| Adiyaman, Ismail; Bika, Chrysa; Dyrda, Daniel | Creating Memorable Player Experiences Through Level Design: A Case Study of Elden Ring’s Siofra River Well Elevator Scene | Player experience in digital games emerges from the interplay between design and psychological responses, often producing memorable moments. This paper presents a qualitative case study of the Siofra River Well elevator scene in Elden Ring (FromSoftware, 2022), examining how level design shapes memorability. Combining structural analysis of the environment with observations of player behavior, we show how spatial guidance, pacing, and staged revelation create a sequence of curiosity, anticipation, and awe. We propose a candidate design pattern capturing these interactions, offering designers a structured reference for crafting similarly memorable player experiences. | Late Breaking Short Papers |
| Anderson, Craig G.; Eshgarf, Nasim; Carpenter, Zack; DeLiema, David | Designed to Fail: Puzzle Game Developers’ Perspectives on Designing Challenge and Failure | Video games invert our expected relationship with failure – rather than avoiding it, players actively pursue games where failure is frequent. The viewpoint previous work has generally taken centers on players encountering hard-coded fail-states as defined by the game. However, scholars have pointed out that game communities often set their own goals (i.e. speedrunners), changing what it means to fail. A perspective still being considered is how developers themselves conceptualize designing games in which players can happily fail, specifically within different genres. This study contributes to this through semi-structured interviews with 20 puzzle game developers, identifying commonalities in their design philosophies, approaches to designing challenge, conceptualizations of failure, and criteria for puzzle quality. Through inductive thematic analysis, we show that puzzle developers reframe failure away from performance-based definitions. Rather than centering incorrect attempts, they conceptualize failure primarily as total player disengagement and consider this to be a failure in design. Further, puzzle developers regard player setbacks as intentional learning mechanisms encouraging experimentation that leads players to the solution, centering expectations to give permission for exploration and “failing” in service of understanding. Through this paper, we show how developers set player expectations and goals to create a unique relationship with failure. | Game Design |
| Avila, Tania Olarte | Designing a Practice-Based Mobile Prototype for Mental Health Literacy through Emotional Granularity and Reflective Play | Mental health literacy, the ability to recognise, understand, and respond to mental health-related concepts, is essential for early intervention and wellbeing. Awareness remains uneven, and stigma continues to limit seeking help. Game design is also a powerful medium for education, symbolism, and reflective engagement. This paper presents Library of Emotions, a practice-based mobile prototype that explores how mental health literacy may be fostered through emotional granularity and reflective play. The project embeds literacy into its mechanics, supporting awareness and more precise emotional naming. It supports early recognition rather than treatment. Emotional granularity, understood as the ability to recognise and label emotions with precision, is associated with resilience and adaptive coping. The project asks how mobile game design can foster mental health literacy through emotional granularity and by translating mental health techniques into tactile, symbolic mechanics. Building on reflective play research, the project explores how symbolic and tactile mechanics might help players engage with and reconsider emotional experience through gentle interaction. A practice-based methodology guides iterative prototyping, translating brief reflective techniques into tactile mobile interactions. The project embeds literacy into play by prompting precise emotion choices and connecting them to symbolic mini-games and reflection. It offers a design approach that supports awareness, precision in naming, and safe reflection. | Late Breaking Short Papers |
| Aycock, John; Biittner, Katie; Olguin, Minori; Asad, Hira | LAVA: Large-scale Archaeological Videogame Analysis | Early videogames are foundational to the modern game industry, yet studying them is not straightforward. These games’ development is distant in time, their source code and knowledge of their creation frequently lost, and sometimes only fragmentary evidence remains – the precise conditions that archaeologists are used to working with. Studying videogames from the viewpoint of the discipline of archaeology offers the potential for new insights. But it too presents challenges: specifically, how videogames’ implementation and patterns of usage can be studied at scale in a systematic, scientific way. New tools are needed to capture this dynamic process. We present one such tool, LAVA, a prototype that we have already used to study the implementation of a small corpus of games in low-level detail. Not all uses of LAVA need be so fine-grained, however; a critical piece of LAVA is the data it collects. LAVA’s data-gathering pipeline is easily and quickly reconfigured for different platforms, and we compare data collection for 13 game consoles and computers. Further, we illustrate the general utility of LAVA’s data through a series of example use cases involving over 50 games in total, demonstrating how the data can be used for game research including platform studies, and how LAVA’s data opens the door for involvement and new perspectives on videogame implementation from the digital humanities and data science. | Game Analytics and Visualization |
| Baars, Arthur; Akker, Fabian; Chatzimparmpas, Angelos; Pfau, Johannes | Ctrl + Create: Empowering Creative Control in AI-Driven Rapid Level Design | Level design is one of the most labor-intensive processes in video game development — especially because communicating a creative vision across designers, artists, writers, and gameplay engineers requires extensive iterative refinement. Traditionally, this involves rounds of white boxing and set dressing, which distributes labor effectively but limits rapid exploration and creative experimentation. Recent advances in AI-driven image generation offer timely opportunities to transform these workflows, but risk losing control to the model’s interpretation and capabilities. We investigate the impact of generative AI on designers’ control, expressiveness and efficiency through a mixed-methods study (n=20), comparing drawing (full control), text-to-image (full AI), and our approach: A visualization pipeline combining generative AI with user-centered spatial control. It succeeded in enhancing visual expressiveness and sense of control over bare AI, matched manual drawing (without necessitating advanced skills), and enabled faster iteration — highlighting the potential of giving back control to creative visionaries. | GenAI |
