About us

ACM Games: Research and Practice (GAMES) publishes major contributions that advance how we understand, make, and teach games and playable media. A quarterly peer-reviewed journal published jointly by non-for-profit publishers ACM and ETC Press, it offers a lighthouse for games research – a central reference point that defines the state of the art on games and playable media, bridging academic research and industry practice.

Inclusive in community, discipline, method, and game form, we publish major reviews, tutorials, and research articles, alongside case studies, opinions, and dialogues on new developments that will change games. We embrace open science and scholarship and actively champion new and underrepresented voices in games and playable media.

Games: Research and Practice is edited by co-Editors-in-Chief Sebastian Deterding (Professor at Imperial College London) and Kenny Mitchell (Technical Director Rendering, Roblox, and Professor at Edinburgh Napier University), together with Senior Associate Editors Dr. Rachel Kowert (Research Director at Take This) and Brad King (Editorial Director of ETC Press). They are supported by a volunteer Editorial Board of more than 70 diverse senior researchers and industry leaders across the globe.

We are jointly published by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and ETC Press. The ACM brings together computing educators, researchers, and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources, and address the field’s challenges. As the world’s largest computing society with more than 100,000 members, ACM strengthens the profession’s collective voice through strong leadership, promotion of the highest standards, and recognition of technical excellence. The ACM hosts more than 220 of the leading conferences and journals in computing, including SIGGRAPH, CHI, CHI PLAY, MIG, I3D, Communications of the ACM, and Computing Surveys.

Carnegie Mellon University’s ETC Press is an open-access, academic press that publishes journals, proceedings, trade, and textbooks that explore the intersection of entertainment technology and society. The ETC Press takes an experimental approach to publishing, using emerging technologies to produce more than 150 projects using a variety of formats, from glossy, print hardback books to interactive, mobile books, including journals like Analog Game Studies, Well-Played, and the Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association.

In the last decades, games and research on them have experienced a “Gambrian Explosion”. More and more different people make and play more and more different games (and not-quite-games) than ever before. Mobile games, microtransactions, and markets in the ‘Global South’ have become new centres of gravity. Digital games are converging with analog games and not-games of all kinds into a wide new field of playable media. Games research has likewise exploded in volume, but also fragmented into disciplinary specialisms. All this makes it hard to get oriented about the state of the art on any given games topic.

In response, Games: Research and Practice wants to offer a new lighthouse publication for games and playable media. To achieve this, we have set ourselves five principles, outlined in our charter:

To provide a home for games and playable media, we welcome work from any disciplinary background and community, provided it is well-communicated, rigorous by its own standards, and advances how we understand, make, or teach games and playable media.

To bridge research and practice, we offer formats that speak to academic and industry authors and readers, and all our material is co-edited and reviewed by both researchers and practitioners, with clear criteria that ensure work is both practically useful and grounded in robust evidence and argument.

To champion diversity and inclusion, we feature a diverse editorial board, a scope that invites work from all gaming communities, and actively solicit and support underrepresented voices.

To curate the state of the art, we actively invite reviews and tutorials by leading experts, set a high quality bar for submissions, and embrace open science and scholarship practices.

To reach wide across communities, we feature accessible and shareable formats like opinion pieces and short news summaries of major articles on this website, and make as much of our content as freely available as possible.

ACM Games: Research and Practice gratefully acknowledges the following organizations for their support and sponsorship. If your organization would like to sponsor our Games community, access, and in-person activities, please contact Kenny Mitchell.