4GGS: 4th Geogames Symposium Federal University of Goiás Goiás, Brazil, May 30-June 2, 2027

Feel invited to join us!

The 4th Geogames Symposium (4GGS) brings together researchers, developers, designers, practitioners, and game enthusiasts to exchange ideas and advance the growing field of geogames. It offers a platform for the exploration of how analogue, digital, and hybrid geogames can connect people, places, environments, and cultures, and inspire new ways of understanding and shaping our world.

This year, 4GGS places a special focus on geogames for cultural heritage and place. How can geogames help experience historic places differently? How can games bring stories, memories, traditions, architecture, and cultural landscapes to life? We invite contributions exploring how geogames can help discover, preserve, interpret, and reimagine heritage while creating meaningful connections between the past,
present, and future. We welcome theoretical, methodological, experimental, and applied contributions related to geogames, game design, and playful approaches to place.

What are Geogames? 4GGS builds on the definition proposed by Poplin (2025): “Geogames are digital, analogue, or hybrid games that center on Gaia as Earth’s interconnected system of the physical environment, living organisms and its non-physical elements. They create playful experiences grounded in the use of real-world geographic data, locational knowledge, and spatial reasoning.” The broader definition
emphasizes geogames as playful experiences that foster systems thinking, problem-solving, environmental awareness, and the resilience and well-being of Earth’s systems.

Let’s explore how geogames can:

• Bring cultural and architectural heritage to life
• Connect people with places, histories, stories, and identities
• Preserve and reinterpret tangible and intangible heritage
• Strengthen community engagement and placemaking
• Inspire playful responses to local and global challenges
• Encourage environmental awareness, responsibility, and care
• Create more resilient, sustainable, and regenerative futures

We invite you to join us at 4GGS!

Submission Guidelines

Submissions

All submissions should include the title, names of the author(s), their affiliation(s), and their emails. INDICATE one of the following submission types:

• Short paper demonstrates most recent research in the form of a short scientific paper. It should contain between 750-1000 words. Please include a problem statement, research focus, research methodology, results and conclusions.
• Workshop is in-person run workshop on a selected topic of geogames. It can last 2 – 3 hours. The submission should describe the goals of the workshop in around 300 words.
• Game demonstration is in-person showcase of the game or games developed by the authors. These games can already be a final product or in the phase of testing as a testable prototype. The authors bring their games and showcase them to the participants. Descriptions of these games should be around 300 words long.
• Student forum is in-person gathering of students showing and demonstrating their work related to geogames. The descriptions should be around 500 words long and can include created geogames or their prototypes, graduate or PhD thesis work related to games, class work or research in progress.
• Panel is a discussion forum on a specific topic of geogames which can include theoretical approaches, revisiting definitions, exciting novel ideas. Descriptions should be around 500 words long.

Deadlines

• First submission for peer-review: December 20 (00:00 UTC)
• Reviews completed: January 29
• Acceptance letters sent to the authors: February 15
• Upload the final contributions: March 19

Submission platform

The submission Web page for 4GGS is https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=4ggs.

List of Research Topics

Topics may include cultural heritage, architecture, historic preservation, urban planning and design, placemaking, community engagement, history, geography, geospatial science, digital twins, climate resilience, environmental challenges, psychology, anthropology, health and well-being, and more. We especially welcome work that crosses disciplinary boundaries and explores new relationships between
games, people, place, and heritage. Let’s play with the past, experience the present, and co-create the future through geogames.

Key research topics include and are not limited to:

• Geogames, Cultural Heritage, and Place
  Explore how geogames can bring cultural and architectural heritage, histories, memories, traditions, and places to life through playful experiences.
• Co-Creation with Geogames
  Explore how geogames can engage communities in participation, co-creation, citizen science, and collaborative planning while enabling players to imagine, visualize, and explore more resilient, inclusive, and sustainable futures.
• Geogames Across Application Areas
  Share geogame applications in education, planning, architecture, environment, health, disaster management, geography, cybersecurity, religion, and other fields.
• Geogame Design, Technology, and Evaluation
  Present approaches to geogame design, prototyping, playtesting, and evaluation, including AI, AR/VR/MR, digital twins, geospatial technologies, and other emerging technologies.
• Theory of Geogames
  Contribute to the foundation of geogames by presenting theoretical foundations for geogames.