| Baghi, Amir Masood; Sjölund, Jens; Bergdahl, Joakim; Gisslen, Linus; Sestini, Alessandro | Improving Sample Efficiency in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Simulated Football Games via Exploration | Multi-agent reinforcement learning has shown promise in learning cooperative behaviors in team-based environments. However, such methods often demand extensive training time, which inhibits their application for game-AI in standard game development. For instance, the state-of-the-art method TiZero takes 40 days to train high-quality policies for a football environment. In this paper, we hypothesize that better exploration mechanisms can improve the sample efficiency of multi-agent methods. Thereby, we propose utilizing a random network distillation bonus within the multi-agent TiZero framework, aiming to better address exploration. Additionally, we introduce architectural modifications to the original algorithm to enhance TiZero’s computational efficiency. We evaluate the sample efficiency of our approach against original TiZero through extensive experiments. Our results show that random network distillation improves training sample efficiency per single training phases in a curriculum-like setup and enhances generalization and adaptability to previously difficult scenarios compared to the original TiZero; this highlights the better applicability of our variant in practical game development settings. Lastly, we qualitatively evaluate the gameplay of the models produced against a heuristic AI, with the random network distillation leading to a more proactive gameplay as demonstrated by its higher accuracy in shooting, as well as exhibiting more stability. | Game Artificial Intelligence |
| Biittner, Katie; Newell, Paul; Aycock, John | No Prototypical Prototypes | Not all game prototypes are created equal. Over forty years ago at the start of the game industry, people were creating prototypes whose purpose was not a direct evolutionary step towards a finished game. Based on oral history and access to a set of unique physical and digital artifacts, we document some non-prototypical ways that prototypes were used at that time. Moreover, we examine this human-technology interaction in terms of the archaeological study of another human technology – stone tools – to refine our understanding of what a game prototype is. | Late Breaking Short Papers |
| Bisberg, Alexander J.; Chen, Emily; Williams, Dmitri; Ferrara, Emilio | Extending STRIVE to World of Tanks: A Cross-Game Validation of a Socio-behavioral Player Taxonomy | STRIVE is a socio-behavioral taxonomy framework for multiplayer games organized around cross-game dimensions such as sociality, communication, and experience. We extend STRIVE from Sky: Children of the Light, an exploration-focused social game, to World of Tanks (WoT), a markedly different game centered on team combat, persistent social ties, and competitive performance. Using three player data snapshots from 2020 and the original clustering pipeline, we recover four stable player types: Veterans, Socialites, Squad Players, and Newbies. These segments persist across time and align with the core STRIVE dimensions while adding a WoT-specific performance dimension. Prediction experiments further show that future battle frequency varies in predictability across player types: Veterans and Squad Players are consistently more predictable than Socialites and Newbies. Together, these findings support STRIVE as a generalizable framework for comparing social play across multiplayer games rather than a taxonomy tied to a single title. | Late Breaking Short Papers |
| Cai, Xuyuan; Carstensdottir, Elin | Transdiegetic Sound in Narrative-Driven Strategy Games | Game sound, as a feedback mechanism, functions along a diegetic continuum that bridges the boundary between player, game systems, and narrative. In narrative-driven strategy games, this continuum becomes especially important, as audio must communicate diegetically relevant information about story and character, while also supporting complex decision making. This raises key questions about how transdiegetic sound relates to design, narrative, and player experience for this genre. Specifically, how transdiegetic sound is incorporated into feedback systems in narrative-driven strategy games, and what kind of information they are used to communicate. In this paper, we examine the use of transdiegetic sound as form of feedback by analyzing 11 commercial narrative-focused strategy game titles. We map how such audio cues are designed for both narrative and gameplay functions, the specifics of how they traverse the diegetic boundaries, and discuss how these designs may shape player experience. Building on related work on transdiegetic sound in games, this study documents recurring design patterns and cues, and explores their communicative role within the context of narrative-driven strategy games. | Game Design |
| Caravello, Jenna | Interactive Animation: Affective Involvement at the Convergence of Games and Animation | This paper traces the fate of two estranged but related practices—digital animation and video games. I locate an intersection where these sibling modalities diverged but were always fated to reunite, forming an emergent discipline that inherits aspects of Gordon Calleja’s Player Involvement Model while complicating Rogier Caillois’ categories of play. This grey area of subversive gamification and platform hybridity, where animation and game agency collapse, is the terrain of Interactive Animation. There is a frustrating conceptual liminality between video games and digital animation as distinct practices, when at once games rely on animated assets and the practice of animation is defined as sequential, hand-made media—which also describes games. Early games emphasized challenge, shaping how we read animation within them: player-instigated movement became movement in service of agency. Gesture evolves alongside technology, giving players new kinds of agency and access to more spatially complex challenges. But this divergence was never necessary. Interactivity is implied in animation—in hand-manipulated puppetry, or even in indentations on spinning pottery. Hybridity emerges when each discipline absorbs