The Game Hacking Village at DEF CON 34 (August 6-9, 2026, Las Vegas Convention Center) is now accepting submissions for talks!

The Game Hacking Village is a dedicated space at DEF CON focused on the technical, creative, and historical aspects of interacting with video games whether through reverse engineering, modding, exploitation, preservation. We emphasize educational content, sharing knowledge, techniques, and research in a community-driven environment. The village fosters learning, discussion, and innovation in game-related security, modding, and low-level game internals.

Village Alignment

The Game Hacking Village seeks to explore interesting and technical innovations and history in video game related security topics. Our interests are very broad and we aim to keep the focus on education, research, and fun technical deep-dives and not on promoting or enabling cheating especially in live online environments.

Talk Formats

• 30-minute talks (ideal for focused technical demos or targeted topics)
• 60-minute talks (for in-depth explorations, multi-part demos, or broader historical/contextual coverage)

Talks should be technical, insightful, and original. Live demos, code walkthroughs, hardware teardowns, or tool showcases are highly encouraged.

Topics We Are Looking For

We welcome submissions on (but not limited to) the following areas. Feel free to propose others that fit the spirit of deep, educational game interaction:

• Novel game mods or tools that provide substantial improvements, new features, or quality-of-life enhancements to existing games
• Hardware-based game hacks or modifications (e.g., custom controllers, console modchips, FPGA-based reproductions, or peripheral reverse engineering)
• Techniques for bypassing or understanding modern anti-cheat systems (purely educational/research-focused; no live exploitation demos against active services)
• New Anti-cheat measures and research (e.g. AI detections)
• Exploitation of vulnerabilities in games whether modern titles, retro consoles, PC engines, or mobile games
• Speedrunning tools, glitch hunting, or software-assisted speedrunning advancements (e.g., TAS development)
• Game preservation efforts, including server reimplementations, protocol reverse engineering, source code restoration, or emulation enhancements
• Historical perspectives on game cheating, modding scenes, or notable hacks/exploits from past decades
• Reverse engineering of game engines, file formats, networking protocols, or AI behaviors
• Emulation advancements, accuracy improvements, or hardware-level emulation challenges