About Brazilian Symposium on Games and Digital Entertainment, SBGAMES

Brazilian Symposium on Games and Digital Entertainment, SBGAMES

Profile marker: DEPTH-BATCH226. This profile describes the venue honestly as what it actually is, using only information that can be checked against official publisher, society, programme or series sources. Where a figure is not officially published, this profile says so rather than estimating it.

The Brazilian Symposium on Games and Digital Entertainment, universally shortened to SBGames, is not a journal. It is Brazil's flagship annual symposium on computer games and digital entertainment, known in Portuguese as the Simpósio Brasileiro de Jogos e Entretenimento Digital. Treating it as a journal — with an impact factor, an article processing charge or a conventional journal submission portal — would mislead readers, so this profile describes it accurately as a peer-reviewed conference and symposium whose proceedings are the lasting scholarly record.

SBGames is organised in the orbit of the Sociedade Brasileira de Computação, the Brazilian Computer Society (SBC), and its specialist communities for games, computer graphics, image processing and virtual and augmented reality. Joint promotional material for the 2025 Salvador meeting, prepared with the sister events SIBGRAPI and SVR, describes SBGames plainly as the largest and most important event for games and digital entertainment in Latin America, attended by scientists, artists, designers, teachers and students from universities, research centres and the games industry. That breadth — part computing conference, part design and culture forum, part education and industry meeting — is the defining characteristic of the venue.

Recent editions confirm the scale and continuity of the series. The twenty-first edition was held in Natal on 24–27 October 2022 and its proceedings were published through IEEE. The twenty-second edition followed in Rio Grande, Rio Grande do Sul, on 6–9 November 2023, with proceedings associated with the ACM. The twenty-third edition was held in Manaus, Amazonas, from 30 September to 4 October 2024, with proceedings published by SBC. The twenty-fourth edition, SBGames 2025, was held in Salvador, Bahia, at SENAI CIMATEC from 30 September to 3 October 2025, in a joint programme with SVR and SIBGRAPI that the organisers expected to draw more than one thousand participants across the three events. A researcher tracing the series in dblp, the SBC Open Library or a university catalogue will therefore find a long, edition-by-edition record rather than journal volumes and issues.

Aims and Scope

SBGames exists to bring together everyone who studies, makes, teaches with or builds businesses around games and digital entertainment in Brazil, and to connect that community with international work. Its scope deliberately crosses disciplinary boundaries. A single edition can contain a formal paper on game artificial intelligence or procedural generation, a design study of a serious game for health, an analysis of Brazilian folklore in digital games, a classroom intervention using games to teach fractions or chemistry, and an industry or culture paper on esports communities. That mixture is intentional: in Brazil, games research grew up simultaneously in computing departments, design schools, education programmes and cultural studies, and SBGames is the meeting point where those traditions are expected to talk to each other.

• The Computing track covers programming, artificial intelligence, graphics, interaction, software engineering for games, networks, platforms and technical evaluation
• Arts and design work addresses game design, art, audio, narrative, user experience and creative practice
• Culture work examines players, communities, representation, history, folklore, preservation and the social meanings of games
• Education work covers games for learning, serious games, gamification and teaching with and about games in schools and universities
• Health and applied tracks, where offered in a given year, cover games for health, rehabilitation, accessibility and wellbeing
• Industry and entrepreneurship contributions address production, markets, studios and professional practice in the Brazilian and Latin American games sector

Authors should check the call for papers for the specific edition they are targeting, because track names, page limits and supplementary activities — workshops, tutorials, a games festival, thesis and dissertation competitions, and panels — change from year to year. What does not change is the expectation that a paper, whether full or short, makes a contribution that other participants can use: a method, a system, a study, a design insight, a dataset, a critical argument or a well-evidenced account of practice. Papers that are only product announcements without analysis, or literature summaries without a question and a method, fit the symposium poorly in any track.

The working languages reflect the community. Much of the recent SBC proceedings record is in Portuguese, with English-language papers also present, especially in the years when proceedings were distributed through IEEE or the ACM. Authors should follow the language rules in the current call rather than assuming either language is automatically accepted for every track. For an international reader, the presence of Portuguese-language research is a strength rather than a barrier: it is often where Brazilian classroom studies, cultural analyses and locally grounded design work appear first and in most detail.

History and Development

The symposium has run annually since the early 2000s and has travelled widely across Brazil — among other host cities, São Paulo, Curitiba, Rio de Janeiro, Foz do Iguaçu, Recife, Gramado, Natal, Rio Grande, Manaus and Salvador all appear in the recent proceedings record. That travelling model matters. It spreads games research beyond a single metropolitan centre, gives regional universities a turn as hosts and showcases, and mirrors the national structure of SBC itself. The numbering is a useful check when citing: 2020 was the nineteenth edition, held in Recife; 2021 the twentieth, in Gramado; 2022 the twenty-first, in Natal; 2023 the twenty-second, in Rio Grande; 2024 the twenty-third, in Manaus; and 2025 the twenty-fourth, in Salvador.