the other’s values. In gallery-based media arts, we see works built in game engines but grounded in cinematic and fine-arts priorities. These works borrow game engines but center cinematic and fine arts values—not gamified challenges, but expressive, polemical digital animation inside interactive systems. My thinking is grounded in the idea that animation and games share a closeness to the human hand. This closeness, through interactivity, becomes a mechanism for processing affective experiences. Interactive Animation offers forms of kinesthetic and relational involvement that, as Sabine Harrer suggests, open new pathways for meaning-making, coping, and emotional learning. Here, digital animation escapes asset status, games escape industrial constraint, and both sibling disciplines share equal importance, offering new opportunities for meaning-making and negotiating embodied experience. References: Calleja, G. (2011). In-game: From immersion to incorporation. MIT Press. Caillois, R. (2001). Man, play and games (M. Barash, Trans.). University of Illinois Press. (Original work published 1958) Furniss, M. (2007). Art in motion: Animation aesthetics (2nd ed.). John Libbey Publishing. Harrer, S. (2018). Games and bereavement: How video games represent death and grieving. Transcript Verlag. | Abstracts |
| Chang, Ziyan; Yan, Chenyu; Zhang, Meiyi; Lee, Jun Hee | Playing with Reality: Game-Like Structures in Reality Television | This study examines the gamification of contemporary reality television by demonstrating how structured, competition-based formats systematically incorporate formal game design elements in non-game contexts. Drawing on Tracy Fullerton’s framework of formal game design elements (Player, Objective, Procedures, Rules, Resources, Conflict, Boundary, and Outcome), the study claims that reality TV has evolved beyond the observational “docusoap” style of the 1990s into highly engineered game-like systems that generate narrative tension and commercial replicability. Through detailed case studies of four major reality genres: adventure (Survivor, The Amazing Race), audition/competition (The Voice, Project Runway), social experiment (Big Brother, The Circle), and dating (Love Island UK, Love Is Blind), the analysis reveals consistent parallels: contestant function as players pursuing clear win conditions; scripted procedures and strict rules create controlled progression; scarce resources and elimination mechanics drive conflict; physical or conceptual “magic circles” separate the game world from ordinary life; and deterministic yet unpredictable outcomes sustain dramatic uncertainty. These structural similarities illustrate that many successful reality formats are effectively produced as rule-based games with real people as players, offering producers a systematic, albeit largely confidential, methodology where game design has the possibility to replace traditional dramatic scripting. By applying established game design frameworks to reality television production, this paper provides an accessible analytical lens for a field that lacks transparent academic methodologies due to the proprietary nature of format bibles. The findings highlight how gamification enables precise control over difficulty, pacing, and interpersonal drama, transforming unscripted human behavior into compelling, repeatable entertainment products. | Abstracts |
| Cohen, Evyatar; Herzberg, Tamir; Bialo, Danil | Breaking News | Inspired by the days when smacking a glitchy TV seemed to fix it, Breaking News is a chaotic comedy adventure where you can change reality by hitting an old CRT TV. | Games and Demos |
| Conti, Leonardo | Defining Single-player Video Games NPC Societies: An Ethnographic Approach | Single-player video games can present complex worlds inhabited by non-player characters (NPCs) that form societies with their own infrastructures, institutions, and cultural norms. These societies are not merely decorative settings, but functioning social environments shaped by rules, routines, economies and communities at various level of independence. However, despite the complexity and richness of these worlds, academic research in game studies has traditionally focused primarily on human players and their interactions with digital systems. While multiplayer virtual environments have already been studied through ethnographic approaches, the societies represented within single-player video games, composed entirely of artificial agents, have rarely been treated as autonomous objects of research. This PhD research fills this gap by treating singleplayer video game worlds as legitimate objects of social inquiry, asking whether methodologies from anthropology and sociology, in particular regarding ethnography, can be applied to societies composed entirely of non-human agents. Rather than approaching single-player video games solely as ludic artifacts, this project proposes to examine them as constructed social environments that may reveal insights about social representation, world building and the design of artificial communities. This research seeks to contribute both to the theoretical development of game studies and to broader discussions about digital environments, simulation and the representation of social systems in interactive media. | DocCon |
| Creed, Lewis Matheson; Shu, Dean; Guo, Drason; Wang, Zixuan; Lange-Nawka, Dominik; Wuensche, Burkhard | Rhythm Walker: The Effect of Music Choice and Rhythm in Game-music Integration for Exergames | Sedentary behavior contributes significantly to rising rates of non-communicable diseases in developed countries. Exergames, which combine exercises with games, have been suggested as a scalable intervention by capitalizing on the intrinsic motivation inherent in game mechanics to overcome the traditional motivational gap often observed in routine exercise programs. Music has been shown to enhance mood states, increase arousal, boost self-efficacy, divert user’s conscious attention away from the uncomfortable, exertion-induced sensations of fatigue, and improve performance using an effect called “rhythmic entrainment”. It is hence of interest to the research community how to integrate music and gameplay mechanisms for exergames. In this research we investigate the effect of game-music integration, music choice, and the music’s rhythm, on users performance, enjoyment and motivation by developing and evaluating two outdoor-AR walking games. The first game integrates music and gameplay mechanisms and uses preset music with a BPM of 110-130, which is suitable for fast walking. A user study with n=15 participants found that combining game and music significantly increased interest/enjoyment, effort/importance, and step count but had no effect on pressure/tension and perceived exertion. Participants expressed a strong preference for selecting their own music. The second game integrates a music streaming service into the game enabling users full freedom in music selection. We evaluated the effect of free music selection with a user study with n=10 participants and found while users preferred to select their own songs, they found it significantly harder walk with the beat of the music. Our results suggest that rhythm games can be more effective than music alone. Users need choices but also guidance in music selection in order to balance enjoyment and motivation with exercise-intensity and personalization options are essential. | Games Beyond Entertainment |
