Student Game Competition is in-person only.
Important Dates
All times are in Anywhere on Earth (AoE) time zone. When the deadline is day D, the last time to submit is when D ends AoE. Check your local time in AoE.
- Submission deadline: Thursday, January 23, 2025
- Notification: Thursday, February 20, 2025
- e-rights completion deadline: Thursday, February 27, 2025
- Publication-ready deadline: Thursday, March 6, 2025
- TAPS Closes: Thursday, March 13, 2025
Submission Details
- Online submission: PCS Submission System
- Template: ACM Master Article Submission Templates (single column)
- Submission length: Up to 5 pages long (excluding references).
- Game demonstration video.
- Proof of student status.
- Student(s) must be currently enrolled in a university or college at the time of the initial submission deadline. For further details see the Eligibility and Guidelines section below.
- List of up to 2 supervisors/advisors with affiliation
- The extended abstract and video submission must meet accessibility requirements. See details in the Preparing Your Student Game Competition Submission section below.
- Submissions are not anonymous and should include all author names, affiliations, and contact information.
Selection Process
Message from the Student Game Competition Chairs
The Student Game Competition (SGC) is a forum for undergraduate and graduate students to showcase their game design and game development, and improve their communication skills while competing for prizes at CHI 2025. The competition provides the opportunity to showcase Innovative Interfaces, and Transformative & Transgressive Play (more details further below).
The Student Game Competition has the following goals:
- to give undergraduate and graduate students the opportunity to share their game ideas and insights at CHI in a special forum that provides visibility for their work
- to recognize and reward outstanding game design
- for students to receive feedback about their game design and presentation, from a panel of distinguished judges from industry and academia
- to give students the opportunity to meet with and interact with CHI attendees to share ideas, gain new insights, and understand possible practical applications
- to give students an opportunity to sharpen their communication skills
ACM’s Publication Policies
It is critical that authors review ACM’s publications policies. Please read this separate page for them.
Eligibility and Guidelines
- Student(s) must be currently enrolled in a university or college at the time of the initial submission deadline.
- If the submission is selected, the designated presenter must have an active ACM student membership and register to attend the CHI 2025 conference.
Funding
Students can apply for a Gary Marsden Travel Award, independently of submitting to the Student Research Competition. Please carefully read the page linked above because some of the deadlines for this travel award may occur before the submission deadline of SGC.
Metadata Integrity
All submission metadata, including required fields in PCS like author names, affiliations, and order, must be complete and correct by the submission deadline. This information is crucial to the integrity of the review process and author representation. The submission deadline is a hard deadline for listing all author names; there are no exceptions. Changes to the order of authors are allowed only during the Publication-Ready submission phase. Minor changes to the title and abstract are permitted during the Publication-Ready submission phase.
Policy on Use of Large Language Models
Text generated from a large-scale language model (LLM), such as ChatGPT, must be clearly marked where such tools are used for purposes beyond editing the author’s own text. Please carefully review the April 2023 ACM Policy on Authorship before you use these tools. The SIGCHI blog post describes approaches to acknowledging the use of such tools and we refer to it for guidance. Note that the LaTeX template will default to hiding the Acknowledgements section while in review mode – please make sure that any LLM disclosure is available in your submitted version. While we do not anticipate using tools on a large scale to detect LLM-generated text, we will investigate submissions brought to our attention and desk reject papers where LLM use is not clearly marked.
Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects
Any research in submitted manuscripts that involves human subjects must go through the appropriate ethics review requirements that apply to the authors’ research environment. As research environments vary considerably with regards to their requirements, authors are asked to submit a short note to reviewers that provides this context. Please also see the 2021 ACM Publications policy on research involving humans before submitting.
Accessibility
Accessible submissions are essential for reviewers and are good practice. Authors are expected to follow SIGCHI’s Guide to an Accessible Submission. If you have any questions or concerns about creating accessible submissions, please contact the Accessibility Chairs at accessibility@chi2025.acm.org early in the writing process (the closer to the deadline, the less time the team will have to respond to individual requests).
Student Game Competition Submission
A submission to the Student Game Competition should present a recently developed student game project in any of the topic areas covered by CHI. Submissions should be original work that is neither in submission elsewhere nor already published in CHI or another conference or journal.
We invite submissions to the categories Innovation Interface and Transformation & Transgressive Play. Both categories will be judged individually.