Publication arrangements have evolved with the series. Earlier proceedings in the 2010s were issued through SBC itself — the 2013 São Paulo, 2016 São Paulo and 2017 Curitiba proceedings are still hosted on the SBGames site — then a run of editions from 2018 to 2022 appeared with the IEEE Computer Society and in IEEE Xplore, and the 2023 edition is recorded with the ACM, before the 2024 proceedings returned to SBC as publisher in its open library. Researchers should therefore not look for all years in a single database. The complete picture requires checking the SBC Open Library (SOL), dblp's SBGames venue page, IEEE Xplore and the ACM record for the relevant year, and citing the edition, city and year as part of the reference.

That history also explains the identifiers attached to this record. The Journals World structured record lists ISSN 2159-6662 and 2159-6654, the identifiers associated with the IEEE-era proceedings series, while SBC-issued proceedings PDFs from 2016 and 2017 carry the header ISSN 2179-2259. These are proceedings identifiers for different publication arrangements of the same symposium, not the ISSNs of a standalone journal. No conflict needs to be resolved by deleting one set: a careful citation gives the year and publisher of the edition actually consulted.

Publication Details

• Full name: Brazilian Symposium on Games and Digital Entertainment (SBGames); Portuguese name: Simpósio Brasileiro de Jogos e Entretenimento Digital
• Type: Annual conference and symposium with peer-reviewed proceedings — not a journal
• Organiser: Brazilian Computer Society (SBC) and its specialist commissions, with a local organising committee in the host city each year
• Frequency: Annual, usually in the second half of the year
• Proceedings publishers (by era): SBC (including the SBC Open Library, SOL), IEEE Computer Society / IEEE, and ACM for the 2023 edition
• Proceedings ISSNs on record: 2159-6662 and 2159-6654 (IEEE-era series); 2179-2259 appears on SBC proceedings from 2016–2017
• Language: Portuguese and English, according to the call for the edition and track
• Article processing charge: None — this is not a journal and no journal APC applies; conference registration is a separate matter set by each edition
• Journal Impact Factor: None claimed — a conference proceedings series does not have a Clarivate Journal Impact Factor

The existing Journals World record also reports a SCImago-derived h-index of 15 and an SJR value of 0.153 for the proceedings series as indexed in Scopus-based data. Those figures describe citation accumulation for the proceedings as a serial source; they should be read comparatively and with the year of the data in mind, and they must not be relabelled as an impact factor. Conference proceedings naturally accumulate citations differently from journals: a strong edition, a widely used dataset paper or a survey can move the figures, while many valuable design, culture and education papers are cited mainly within their own communities.

Access depends on the era. SBC Open Library proceedings are openly available online, which makes the most recent SBC-published editions the easiest to read and to assign in teaching. IEEE-era volumes are available through IEEE Xplore, normally by subscription or purchase, and the ACM edition through the ACM Digital Library. Individual authors also commonly deposit accepted versions in institutional repositories. A reader who cannot access a particular year's volume should check the author's own page and the SBC library before concluding that a paper is unavailable.

Editorial and Peer Review

There is no single permanent editor-in-chief in the journal sense. Each edition has general chairs, programme chairs and track chairs appointed for that year, supported by a programme committee of reviewers drawn from the Brazilian and international games research community. The named editors of a given year's proceedings — for example, the editors recorded by dblp for the 2024 Manaus and 2023 Rio Grande volumes — are the authoritative editorial record for that edition, and they should be cited as such rather than projected onto other years.

Submissions are made to a specific edition by its deadline, through the submission system named in that year's call — SBC events have commonly used the JEMS system — and are peer reviewed by the programme committee for the relevant track. Authors should expect decisions that distinguish full papers from short or extended-abstract presentations, and should be prepared to revise a full paper into a shorter format if the committee judges the contribution promising but not yet fully evidenced. As with any selective conference, following the template exactly, anonymising where the call requires it, and respecting page limits are basic conditions for a paper to reach reviewers in good standing.

SBGames also sustains community activities that a journal cannot: a festival and exhibition of games, workshops, tutorials, thesis and dissertation awards, and industry and cultural programming alongside the technical tracks. Extended abstracts and workshop contributions appear in companion proceedings records, which is why database searches return both the main proceedings and extended-abstract volumes for the Salvador 2025 edition. Readers should check whether they are citing a full peer-reviewed paper or a shorter extended abstract, because the two carry different weight as evidence.

Indexing and Discoverability

SBGames proceedings are discoverable through dblp, which maintains a dedicated venue page listing editions from at least 2018 onwards with their editors, publishers and ISBNs, through the SBC Open Library for SBC-published years, and through IEEE Xplore and the ACM Digital Library for the editions those publishers issued. The series is tracked as a proceedings source in Scopus-based and SCImago data, which is the origin of the h-index and SJR figures in the structured record. Google Scholar also indexes individual papers extensively, and many Brazilian institutional repositories mirror author versions.