| Del Gesso, Christopher | StarGen: A Mixed-Initiative PCG Tool for Galaxy Prototyping and Sci-Fi World Building | StarGen is a deterministic, seed-driven procedural worldbuilding tool that generates coherent settings across multiple scales, from galaxy structure down to individual celestial bodies and their emergent context. The system supports generation and interactive inspection of galaxies (spiral, elliptical, irregular), starfields partitioned into navigable spatial grids, and on-demand synthesis of full stellar systems from selected stars. At the system level, StarGen models single and multi-star configurations, orbit slot placement, and validation of basic dynamical constraints, producing planets, moons, asteroid belts, and ring systems with physically informed attributes (e.g., radiative temperature estimates, atmosphere and surface parametrization, and parent-context effects such as Hill/Roche limits and tidal influences). StarGen includes 3D viewers for objects and solar systems, persistence for objects/systems/galaxies, and a test-driven development foundation emphasizing reproducibility and distributional sanity checks. Ongoing work extends the tool from celestial generation into full-stack worldbuilding: constraint-based regeneration, richer rendering and editing workflows (including undo/redo), and deeper simulation layers for population, infrastructure (e.g., stations), interstellar connectivity (jump routes), and long-horizon history. The long-term objective is an integrated procedural pipeline capable of producing not only astrophysical scaffolding but also inhabitable worlds with evolving ecologies, species niche structures, and civilization-scale dynamics suitable for game development, interactive fiction, and research-oriented procedural content generation. | Games and Demos |
| Demleitner, Adrian; Khaled, Rilla; Blamey, Courtney | Designer as Guest, Collaborating with Materials | This paper presents the analytical phase of the Method for Design Materialization (MDM), a research approach for capturing and theorizing the tacit knowledge produced during video game development. Drawing on an MDM archive of the experimental video game {\em Ostrakinda}, we conduct a detailed walkthrough of Grounded Theory analysis applied to a designer’s reflective documentation, commit messages, and iterative prototypes. Through three coding passes — open coding, axial coding, and a material inquiry grounded in critical code studies — we trace how qualitative analysis of an MDM archive yields empirically derived theory on design practice. The analysis reveals a pattern of retroactive sensemaking in the documentation, pointing to the limits of what designers can articulate mid-process, and crystallizes the emergent theory of the designer as guest: a posture of curious, receptive engagement with design materials rather than confident mastery over them. This framing invites a complementary understanding of design materials as hosts — active participants in a shared, embodied process of making and knowing. We situate these findings within broader debates in new feminist materialism, enactivism, and thing theory, and reflect on the methodological challenges of applying Grounded Theory to one’s own practice. | Late Breaking Short Papers |
| Ding, Leyi; Mao, Xuanyi | “No Way, Did You See That Move?”: Constructing the Entertaining Spectacle in Game Live Streaming | Introduction This study investigates how specific moments in game live-streaming become a spectacle, in the form of emotional climaxes, that triggers intense audience reactions and disseminated as edited highlights. While existing research treats game live-streaming broadly and focuses, on participation motives (Cabeza-Ramírez et al., 2021; Li et al., 2020; Jodén & Strandell, 2022), this study concentrates on specific highlight moments and conceptualizes them as spectacle. To conceptualise this transformation, the study employed an integrated framework that explains how these moments emerge within performance and interactivity in and around the livestreaming, and how they escalate into ritualised collective spectacles. Drawing on Goffman’s (2023) dramaturgy and its extension to live-streaming (Taylor, 2018; Li et al., 2019), the study understands the stream as an ongoing, co-constructed performance in which streamers manage impressions while viewers participate through commentary, responses, and platform-specific tools. This performative environment is further intensified through interactivity, defined as reciprocal communication supported by technologies (Bonner, 2010; Lee, 2005; Rafaeli et al., 2007). Lee’s (2021) multidimensional model clarifies how user control, responsiveness, personalization, and connectedness shape a dynamic co-performance in which meanings are continually negotiated. Within this performance ecology, incongruity humour “charges” particular moments. Following incongruity theory (Raskin, 1985; Morreall, 1983), humour arises from the gap between expectation and outcome. In live-streaming, this occurs when a streamer’s stated intention suddenly collapses into an unexpected twist. Such incongruous disruptions trigger active viewer participation, prompting rapid chat reactions, shared jokes, or collective mocking. These strands collectively explain how particular moments become affectively charged and socially meaningful within the stream. Another explains how charged moments escalate into collective spectacle through ritualised audience participation. Collins’s (2004) interaction ritual model illuminates how synchronous engagement creates collective effervescence. When group co-presence, shared focus, boundary-making, and shared emotional tone align, individual reactions become amplified into a collective, synchronised response. This ritualised escalation marks the shift from an isolated performance mishap to a socially