- Innovative Interfaces invites games that push the boundaries of game design and game interface practice. For example by using gesture input, multi-touch, multi-screen or haptics; voice input; use of sensors such as breathing or heart rate; augmented reality games, mixed reality games, novel use of game AI and machine learning techniques; or explore novel, thought-provoking forms of interaction.
Games submitted to this category must include a section labeled “Interface Innovation” that clearly describes the novelty of the game and positions the within prior work from the CHI community at large, e.g., CHI, CHI PLAY, DIS, IMX, MM. - Transformative & Transgressive Play aims to extend the boundaries of play. We invite independent games, art games, and political games as well as gamified/playbourised systems that explore the role of play in non-gaming settings. For example, educational games, games for sustainability, games for health, safety, or urban planning, and other economic, cultural, and societal sectors. Games submitted to this category create innovative gameplay for non-gaming settings, and critically reflect on their role in an applied context.
Games submitted to this category must include a section labeled “Critical Reflection” that describes what challenges the game addresses and considers both the potential to help and/or cause harm.
We reserve the right to reject the submission should the respective sections not be included.
Please note that it is not mandatory to submit a completely playable game. We encourage submissions of innovative ideas, speculative/provocative game designs, and early prototypes. Submission of speculative and early prototypes should provide justification for the readiness level of their work. Speculative submissions require the simulation, e.g., following a Wizard-of-Oz approach, to demonstrate gameplay. The materials should enable the committee to clearly understand how the game is played.
Preparing Your Student Game Competition Submission
Student Game Competition submissions must be submitted via the PCS submission system by the deadline. The submission must have the following four components, and meet the accessibility requirements at CHI. If you have any questions or concerns about creating accessible submissions, please contact the Accessibility Chairs at accessibility@chi2025.acm.org.
To participate in the Student Game Competition, submit an extended abstract and a game demonstration video to the Student Game Competition category via the Precision conference submission system. For the extended abstract submission, it is possible to list supervisors as co-authors. However, supervisors may not present the game at the conference. At least one of the student authors must present the game to the jury during the conference.
The submission must be a maximum length of 5 pages. References are not included in this page limit. Please include:
- An overview of the game, including motivation, background, description of the game and the expected experience, with possibly screenshots/images of play.
- A section on Interface Innovation or Critical Reflection (see above).
- Acknowledgement of any assistance drawn from outside the student team (e.g., advisors, domain experts, existing solutions, users)
- The initial submission for this venue is *not* anonymized. Please include the name of the author(s) and the acknowledgment section as they will appear in the camera-ready version of the abstract.
The game demonstration video should show a maximum of 4-minutes of gameplay video displaying both the screen (if applicable) and the player interacting with the game. For speculative submissions, a Wizard-of-Oz implementation of the game including a written justification can also be submitted. Guidelines for creating video submissions can be found in the Technical Requirements and Guidelines for Videos at CHI.
Submit proof of student status: submit a single file confirming the status of each student on the team written in English.
- This can be a proof of school affiliation or a note signed by your academic supervisor or faculty member in the same institution verifying all of the following information:
- Academic affiliation
- Whether you were an undergraduate or a graduate student when the work was done
- Student status at the time of the initial submission (i.e., as of January 2025)
- List of supervisors/advisors with affiliation, if relevant
- Transcripts or scanned IDs will not be accepted as proof.
For examples of extended abstracts, we recommend checking accepted submissions from previous years. You can find them in the past CHI proceedings on the ACM Digital Library or on SIGCHI.org (open access). Select “Extended Abstract” and look for “Student Game Competition” session. Videos of finalist submissions can be found here: 2021, 2022, and 2023.
Selection Process
Submissions will be evaluated by a minimum of three reviewers in a two-stage process.
In stage one, all submissions will be reviewed and the finalists in each category will be invited to attend CHI 2025.
Scale for stage one:
- Motivation: 5 points
- Background and related work: 5 points
- Game design: 10 points
- Argumentation for player experience: 10 points
- Innovation/Critical Reflection: 10 points
- Oral presentation: 5 points
- Visual presentation: 5 points
In stage two, the finalists are expected to send at least one team member to attend the conference, present their work, and take part in the final round and the award ceremony. During a public session at CHI 2025, students will have the opportunity to present their work to a panel of judges (5 minutes) and engage in a brief conversation about their work (5 minutes).
The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of the conference. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.
There is no strict limit on team size. However, team size will be taken into consideration in the competition. Larger teams will be expected to present a more ambitious project. There is no limit to the number of teams that may compete from any given university or organization. However, one student cannot be part of multiple teams.
