Institutions Active in Technical Games Research

Universities and other institutions ranked by how active they are in the past 10 years in publishing at conferences and journals dedicated to the technical portion of games and interactive entertainment research (AI, HCI, graphics, etc.). See below the table for the list of conferences and journals. Credit is assigned to authors' current institutions. Credit for multi-author papers is split fractionally.

To give more information than just a ranking, under each institution are its researchers who are most active in these venues, plus the venues that the institution overall is most active in. There is also a large index of all active institutions and researchers who publish in these venues.

July 2023 edition (changelog).

The 262 researchers listed with their institutions above are those with at least 2.0 papers, sorted within institution in descending order. The venues are the top venue for each institution, plus any additional venues where the institution has at least 2.0 papers. These cutoffs are obviously arbitrary, and intended just to illustrate who is where and where they're active, while keeping the table readable.

The following 17 journals and international peer-reviewed conference proceedings are included:

Journals:

• IEEE Transactions on Games (ToG; incl. predecessor TCIAIG)
• Entertainment Computing (EntCom)
• Intl. Computer Games Association Journal (ICGA J.)
• Intl. J. Computer Games Technology (IJCGT)
• Intl. J. Game-Based Learning (IJGBL)
• ACM Computers in Entertainment (CiE; from 2014 relaunch to 2018 discontinuation)

Conferences:

• ACM Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games (I3D)
• ACM Symposium on Motion, Interaction, and Games (MIG)
• Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology (ACE; discontinued after 2017)
• Advances in Computer Games (ACG)
• Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE)
• Computers and Games (CG)
• Computer-Human Interaction in Play (CHI Play)
• Foundations of Digital Games (FDG)
• IEEE Conference on Games (CoG; incl. predecessor CIG)
• Intl. Conf. Entertainment Computing (ICEC)
• Intl. Conf. Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS)

Workshops held at the above conferences are included if they published peer-reviewed proceedings that are indexed in DBLP under the conference's entry. The list of venues is occasionally modified (see changelog).

Is a simple paper count useful? Well, don't read too much into the exact rankings. But it's a decent proxy for which institutions are active in the research community (or communities) that's constituted by the above venues, in the sense that you regularly see them represented at conferences and in journals. I've found it especially useful as a way of discovering researchers and institutions who I didn't know were active in this field, because they go to a different set of conferences than I do.

There are of course limitations to this kind of list. Different venues have different sizes, quality thresholds, external impacts, etc. I could normalize or weight by any of those measures, but I'm not convinced it would make the result more useful, and it would give me a bunch of power to reorder things just by tweaking weights. As an additional caveat, this list focuses on the technical games research community's own venues, and doesn't reflect those who do technical games work but publish it in other ways. For example, some people who come from a specific discipline such as AI, HCI, or graphics may prefer to publish in that discipline's general venues, such as AAAI, CHI, or SIGGRAPH. Other researchers with an industry focus may prefer to present at GDC instead of at academic conferences.

Data from DBLP as of the 2023-07-05 data dump, processed using a few scripts. Affiliations are maintained manually by me, and may have errors or omissions. I'm currently tracking 2658 researchers at 860 institutions (!); see the full list for details.