recognised, emotionally intensified moment. Eventually, Debord’s (2021) notion of spectacle helps to understand how these ritualised reactions become hyper-visible cultural products. Once clipped, circulated, and algorithmically amplified, they acquire a “pseudo-reality” that exceeds the original interaction. Spectacle thus emerges from the streamer’s actions, the layered interplay of performance, interactivity, humour, ritual participation, and platform mediation. Methodology This study utilises Androutsopoulo’s (2018) discourse-centred online ethnography and focuses on non-esports streamers on Douyin and Huya who broadcast the multiplayer game Honor of Kings. Recordings capture the gameplay, the discourse of the streamers, and the chat. Highlight moments which cause a surge of audience reactions (e.g., bursts of corresponding danmu) and are later clipped into video are also extracted and analyzed discursively. Preliminary Result Preliminary findings reveal that spectacles emerge in patterned ways. One spectacle archetypes is called ‘xiafan’, which occurs when a streamer’s gameplay strays significantly away from what is expected. For example, one streamer promised a “Penta Kill” (killing all five opponents) but only killed four before dying, leading to flood of repetitive viewers’ phrase such as “xiafan”, “hahaha” in the chat window. This gap between expectation and presentation fits Morreall’s (1983) incongruity humor and generates rapid, repetitive chat reactions. What begins as a single performance disruption is reframed by co-performance (Li et al., 2019) , reconstructing the failure, into a collective emotional climax. As reactions synchronise, Collins’s (2014) interaction ritual unfolds live. Shared focus and the aligned emotions generate “collective effervescence”(Collins, 2014, p. 35). This ritual dynamic amplifies and anchors the moment, making it memorable and suited for extraction as a highlight clip. Once detached from its original moment and recirculated by algorithms, the incident gains new life as a hyper-visible, self-contained piece of entertainment, following Debord’s (2021) spectacle logic, independent of the live-stream’s ordinary flow. In this sense, the spectacle is co-produced and cyclically reproduced, revealing how streaming cultures embed emotional and aesthetic value into brief, humorous performance ruptures. | Abstracts |
| Dormann, Claire; Wallner, Guenter | How Diegetic Maps Shape Wayfinding, Storytelling, and Immersion | Maps have been an essential part of video games since their early days to help player orient themselves in game spaces. However, maps fulfil various purposes beyond pure navigation tasks. In this paper, we specifically focus on diegetic maps, and look at the dimensions of storytelling and wayfinding that emerged through a thematic analysis of video game maps reviews. Our analysis also shows that diegetic maps take on different forms, ranging from passive maps displayed on walls to ’physical’ maps and fully digital maps. We then reflect on how diegetic maps support different forms of immersion, in particular spatial, narrative, and emotional immersion. We highlight the relevance of different map components and elements in influencing immersion. Together, these factors can support specific types of player experiences. Based on our findings, we propose that the immersion of diegetic maps should be examined and evaluated through a multifaceted view of this phenomenon. | Game Design |
| Drucker, Reia; Stanley, Kevin; Fitsner, Elise | Exploring Player Behaviour in Counter-Strike Global Offensive as a Mobility Problem | Understanding how players interact with virtual environments underpins the design of video games and the contextualization of player behaviour. This work extends a framework from human mobility research to the analysis of player movement and camera orientation trajectories in video games, using features that capture spatiotemporal properties of trajectories. We demonstrate the framework’s ability to characterize player behaviour through supervised and unsupervised machine learning tasks conducted on publicly available professional Counter-Strike: Global Offensive match data. We demonstrate that the framework can be used to distinguish between the gameplay environment and side of play of teams with 93% accuracy when using features derived from player movement and 97% accuracy with the addition of camera orientation features. Clustering on features derived from player movement trajectories highlight map archetypes and player roles providing further support for the generalizability of spatial mobility features in a gaming context. We discuss the properties of player movement and camera orientation trajectories in relation to the properties of real-world human mobility trajectories and potential applications in role identification, environment design, anomaly detection, and cross-game analysis. | Game Analytics and Visualization |
| Dua, Ashmita; Kriplani, Devesh; Devgan, Kaashvi | Engram: Personality-Parameterized Schema Memory for NPC Cognitive Diversity | Current NPC memory systems do not encode events based on character personality, limiting cognitive diversity to surface-level dialogue variation, leading to similar or personality-breaking dialogues. We present a system that parameterizes OCEAN (Big Five) personality trait scores with a Prolog-based memory encoding rule enabling NPCs to form structurally different memories from identical experiences. Preliminary evaluation across contrasting personality configurations shows that the resulting memory representations diverge in trait-predicted directions: high-Neuroticism profiles store proportionally more threat-tagged memories, high-Extraversion profiles amplify social event encoding, and low-Openness profiles resist belief revision. This architecture enables emergent cognitive diversity without scripting, grounding NPC memory processing in an established psychological framework. | Late Breaking Short Papers |
| Dyrda, Daniel; Geheeb, Julian; Schacherbauer, Martin; Pirker, Johanna; Klinker, Gudrun | The Pacing Diagram: A Step Toward a Shared Player Experience Language for Game Design | Pacing diagrams are used in game design practice to represent player experience as a temporal structure. However, the term currently refers to heterogeneous and informal artifacts, limiting both interdisciplinary communication and computational use. We propose a minimal formal reference description of pacing diagrams for linear player experience sequences. The contribution defines the core structural elements of the diagram and frames pacing diagrams as both communicative design artifacts and structured representations. This formalization provides a shared point of reference for design practice while enabling consistent interpretation by tools and computational systems. As a first step, it establishes a foundation for more comparable, interoperable, and analyzable representations of player experience in game design. | Late Breaking Short Papers |
