In the last few years, we have witnessed a true revolution in the video-game industry, as both emerging mobile games and traditional video-game platforms have become continuously connected to the Internet. This has contributed to widen the audience for video games (casual gamers) and to the appearance of a series of new economic models (free-to-play, in-app purchases) that are gradually gaining more importance in a sector that traditionally relied on expensive one-time purchases or subscriptions.

More importantly, this recent paradigm shift enables game developers both to collect a vast amount of data in real time and to maintain active relationships with their players. To fully take advantage of this new scenario, it is essential to develop appropriate statistical and learning methods to model and predict player behavior, which should scale to large datasets and allow intuitive visualization of the results, among other features.

Given the richness of the possibility for actions that modern game afford, players can actually express very nuanced motivation and personalities encoded in their in-game behaviors. The current trend to include in games in-app purchases and social features, together with the extraordinary level of granularity of the collected data, turns game datasets into a unique source of information to study human behavior, including social and consumer dynamics.

The objective of this special session on Game Data Science is to gather together experts from industry and academia, providing a stimulating atmosphere that fosters collaboration and mutual exchange. We call for top-notch and inspiring contributions that explore the development and application of new technologies toward this new paradigm in the realm of video games.