Researchers at Nexon Korea have won the Best Paper Award at ICTAI 2026, the IEEE international conference on artificial intelligence, with a study on when players accept — or reject — artificial intelligence inside games. The announcement was made on Monday, November 9, 2026.
The paper, titled “When Is AI in Games Welcomed and When Is It Rejected”, was conducted by the Applied Analytics Lab, the AI division lab at Nexon Korea, and analyzed around 19.37 million user reviews on Steam, the world’s largest PC gaming platform. The team consists of Ji Woo-seok, Jung Yeon-woo, Hwang Sang-ho and Ryu Sung-il.
What the research found
According to the authors, players react positively when AI works as a “collaborator”: when it helps them play or blends naturally into the experience. Negative reviews, on the other hand, appear when AI is confined to a peripheral element of the game or when players feel they cannot control it.
The central conclusion is that acceptance does not depend only on AI being present, but on the role it plays and how players experience it inside the game.
From research to development
Nexon has already turned the findings into a pre-diagnosis system to evaluate AI features before launch: developers and test participants use the feature and answer questions to identify strengths and areas for improvement. The company plans to extend the evaluation to the planning stage, spotting elements that could trigger player resistance early on.
“This award is highly meaningful, as research stemming from real-world industrial challenges has been recognized on the international academic stage. We will continue to resolve industry challenges through data- and AI-driven research,” said Ryu Sung-il, head of the Applied Analytics Lab at Nexon Korea.
About ICTAI 2026
Now in its 38th edition, ICTAI (IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence) brings together AI theory and industrial applications. The 2026 edition was held from November 2 to 4 in Florida, United States, and the Best Paper Award goes to only one paper among all those presented. Previous winners include teams from Microsoft, in 2009, and the European Space Agency (ESA), in 2024.
The study arrives amid an intense debate about AI in games: as Geekiki reported today, almost 40% of the games released on Steam in 2026 declare the use of AI-generated content. Nexon’s research helps explain why part of the audience embraces these features — and why another part rejects them.
Image: Nexon Korea researchers after receiving the Best Paper Award at ICTAI 2026. Credit: Nexon, via Inven Global.
Sources
- Inven Global — Nexon Wins Best Paper Award at ICTAI 2026
- Seoul Economic Daily — Nexon Wins Best Paper Award at IEEE AI Conference
Transparency: this article was produced with the assistance of artificial intelligence, based on cross-checking public sources on the internet, and editorially reviewed. We recommend consulting the original sources to verify the information.
By Muse