| Dyrda, Daniel; Lucas, Felipe Wink Rodrigues; Schacherbauer, Martin; Bika, Chrysa; Geheeb, Julian; Pirker, Johanna | Game Design Pillars: Between Concept and Practice | Design pillars are widely used in game development as high-level principles that define the intended player experience and guide design decisions. Despite their prevalence in industry practice, their role remains underexplored in academic literature. This paper provides a structured description of design pillars and investigates their use through an exploratory questionnaire study with game developers. The results show that design pillars are well understood and commonly used to support early design decisions and team alignment. However, their application is often inconsistent, declines over the course of development, and is challenged by vagueness, difficulty in operationalization, and insufficient documentation. These findings reveal a gap between the conceptual role of design pillars and their practical use. We discuss implications for game design practice and outline directions for future work toward more structured, player-experience-oriented design processes. | Late Breaking Short Papers |
| Endrovski, Bojan; Van Toll, Wouter; Bidarra, Rafael | xs: A Code-First Game Engine for Rapid Procedural Content Generation | xs is an extra-small, open-source game engine designed for rapid procedural content generation. Built on three core principles, code-first development, rapid ideation, and a focus on PCG, it uses the Wren scripting language to let developers write, compile, and hot-reload game logic in milliseconds. A Data Registry automatically exposes parameters to a runtime UI, creating a tight feedback loop for tuning generative algorithms. Built-in primitives for grids, procedural meshes, noise, and Voronoi diagrams provide ready-made building blocks, while native coroutine support enables step-by-step visualization of the generation process. The engine’s thin layered architecture supports six platforms from a single compact codebase. We demonstrate xs through three examples: a roguelike with multiple dungeon generation algorithms, a racing game with procedurally generated tracks, and a platformer showcasing rapid iteration and console deployment. Link: https://youtu.be/XZ1bzZ8R0wE?si=Atb67TYyACz11veY | Games and Demos |
| Escarce Junior, Mário; Johns, Mj; Shukla, Shivam; Lee, Darian; Hendawy, Mennatullah; Jul, Susanne; Isbister, Katherine; Seif El-Nasr, Magy | Talking Wildfire: How Discourse in Serious Games Shapes Collaborative Learning and Preparedness | Wildfire preparedness is a deeply social challenge that depends on shared understanding, coordinated action, and community-level decision-making. Serious games have emerged as promising tools to support this kind of learning, yet their evaluation often relies on individual outcomes or surveys, leaving the interactional processes behind collaborative learning largely unexamined. This paper addresses this gap by analyzing how players from wildfire-affected communities co-constructed knowledge while playing Firesafe Friends, a two-player preparedness game. Using the Discourse Acts framework, we coded dialogue from onsite and remote sessions (n=20) and triangulated these findings with pre/post surveys and observational notes. Our analysis reveals distinct phases of collaborative learning – orientation, strategy formation, active collaboration, and reflection – each marked by shifts in cognitive, social, and integrated discourse acts. Budget constraints prompted negotiation, contested upgrades spurred collective reasoning, and reflective talk supported players in connecting in-game decisions to real-world preparedness. We contribute (1) an empirical analysis of discourse as a mechanism for resilience learning, (2) a discourse-centered, triangulated evaluation method, and (3) design implications for resilience games that scaffold negotiation and reflection to strengthen community preparedness. | Games Beyond Entertainment |
| Fellner, Lucas | one-room-apartment | This is a game without a story. one-room-apartment is an experimental narrative game that explores the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) as co-creative storytellers. Set inside a small one-room apartment, the game removes the traditional concept of a pre-authored plot and instead allows the narrative to emerge through a collaborative process between the player and an AI narrator. Players interact with everyday objects in the environment, and each action prompts the LLM to generate the character’s thoughts, feelings, and observations in first-person perspective. Across three in-game days, these interactions gradually construct a unique narrative and character profile shaped by player decisions and generative AI responses. The game features three levels of interaction between player and LLM: simple prompts, multiple-choice, and open text input, allowing players to influence the story with varying degrees of agency. In addition to generating text, the AI also contributes to environmental storytelling by adjusting lighting and sound based on the AI’s interpretation of the emotional tone of the current narrative trajectory. By combining player input with generative AI, the project demonstrates how LLMs can enable highly adaptive storytelling and create unique narrative outcomes in each playthrough. The result is a playable prototype that explores new possibilities for emergent narratives, player-driven storytelling, and experimental game design through AI-assisted co-creation. | Games and Demos |
| Fowler, Allan; Dodd, Michaela; Zaini, Athirah; Bai, Xue; Mai, Tian; Khosmood, Foaad | Game Development for Diverse Academic Backgrounds: Designing an Inclusive Pedagogy | This paper examines the design and delivery of an undergraduate Game Design elective tailored for students from non-computing disciplines. Conducted over three years in three editions of the same course, this study involves 215 students, 4 teaching staff members, and 9 teaching assistants. We outline the pedagogical approach adopted to support learners with limited technical backgrounds and describe the key learning activities implemented throughout the course. We present data on student perceptions and engagement, highlighting both successes and areas for improvement. We offer critical reflection on the challenges encountered, including balancing technical complexity with accessibility and fostering creative confidence. Finally, we share practical insights and recommendations for educators seeking to integrate authentic game development experiences into curricula for non-cognate learners. | Games Pedagogy |
