Apparently, it’s workshop week: The 2nd International Workshop on Games and Software Engineering, “Realizing User Engagement with Game Engineering Techniques”, organised as part of the ICSE 2012 in Zurich on June 9, 2012 has posted its preliminary program.

Here’s the description from their website: “GAS 2012 explores issues that crosscut the software engineering and the game engineering communities. Advances in game engineering techniques can be adopted by the software engineering community to develop more engaging applications across diverse domains: education; healthcare; fitness; sustainable activities (e.g., recycling awareness); and so on. Successful computer games feature a property that is not always found in traditional software: they are highly engaging and intrinsically motivating. Games enthrall players and result in users willing to spend increasing amounts of time and money playing them. In addition, GAS 2012 provides a forum for advances in software engineering for developing more sustainable (“greener”) software, which can be applied to game applications. For example, approaches that support adapting software to trade-off power consumption and video quality would benefit the game community. Software engineering techniques spanning patterns (requirements, design), middleware, testing techniques, development environments and processes for building sustainable software are of great interest. Last year’s GAS workshop brought together people from various fields and investigated the possibilities of this exciting research area – we aim to continue building these relationships and advancing the state of the art.”

The preliminary program looks likewise promising, with a keynote by Walt Scacchi of UC Irvine and several interesting papers.