The First Exploration on Games and Gamers Workshop, held in Barcelona, Spain in conjunction with the 6th International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo 2014) on November 10th, 2014.

In the past 30 years or so, video games have transitioned from being seen as a children's activity to becoming a huge chunk of the entertainment industry. What started as simple games like PONG has grown to become a billion dollar industry with hundreds of millions of people playing together over the Internet. Considering the time and financial investment people put into games, the research community has shown increasing interest in studying games from a variety of perspectives.

Studying video games as a scientific endeavor can have huge impact for the industry. Quantification and empirical evidence can inform game developers on design decisions, aid in the advancement of gaming technology, and provide new insight into the minds of gamers. This is important for several reasons. First, the gaming industry has driven significant amounts of innovation in computing technology. Second, gaming skill has been shown to be a predictor of real-life ability, as well as increasing certain skill sets. For example, skill in Nintendo Wii games has been shown to be a predictor of laparoscopic (minimally invasive) surgery skills. Finally, as people are spending an increasing amount of their time in online games, the development and crafting of games has a direct impact on a large number of social interactions.

There are also important social problems facing gaming. Consider unethical actions such as toxic behavior and cheating. Due to the reliance of social interactions in multiplayer games, both of these issues threaten the community of gamers. As expected from controlled laboratory experiments and intuition, cheating has been shown to display contagious properties, where the behavior will spread from friend to friend. Toxic behavior, which is violations of social norms to cause harm to individuals and the larger community, has only recently begun to be understood. A deeper understanding of bad behavior in online games could lead to detection and mitigation strategies, and can have impact on the understanding of other forms of bad behavior, such as contraband networks or even cyberbullying.

In this workshop, we invite research on qualitative and quantitative analysis of games and gamer behavior, as well as systems to support such analysis from both academia and industry.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

* Understanding, detecting, and mitigating extreme and unethical behavior in online games.
* Big data systems for efficient storage and processing of gaming related data.
* Diffusion of optimal strategies from higher skill players to lower skill players.
* Improvements in matchmaking algorithms.
* Methods for annotating subjective events in eSports (e.g., successful fight initiations).
* Extrinsic rewards and intrinsic motivation in social games.
* The relationship between the roles players take in-game and personality.
* Methods for providing sensitive data for 3rd party analysis.
* Analysis of virtual goods economies, both things like MMO economies as well as out of band markets like the Steam Trading platform.
* Community/user generated content and relationships to game popularity, longevity, etc.
* Improvements to player tutorials.