| Freire, Vitor; Grimord, Monique; Turtle, Grace | Unimaginable Red | The Red Light District is more than an iconic neighborhood—it’s a cultural and historical landscape filled with complex narratives. Often portrayed as “wild” and in need of control, it’s also a place of resistance, creativity, and liberation. Unimaginable Red reimagines this space, offering an alternative vision: a “rewilding” of the district that celebrates diverse imaginaries and crafts bold, alternative lifeworlds. Unimaginable Red is an artistic game inspired by pleasure activism, stories and heritage of social movements in Amsterdam. Developed in collaboration with a group of imagineers—including trans and queer activists, sex workers, heritage experts, and residents—the game transforms the Red Light District into a parallel reality: an autonomous island with its own pleasure economy. As a player, you take charge of spreading pleasure energy and nurturing the island’s vibe. You’ll encounter characters in three evolving states: confused wanderers, eager seekers, and those who’ve reached euphoric heights. Your mission is to guide them, share powerful vibe artifacts, and keep the cycle of joy alive while protecting the island from looming threats. This whimsical yet subversive game world invites players to engage with surreal, playful interactions and rethink the meaning of autonomy, connection, and pleasure. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3lzHQMOpHY https://www.figma.com/deck/9kaBuivxzrkAaxHgSrmywc/IDFA-Intro?node-id=1-104&t=U5n3fuEKcvEUSgCf-1 https://festival.idfa.nl/en/film/728ee5de-c663-4987-b873-7756fb615e08/unimaginable-red/ | Games and Demos |
| Geheeb, Julian; Schwarz, Marvin Julian; Dyrda, Daniel; Groh, Georg | LLMs are the Ideal Candidate for Mixed-Initiative Game Design Pillar Workflows | Game Design Pillars are natural language artifacts commonly used in game development to communicate a project’s core vision and ensure a coherent player experience. Their linguistic nature aligns well with the strengths of Large Language Models (LLMs), which excel at generating and interpreting natural language, making them strong candidates for supporting mixed-initiative workflows centered on design pillars. In this study, we introduce a formal definition of game design pillars, present an initial prototype—SPINE—and investigate the utility of LLMs in the creation and decision-making processes associated with pillar-driven workflows. We begin with a pre-study to identify an appropriate model, comparing gemini-2.0-flash and GPT-4o-mini. Results show that Gemini is better suited to our tasks due to greater output variety and consistency. We then conduct a case study by deploying the tool at a local game jam. Findings indicate positive reception and clear value in integrating SPINE into early-stage development. Finally, we interview four experts, demonstrating the tool and allowing them to experiment with it in a controlled environment. While individual perspectives vary, the overall perception is encouraging and supports our intuition: LLMs can meaningfully contribute to game design pillar workflows. These early findings highlight the potential of formalizing pillar-driven design as a research space and point toward several promising avenues for future work. | GenAI |
| Gerbeaud, Axel; Lorcet, Leo; Campan, Loan; Dockhorn, Alexander; Wolf, Florian; Lherbier, Aurélien; Addoum, Maël | Large Language Models for Behavior Trees Generation in Unreal Engine | Behavior Trees (BTs) enable dynamic and strategic gameplay by controlling non-player characters (NPC) in video games, but their construction and iterative refinement remain time-consuming and technically demanding for game developers. This project explores the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) within Unreal Engine 5 (UE5) as a tool to automatically generate BTs from natural language prompts, thereby reducing the complexity of designing game AI and accelerating the production pipeline. In order to choose the adapted model in terms of coherence and practicability for local integration, multiple models such as LLaMA, Mistral, Hermes, and Tessa were benchmarked within UE5. Results revealed that models under 2,5 GB provided the best trade-off between performance and output quality. The LLaMA 3.2 3B Instruct model was found to be particularly suitable. In this study, we have thus developed a tool based on the Llama-Unreal Plugin to implement a local LLM into the engine. A custom prompt interface was implemented in the UE5 editor, allowing users to submit natural language inputs. The model responds with an XML description of the BT, which is then parsed and instantiated as a native BT asset in UE5. The XML schema was carefully designed to accommodate different node types (tasks, composites, decorators). The implemented system was tested with simple NPC’s behaviors like seeking and chasing the player for a guardian, or like a boss fight sequence for a dragon. It successfully produced functional BTs from simple prompts in various gameplay scenarios. Early results have shown how LLMs can streamline the creation of Game AI. The system could be extended to support more complex and hierarchical BTs, improve error handling in XML parsing, and integrate with other game engines such as Unity or Godot. | Game Artificial Intelligence |