Confidentiality of submissions is maintained during the review process. All rejected submissions will be kept confidential in perpetuity. All submitted materials for accepted submissions will be kept confidential until the start of the conference or the release of conference abstracts in the ACM Digital Library, with the exception of title and author information which will be published on the website prior to the conference. Submissions should not contain sensitive, private, or proprietary information that cannot be disclosed at publication time.
Upon Acceptance of Your Submission
Student Game Competition abstracts will be archived in the ACM Digital Library. Publishing in the Student Research Competition will not constrain future submissions (e.g., as a conference paper or a journal article). Your abstract is not considered to be a prior publication of the work for the purposes of a future conference or journal publication.
Authors of all accepted submissions will receive instructions on how to submit the publication-ready copy of their abstract. Deadlines and instructions regarding publication-ready submissions are emailed to accepted authors. This email will also contain instructions on requesting accessibility accommodations. If the authors are unable to meet these requirements by the Publication-Ready deadline, the venue chairs will be notified and may be required to remove the paper from the program.
The publication-ready version has to follow the LaTeX and Word templates from ACM. Should you need technical assistance, please direct your technical query to: publications@chi2025.acm.org.
At the Conference
Accepted authors must participate in the competition in-person. Accordingly, a presenting author must register to the conference.
The team will present their work and take part in the second stage of the competition and the award ceremony. During a public session at CHI 2025, students will have the opportunity to present their work to a panel of judges (5 minutes) and engage in a brief conversation about their work (5 minutes). At least one student author must present their work and have the conversations with judges.
In addition to the scale used in stage one, the scale for evaluating the conference presentation of the research includes:
- Knowledge of innovation/critical area: 15 points
- Perceived player experience: 10 points
- Presentation: 10 points
All finalists will receive a Certificate of Recognition. The winning entry in each of the two categories will be recognized at the closing plenary session of the CHI 2025 conference. All teams will be mentioned on the conference website.
You may be given an opportunity to present your games in a demonstration format, though the details will be provided later (note that there is also a possibility that the demonstrations may not occur due to space limitations). This will be optional but encouraged to increase exposure for your game.
In-person attendance
The CHI 2025 Student Game Competition relies on in-person attendance so that all students can benefit most from the experience. Accepted submissions are expected to attend CHI 2025 to participate in the Student Game Competition. If you have an exceptional circumstance which prevents your in-person attendance, please contact the Chairs.
Competition Judges
A distinguished panel of judges from across the CHI community will be convened to discuss finalists’ presentations and select the winner.
After the Conference
Accepted Student Game Competition abstracts will be distributed in the CHI Conference Extended Abstracts. They will be placed in the ACM Digital Library, where they will remain accessible to thousands of researchers and practitioners worldwide.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I submit to the Student Game Competition and submit the same work in parallel with other tracks (e.g., Late-breaking work)?
For each work, authors must choose only one track and submit their submissions to a single track. Any concurrent submissions must be declared and should follow ACM policies on Redundant Publication or Self-Plagiarism. Any duplicate submissions across tracks will be rejected.
Can high school students submit to Student Game Competition?
Unfortunately, no. The CHI Student Game Competition limits participation to undergraduate and graduate students.
Can I reuse the content of my Student Game Competition paper in my future paper?
The copyright of the content in the Extended Abstracts is typically retained by the authors, not assigned to the ACM. Thus, the authors may reuse their content.
Suppose the authors plan to reuse the content as a part of their future paper. In that case, we recommend reaching out to the paper chairs or editors of the target venue to clarify the re-publishability early on. Their decision will depend on the policies at the time of your future submission. For the CHI conferences, relevant policies are the ACM policies on Prior Publication and Simultaneous Submissions, Guidelines and Criteria for Evaluation of Submissions for ACM Publications, and Policy on Plagiarism, Misrepresentation, and Falsification.
According to these policies, as of 2025, material published in a semi-archival, widely disseminated publication, such as the CHI Extended Abstracts, should not be republished unless the work has been “significantly” revised. A significant revision would contain at least 25% unpublished material and amplify or clarify the original material. These are subjective measures left to the interpretation of the reviewers and committee members – authors are wise to revise well beyond the Policy guidelines. Whenever submitting material that has partially appeared in a widely disseminated publication, it is good practice to cite the prior publication and explicitly state the differences between the new and prior material.
Contact Us
Student Game Competition Chairs
Simone Kriglstein, Julian Frommel
