Changelog

A log of changes to how the Technical Games Research institution rankings and researcher list are computed/maintained.

July 2025

• Updated for 2025. I missed the 2024 update; sorry!
• There are now 2636 researchers at 858 institutions included in the list.
• The list of notable moves has been moved (as it were) from here to its own page.
• Bolding and ordering of individual authors is now based on raw count of papers they (co-)authored, instead of using fractional credit for multi-author papers. I think this provides a better view of who is "very active" in these venues, in particular boosting visibility of people who write a lot of papers with student co-authors. However, for the majority of people the two metrics produce similar results. The institution ranking formula is unchanged and still uses fractional paper-shares.
• Special thanks once more to Max Kreminski and Matthew Guzdial for sending in a bunch of information about people who have moved.

July 2023

• Updated for 2023.
• There are now 2658 researchers at 860 institutions included in the list.
• DBLP parsing code update, to handle recent CHI Play proceedings published as a special issue of Proceedings of the ACM on HCI.
• Special thanks to Max Kreminski and Matthew Guzdial for sending in a bunch of information about people who have moved.
• Merged DeepMind into the Google affiliation, following the recent merger of Google's AI groups under the Google DeepMind brand.

May 2022

• An update for 2022! All 2021 conference and journal issues appear to be indexed by DBLP and included. Update: CHI Play now publishes some of its papers as a journal special issue instead of as conference proceedings, which my current code doesn't include. Will look into fixing this for the next update.
• Dropped publications from 2011 (now more than 10 years old).
• Numerous affiliation updates and additions. Now covering 2521 researchers at 830 institutions.
• Split Google DeepMind and Google into separate institutions. Though Google owns DeepMind, they seem to be run sufficiently separately to be somewhat like different campuses of the same university system (though the analogy is imperfect).

April 2021

• Updated DBLP dump. Most 2020 conferences and journal issues are now included, except AIIDE 2020, which doesn't seem to be indexed yet by DBLP.
• Dropped publications from 2010 (now more than 10 years old).
• Added two new venues: the ICGA Journal (only papers of type "Research Article"), and the ACM Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games (I3D).
• The usual batch of affiliation updates and additions. The new total is 2359 researchers at 763 institutions.

January 2020

• Updated DBLP dump; all 2019 conferences and journal issues should now be included.
• Dropped publications from 2009 (now more than 10 years old).
• Reduced the threshold for displaying per-institution "top venues" on the main page, so there are now more of them listed.
• The usual batch of affiliation updates and additions. The new total is 2140 researchers at 706 institutions.

September 2019

• Updated DBLP dump. This adds some journal issues, but no 2019 conference proceedings yet.
• Another batch of affiliation updates and additions. The new total is 2026 researchers at 679 institutions.

February 2019

• Updated DBLP dump; all 2018 conferences and journals should now be included.
• Dropped publications from 2008 (now more than 10 years old).
• Moderate number of affiliation updates and additions, bringing the total up to 1912 researchers at 637 institutions.

November 2018

• Updated DBLP dump. This adds the 2018 proceedings of AIIDE, CHI Play, CIG, FDG, and ICEC, plus some journal issues.
• Hundreds of affiliation corrections, updates, and additions. The big list now includes 1852 researchers at 618 institutions, up from 1338 researchers at 490 institutions.
• Added a list of authors still missing affiliations; any information on them is welcome.
• People who have moved to companies that don't do game-related research (e.g. moved to the finance sector) are now classified under Independent/Other.
• Removed DiGRA. Nothing wrong with the conference, but: 1) it appears to have a quite small percentage of technical papers, and 2) including it resulted in a strangely chosen subset of people and institutions from game studies being highlighted here — strange because, since I don't include any game-studies journals, other equally active researchers weren't included. Since I don't attempt to cover game studies properly, it seems better to omit DiGRA too. (For the record, this change hurts my own institution.)
• ACE 2018 imploded spectacularly, so removed ACE going forward (papers up to 2017 are still included).
• Minor cleanup to remove some non-papers that DBLP had indexed (lists of organizers, news updates from the journal editor, etc.).

March 2018

• Initial version.