After receiving a travel budget from my University for the first time, I came to sit down and have a look at potentially interesting conferences for the young game academics among us. Now, with so many different focus areas within games your planning might differ. Nevertheless, I though it would be nice to share some of the initial hot spots next year for game academics. On a more personal note: In a perfect world, I could go to all these events. However, my budget would be completely exhausted by GDC alone and I can hardly dream of getting papers accepted in the variety of conferences that are coming up.

Through the progress of the next year (2008) all data is due to change

Academic Venues

• CHI Florence, April 2008
• Nordic Game, May 2008 Malmö
• NordiCHI October 2008
• Futureplay (Fall 2008)
• The [Player] conference (August 26th – 29th 2008)
• International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology Japan, December 2008

Industry-focused Events (which are interesting for academics as well)

• GDC San Francisco Feb 18-22 2008
• GC Developers Conference August 2008 Germany
• Ars Electronica (September 2008)
• FMX International Conference on Animation, Effects, Realtime and Content

You can see that most of those conferences are European focused, which is natural since I study in Scandinavia. Drop me a note if you are going to one of these conferences and blog about it, maybe we meet or I could read your reports.