We are pleased to announce the holding of the first edition of the “Symposium on Research in the Indie Video Game Industry” (I3V 2023) on October 27th, in Terrassa (Spain), as a parallel event to “INDIE GAMES TRS“, a free access event that will serve as a meeting point for the entire independent Spanish video game scene. This symposium is open to contributions from any actor involved in the study and research in this area, and thus establish a dialogue between the different actors involved, both academia and industry, that promote their improvement and new models of col .collaboration

The process of designing and developing video games poses many challenges, and establishing between the different actors involved a way to exchange good practices or success stories is of great relevance. Although this process is primarily related to industry, there is a long tradition of cases where collaboration with academia has helped research and advance understanding of how to analyze and develop better games.

There are well-known works presented with a clear research background, or published at academic events, which serve to illustrate this fact. From the MDA framework of Hunicke and LeBlanc (published at the “AAAI Workshop on Challenges in Game AI”), to the studies of Lazzaro (“Game Developers Conference”) and Bartle (“Journal of MUD research”) on ways to achieve immersion of the players If we focus on “indie” video games, we find the volume “Handmade Pixels: Independent Video Games and Quest for Authenticity” by Juul, or the monograph “Indie, Eh? Some Kind of Game Studies”, published in Loading magazine, where the meaning of indie, its relationship with mainstream currents, aesthetics, player communities, etc. is addressed.

Both researchers and professionals in the sector are invited to participate in this symposium. In this regard, contributions are welcome on all the following topics, among others related:

- Video game design frameworks
-Good practices
- User studies
- Metrics and analysis
- Monetization strategies
- Communication and marketing strategies
- Quality assurance (QA)
- Software engineering
- Project management
- Integration with new technologies
- Post-mortems
- Aesthetic particularities of indie video games (aesthetics)
- Narrative in indie video games
- Historical perspectives around the indie video game

While the emphasis is on the independent industry, all players in the video game industry in general who want to contribute their views on these aspects, are invited to participate and send contributions.