Foundations of Digital Games

The Foundations of Digital Games (FDG) conference series seeks to promote the exchange of information concerning the scientific foundations of digital games, technology used to develop digital games, and the study of digital games and their design, broadly construed. The conference is held yearly in late Spring or early Summer, and attracts an international audience of 150-200 attendees. The focus of the conference is the presentation of papers describing novel research results. FDG is typically held in-cooperation with one or more special interest groups of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the proceedings of the conference from 2008 onward are archived in the ACM Digital Library.

The conference series was originally created by Kent Foster and John Nordlinger at Microsoft, and was known as the Microsoft Academic Days on Game Development in Computer Science Education (GDCSE). The research focus of GDCSE was education using (and about) computer game technology. In 2009, the conference changed its name to the Foundations of Digital Games, and expanded its scope to become a "big tent" computer games research conference, covering a spectrum of computer game research topics while retaining a strong interest in educational uses of games. In the run-up to the 2009 conference, Microsoft transferred ownership and organization of the conference to the Society for the Advancement of the Study of Digital Games (SASDG), a nonprofit corporation with an academic board of directors.

FDG 2019 will be held at Cal Poly University, in San Luis Obispo, California, August 26-30, 2019. The General Chair is Foaad Khosmood, and the Program Co-Chairs are Thomas Apperley and Johanna Pirker.