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WhitepaperUniversity of California Santa Cruz22 Oct 2026

Open Problems and Future Directions in Games Research: An Industry-Academic Workshop

Game Design
Game Development
Game Studies
Global

Length: 3 pages · ~16 min read
Format: PDF: read online free, download with a free account

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Key insights

6 takeaways

01
Industry and academic research communities currently operate in silos, preventing the effective study of large-scale behavioral phenomena and social dynamics that are only visible at deployment scale.See it on page 1
02
More than 80% of teenagers play video games, yet fewer than half identify as 'gamers,' signaling a shift in how games function as primary platforms for social interaction and community.See it on page 1
03
Industry practitioners possess high-volume behavioral data and real-world insights, while academia provides the methodological rigor and theoretical frameworks necessary to validate and generalize these findings.See it on page 2
04
Structural barriers, including NDA constraints, data-sharing limitations, and disparities in resources and labor, currently impede long-term collaboration between game studios and academic researchers.See it on page 2
05
The workshop aims to produce a formal letter for IEEE TOG that captures community-identified open problems and actionable recommendations to bridge the research-practice gap.See it on page 2
06
The initiative prioritizes participant-driven agendas over pre-set topics, using pre-workshop submissions to organize thematic breakout groups around real-world challenges currently encountered in the field.See it on page 2

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Summary

Open Problems and Future Directions in Games Research: An Emily Chen Anders Drachen Pejman Mirza-Babaei Department of Computational Media University of Southern Denmark University of Ontario Institute of University of California, Santa Cruz Odense, Denmark Technology Santa Cruz, California, USA [email protected] Oshawa, Ontario, Canada [email protected] pejman.m...

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