CoG 2026 Awards

Best Paper Award

Winner (Delegate Vote)

Valentina Genoese-Zerbi, Justus Robertson and Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera
Categorizing Experience Management Problem Difficulty Using Graph Analysis

First Runner Up (Committee Vote)

Qian-Rong Li, Hung Guei, I-Chen Wu and Ti-Rong Wu
MAPLE: Multi-State Aggregated Policy Evaluation for AlphaZero in Imperfect-Information Games

Second Runner Up

Filip Sroka and Laurissa Tokarchuk
Segment-Based Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment for Motor Learning in VR Rhythm Games

Best Reviewer Award

Winner

Loutfouz Zaman
Ontario Tech University
Game Analytics Track

First Runner Up

Alexander Dockhorn
University of Southern Denmark
AI for Game Playing

Second Runner Up

Miguel Belbute
Instituto Superior Tecnico - University of Lisbon
Serious Games

Best Demo Award

Winner (Delegate Vote)

Toby Best, Raluca Gaina, Simon Lucas, James Goodman and Jamie Harris
Descent: Journeys in the Dark’ Computer-Aided Content Generation

First Runner Up

Paul Riesch, Mary Linke, Florian Rupp, Sabiha Ghellal and Katie Seaborn
CaféBeans: An Exploratory Serious Game for Deceptive Design Awareness

Second Runner Up (tied)

Mathias Babin
TRACE: Temporal Representation Alignment for non-player Character Evolution

Second Runner Up (tied)

Adrian Kathagen, Fabian Ostermann and Marco Pleines
Simulating Super Mario Odyssey for Agent Training