Journal contributions of your work can be submitted to the Special issue on Geogames titled Can Geogames make the World a better Place? in the Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and Citizen Science journal co-edited by Alenka Poplin and Ítalo de Sena: https://journals.sagepub.com/page/epb/collections/special-issues

Feel invited to check accepted and published contributions of the previous symposia:

• 3rd Geogames Symposium: https://www.iastatedigitalpress.com/geogames/issue/current/
• 2^nd Geogames Symposium: https://geogameslab.net/2nd-geogames-symposium-proceedings/

Committees

Program committee

• Alenka Poplin, Iowa State University, USA
• Ítalo Sousa de Sena, University College Dublin, Ireland
• Arghavan Akbarieh, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
• Ariane Magda Borges, Federal University of Goiás, Brazil

Scientific committee

• Ola Ahlqvist, The Ohio State University, USA
• Arghavan Akbarieh, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
• Mónica Alcindor, Portucalense University, Portugal
• Bala Krishna Annalouri, Backstage Pass Institute of Gaming and Technology, India
• Bruno Amaral de Andrade, Federal University of Bahia, Brazil
• Luiz Adolfo de Paiva Andrade, State University of Bahia, Brazil
• Michely Gomes Avelar, Federal Institute of Goiás, Brazil
• Jeremy Best, Iowa State University, USA
• Ariane Magda Borges, Federal University of Goiás, Brazil
• Luciana Bragança, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil
• Anson Call, Iowa State University, USA
• Raul Isaías Campos, Federal University of Goiás, Brazil
• Marta Brković Dodig, NGO ARQubator, Serbia
• Stefan Göbel, Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany
• Qi Han, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
• Jared Hansen, Iowa State University, USA
• Casper Harteveld, Northeastern University, USA
• Xu Liu, Atlantic Technological University, Ireland
• Yanhua Lu, Iowa State University, USA
• Kotaro Izuka, University of Hyogo, Japan
• Balaji Kalluri, Bharat Play Innovations, Play2ProgressIndia, India
• Charles Madeira, Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil
• Deepak Marhatta Tribhuvan University, Nepal
• Cameron MacKenzie, Iowa State University, USA
• Adriana Pena Perez Negron, University of Guadalajara, Mexico
• Alenka Poplin, Iowa State University, USA
• Thiago Malheiros Porcino, Laboratório Nacional de Computação Científica (LNCC), Brazil
• Claudia Lucia Rojas, Universidad del Norte, Colombia
• Christoph Schlieder, University of Bamberg, Germany
• David Schwartz, Rochester Institute of Technology, USA
• Ítalo Sousa de Sena, University College Dublin, Ireland
• Livia Scienza, Federal University of São Carlos & Scienza Studio, Brazil
• Yusuf Sermet, Tulane University, USA
• Micael Sousa, Center for Advanced Preparedness and Threat Response
  Simulation, USA
• Deepak Sridhar, City Atlas, USA
• Todor Stojanovski, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
• Brian Tomaszewski, Rochester Institute of Technology, USA
• Ziyu Tong, Nanjing University, China
• Eszter Tóth, University of applied sciences Darmstadt, Germany
• Jeffrey Wheatley, Iowa State University, USA
• Aaron Yang, Iowa State University, USA

Local organizing committee

• Ariane Magda Borges, Federal University of Goiás, Brazil
• Michely Gomes Avelar, Federal Institute of Goiás, Brazil
• Raul Isaías Campos, Federal University of Goiás, Brazil
• Gustavo Hilário de Lira Christino, Goiás Game Developers Association (GameGO), Brazil
• Michelle Santos Costa, Goiás Game Developers Association (GameGO), Brazil

Invited Speakers

• t.b.d.

Publication

4GGS proceedings will be published by Iowa State University library repository.

Venue

The conference will be held at the Federal University of Goiás, Goiás town, Brazil .

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to Alenka Poplin (apoplin@iastate.edu) or geogameslab@outlook.com and cc-ed to apoplin@iastate.edu.

Sponsors