition to support a wider aspiration to form and sustain a community of practice around the field. To achieve this, the team at the SGI will use innovative software called Intronetworks, which allows conference participants to create their own profile allowing them to identify like-minded and complementary skilled colleagues."

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"The FaVE conference seeks to address this deficit [of research on virtual environments] and provide a venue to research related to the many facets of persistent virtual environments. We therefore welcome diverse contributions covering the entire range of subjects around the vision of present and future persistent virtual environments. This includes both the underlying technology and the resulting, emergent aspects. As such, FaVE is an interdisciplinary academic conference connecting lawyers, engineers, and social scientists."

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