About

Games and play research is spread across many conferences, labs, and countries, and it can be hard to see the field as a whole. This project brings that landscape onto one map so that students, researchers, and anyone curious can explore it directly.

Each point on the map is an institution that has published games research, sized by its output. You can search by institution or author, filter by country, venue, and year, scrub a timeline to watch the field grow, and turn on collaboration arcs to see which institutions publish together. Institution and author profile pages collect the papers, people, and partners behind each point, and the insights dashboard summarises the field in numbers that stay current as the data updates.

The map is assembled from several open scholarly sources, combined automatically:

• DBLP provides the authoritative list of which papers belong to each venue.
• OpenAlex supplies the authorships, institutions, abstracts, and citation counts for each paper, matched by DOI.
• ROR (the Research Organization Registry) provides canonical institution names, countries, and coordinates.
• Nominatim and OpenStreetMap fill in coordinates for the few institutions that ROR does not place, and OpenFreeMap provides the basemap.

The map currently covers three venues:

• CHI PLAY, the ACM Symposium on Computer Human Interaction in Play.
• FDG, the Foundations of Digital Games conference.
• CHI Games and Play, a curated games and play slice of CHI from 1981 onward. CHI is a very large conference, so rather than include all of it, this venue keeps only the papers whose titles or abstracts match a games and play vocabulary (for example game, player, gameplay, esports, playful, and gamification). It is a curated subset, not the whole of CHI, and it is tuned to favour genuine games and play work.

The data refreshes automatically every week through a scheduled job that re-reads the venues, adds newly indexed papers, and updates citation counts. Every run is recorded so the history of updates is auditable.

There are several ways to take part:

• Submit a leadership entry for your institution. Community submissions are reviewed by a moderator before they appear on the community layer of the map.
• Claim your author profile from any author page to add a short bio, your pronouns, and links. Claims are reviewed before they go live, and you can edit them afterward.
• Follow institutions or authors to receive a weekly email digest of their new papers.
• Build on the data through the public read only API, or embed the live map on your own site using the embed view.

A few things are worth keeping in mind when reading the map:

• Coverage is based on the publication record, so the map reflects what DBLP and OpenAlex have indexed rather than every piece of work in the field.
• New proceedings take time to appear in DBLP, usually days to a few weeks, so the most recent papers may lag slightly.
• The CHI Games and Play filter is based on keywords, so it can occasionally miss a relevant paper or include one that is not really about games. Corrections are easy to make.
• Institutions without a ROR identifier or without known coordinates may not appear on the map, even when their papers are counted.
• Community entries are self submitted and moderated, so they represent the people who chose to contribute rather than a complete directory.

With thanks to the projects that make this possible: DBLP, OpenAlex, ROR, and OpenStreetMap for the data, and the open source ecosystem the site is built on. The source code is public on GitHub.