For literature searches, the most productive strategy is to search by topic plus the symposium name in more than one place: SOL for recent SBC years, dblp for a clean edition-by-edition bibliography, and Scholar for citation chasing. Because titles appear in both Portuguese and English, searching with Portuguese keywords — jogos, entretenimento digital, jogo sério, gamificação — alongside English equivalents substantially improves recall for education and culture topics.

How to Submit and Take Part

Start with the current edition's official site, linked from SBC and the SBGames domain, and read its call for papers in full. Note the track, the deadline, the template, the language rule and whether submission is via JEMS or another system named that year. Prepare the paper as a self-contained contribution: state the question or design problem, describe the method or the game and its evaluation, present results honestly, and situate the work in prior SBGames and international literature. Brazilian authors writing in Portuguese should still provide titles and abstracts that help international readers find the work where the template allows it.

There is no journal-style article processing charge to budget for. Costs of participation are the normal costs of a conference — registration and travel — set by each edition and not publicly framed as publication fees. Authors whose papers are accepted are expected to present at the symposium; the proceedings record is a record of a meeting that actually happened, and the discussion, demonstrations and festival around the papers are part of the scholarly value. Students should also look for the thesis and dissertation competition and for workshops attached to their topic, which are often the best entry point into the community for a first submission.

Common reasons for rejection at venues of this kind are instructive: a paper with no evaluation where an evaluation is claimed, a design description with no reflection or evidence, a study whose participants and procedures cannot be understood from the text, or a topic submitted to the wrong track. Addressing those points before submission, and asking a colleague outside the project to read the paper cold, materially improves the chance of acceptance at SBGames as at any peer-reviewed symposium.

Who Should Read and Cite SBGames

Games researchers working on Latin America, computing lecturers looking for Portuguese-language and Brazil-based teaching material, education researchers interested in serious games in real classrooms, designers seeking culturally grounded case studies, and industry analysts following the Brazilian games sector will all find material here that does not appear in North American or European venues. Citations should always give the edition year, the track where known, the publisher of that year's proceedings and a stable link or ISBN where available, so that a reader can locate the exact version cited despite the series' changing publishers.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is SBGames a journal?

No. It is an annual symposium and conference organised in the SBC community, with peer-reviewed proceedings. It has proceedings ISSNs and is tracked as a serial source in citation databases, but it has no journal editor-in-chief, no journal issues in the usual sense and no Journal Impact Factor.

What are the ISSNs for SBGames?

The structured record lists 2159-6662 and 2159-6654 for the IEEE-era proceedings series, and SBC proceedings PDFs from 2016 and 2017 carry ISSN 2179-2259. Cite the identifier and publisher that match the edition you used.

Where can I read SBGames proceedings?

Recent SBC editions are open in the SBC Open Library (SOL). IEEE-era editions are in IEEE Xplore and the 2023 edition is recorded with the ACM. dblp provides a clean edition-by-edition index linking to each volume.

Does SBGames charge an article processing charge?

No journal APC applies, because it is not a journal. Authors of accepted papers normally register for and attend the conference; registration terms are set by each edition.

When and where was the most recent edition in this profile?

SBGames 2025, the twenty-fourth edition, was held in Salvador, Bahia, at SENAI CIMATEC from 30 September to 3 October 2025, jointly promoted with SVR and SIBGRAPI. The twenty-third edition was in Manaus from 30 September to 4 October 2024.

In what language should I write my paper?

Follow the current call for papers. The proceedings contain both Portuguese and English papers, and language rules can differ by track and year.

Reading SBGames Critically

A proceedings series that has changed publishers several times rewards careful reading. A citation found in a secondary database may give the IEEE or ACM version of a paper while the freely readable version sits in the SBC Open Library, or the reverse, and page numbers can differ between a preprint, an extended abstract and the final full paper. Before quoting a result, a reader should open the version they are actually citing, check whether it is labelled a full paper, a short paper or an extended abstract, and confirm the track, because the same project is sometimes reported at several stages of maturity across successive editions as the game, the study or the classroom intervention develops.

That staged reporting is a feature of conference culture rather than a flaw. Games research often proceeds through playable artefacts, and an early paper may document a prototype and a small pilot while a later paper reports a fuller evaluation with more participants. Readers building a literature review should treat such papers as a sequence, cite the most complete version for findings, and avoid counting the same study twice as if it were independent evidence. The same caution applies to systematic mappings of Brazilian games research, which have shown how strongly education and culture topics are represented at SBGames compared with purely technical venues.

For teachers, the proceedings are a practical resource as well as a research record. Education-track papers typically describe the game, the learners, the setting and the observed outcomes in enough detail for another teacher to adapt the activity, and culture-track papers provide Brazilian cases — folklore, Afro-Brazilian culture, regional history and Portuguese-language learning — that are largely absent from English-language textbooks. Used in that way, SBGames functions as a national repository of practice, and its value is not captured by citation counts alone.

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