Notes from ICEC 2026 in Paris

11 October 2026

I just got back from ICEC 2026, the International Conference on Entertainment Computing, which took place in Paris this year. Before I even arrived, I already had something to celebrate: two of our papers had been accepted at the conference, and I’m really grateful for that. It was a great few days, so I wanted to write down what stood out while it’s still fresh.

Lorenzo giving a thumbs up next to the ICEC Paris 2026 banner — Me, ready for ICEC 2026 in Paris.

An honourable mention

The highlight of the trip: our paper Beyond Motivation and Mechanics: Theorizing “Gameful Worlding” as a Co-Constitutive Information System Phenomenon received an Honourable Mention award. The paper was led by my IÉSEG colleague Sulemana Bankuoru Egala, with me as second author and Yaw Afriyie of the University of Business and Integrated Development Studies as co-author. Congratulations to both of them, and thank you to the committee for the recognition.

Esteban Clua, Sulemana Bankuoru Egala holding the Honourable Mention certificate, Lorenzo James and Angelo Di Iorio in the conference hall — Celebrating the Honourable Mention. From left to right: Esteban Clua, Sulemana Bankuoru Egala, me and Angelo Di Iorio.

Presenting our own paper

Our second paper, written together with Emanuele De Pellegrin of the University of Edinburgh, was Toward Linking Health Behaviors to In-Game Rewards Through a Cross-Platform Gamified Ecosystem. The core idea is to bring healthy activities into video games people already play: completing healthy activities earns points that players can spend on rewards inside the game. It builds on my earlier workshop paper at the IEEE Conference on Games (CoG) and my TREO talk at ICIS, so it was great to share the next step of this work with the ICEC community. I wrote a separate post about what the paper is about.

Lorenzo presenting the title slide of his paper to an audience in a classroom — Me presenting our work-in-progress paper.

Familiar faces and a global community

One of my favourite parts of ICEC is that it feels like a community. Plenty of researchers come back year after year, and it was great to catch up with people I’ve met at earlier editions. It was just as nice to see what researchers from all over the world are working on, with work from China, Japan, Brazil and France, among others.

Five conference attendees with badges standing together in a long, sunlit hallway — Catching up between sessions.

It also made me think about the Caribbean, where I’m from. I’d like to see more Caribbean researchers at conferences like this one, and I’m thinking about how I can help with that.

Co-chairing the Doctoral Consortium and Work in Progress

This year I was one of the co-chairs of both the Doctoral Consortium and the Work in Progress track.

At the Doctoral Consortium, PhD students present their research and get feedback from more experienced researchers. It was a really rewarding experience. Not long ago I was on the other side of that table, so being able to give advice to junior PhD students meant a lot.

The Work in Progress papers were presented alongside the other papers in the sessions, which was a nice experience as well: work in progress is where you see ideas at their earliest stage, and it was great to see them shared and discussed next to more mature work.

Until next time

Selfie of Lorenzo on a boat on the Seine at night, with the lit-up Eiffel Tower behind him — Paris by night.

I’m already looking forward to next year in Ireland. In the meantime, I’ll try to share more of what I’m working on, here and on LinkedIn. If you were at ICEC too, or you’re working on something similar, I’d love to hear from you. You can find me on the Contact page.