| Ghotbabadi, Talayeh Dehghani; Seif El-Nasr, Magy; Hodel, Tobias | AI-Supported and Socially-Augmented Gamification to Overcome Behavioral Barriers in Sustainable Cooking | Although young adults frequently intend to cook sustainably, everyday behavioral barriers often prevent these intentions from becoming action. Survey data from 117 participants and workshop insights from 22 participants identified three core inhibitors of vegetable use: action uncertainty, low cooking self-efficacy, and decision fatigue. These findings suggest that sustainable cooking behavior is limited not by motivation, but by a lack of real-time support that helps users act at the moment of choice. We developed FlavorLoop, an AI-driven and gameful cooking assistant grounded in Self-Determination Theory. FlavorLoop provides AI action guidance through a flavor-pairing ingredient graph that generates context-aware meal suggestions and rationale, supports competence through adaptive step-by-step cues, and activates behavior through game mechanics such as progress indicators, micro-goals, supportive feedback, and a Social Co-Cooking Challenge that enables users to join live, AI-guided cooking sessions with friends. To examine whether FlavorLoop reduces the behavioral barriers that sustain the intention to action gap, we conducted a seven-day simulated field probe with twelve participants. Each day, participants completed short scenario tasks involving real ingredients, AI- supported guidance, and reflections on hesitation, confidence, and action initiation. Findings indicate that FlavorLoop reduced uncertainty and emotional load, enhanced perceived competence, and supported initiation of cooking actions that had previously been postponed. Participants frequently described the Social Co-Cooking Challenge as especially motivating because it created accountability, playfulness, and mutual encouragement. These results suggest that AI-supported and SDT-informed gamification can meaningfully reduce behavioral barriers in sustainable cooking practice. | Games Beyond Entertainment |
| Giusti, Federica Serena; Sevinçli, Mehmet Can; Masthoff, Judith F. M.; Poeller, Susanne | Angry Men, Pretty Women: Gendered Emotional Design in MOBA and Hero-Shooter Games | Gender representation still frequently falls short in video games, with titles often portraying stereotypical roles, under-representing female characters, or lacking diverse gender identities. The present research explored diversity in facial expressions based on the gender of game characters and players across League of Legends, Dota 2, Overwatch, and Valorant. We recruited a total of 99 participants for an online study. We presented approximately 20 game characters to each participant and asked them to discern the predominant emotional expression (neutral, happiness, anger, disgust, fear, sadness, surprise, alluring, or determined). They further rated the emotional intensity, followed by indicating their familiarity with the presented game characters. We found that the emotional expressions of the game characters portray gender stereotypes in the design such as anger mainly being expressed by male characters, while female characters are more likely to be presented as alluring. Greater familiarity was associated with more specific readings, whereas less familiarity results in ascribing more stereotypical emotions. Our findings are discussed with implications for game designers and the gaming industry in mind. | Game Design |
| Gnatyuk, Vitaly; Koriukina, Valeriia; Levoshevich, Ilya; Nurminskiy, Pavel; Wallner, Guenter | With the Stroke of a Brush: A Generative-AI Smart Brush for Instant Game Map Editing | With video games steadily increasing in complexity, automated generation of game content has found widespread interest. However, the task of 3D gaming map art creation remains largely underexplored to date due to its unique complexity and domain-specific challenges. To this end, we introduce a novel Smart Brush for map editing, designed to assist artists in seamlessly modifying selected areas of a game map with minimal effort. By leveraging generative adversarial networks (GANs) and diffusion models we propose two variants of the brush that both enable efficient and context-aware generation. Our hybrid workflow aims to enhance both artistic flexibility and production efficiency, enabling the refinement of environments without manually reworking every detail, thus helping to bridge the gap between automation and creative control in game development. A comparative evaluation of our two methods with adapted versions of several state-of-the art models shows that our GAN-based brush produces the sharpest and most detailed outputs while preserving image context. In contrast, the evaluated state-of-the-art models tend towards blurrier results and exhibit difficulties in maintaining contextual consistency. | GenAI |
| Goel, Dave; Guzdial, Matthew; Sarkar, Anurag | Finite Automata Extraction: Low-data World Model Learning as Programs from Gameplay Video | World models are often neural network-based models that attempt to approximate an entire video game. Existing world models are not practical for game developers due to their large scale, lack of accessibility, their prompt-based interfaces, and their nature as black box models where developers cannot access the code. In this paper, we propose an approach, Finite Automata Extraction (FAE), that learns a neuro-symbolic world model represented as programs in a novel domain-specific language (DSL): Retro Coder. The neuro-symbolic world model structure allows for low data learning, meaning we can learn these models from a single gameplay video. This model’s structure means that developers can directly access code to change the behaviour of the model, and it’s low data cost makes it more accessible. In a comparison to prior neural world model approaches, FAE learns a more precise model of the environment and it learns more general code than prior DSL-based approaches. | Game Artificial Intelligence |
| Gonzalez, Johor Jara; Guzdial, Matthew | An Exploration of Collision-based Enemy Morphology Generation | Despite a great deal of prior research into Procedural Content Generation (PCG), relatively little prior work has explored generating enemies for video games. In particular, there is almost no work on generating enemy morphologies, the basic body plan or collision information for in-game enemies, despite the existence of related morphology generation work in robotics. In this paper, we explore three different novel approaches to generate enemy morphologies based on player collision information. We found that each approach provides different strengths and weaknesses, but all had equivalent or better performance than an evolutionary baseline adapted from prior robotics morphology work. | Game Artificial Intelligence |
| Grace, Lindsay | Play as Interface, Evolving HCI Through Game Verbs | For over 50 years, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) has been dominated by a set of persistent, noun-based metaphors, like the desktop, the file, and the trash can. Our primary interactions, or verbs, have remained similarly limited to typing, clicking, and dragging. These binary interfaces force users to adapt to the computer’s rigid process rather than leveraging innate human instincts. This presentation argues for a paradigm shift from designing interfaces based on nouns to designing them based on verbs. More specifically it argues for the innate psychological benefits of the verbs of play. Play is a fundamental human state for practice, experimentation, and problem-solving. This work proposes a framework for ludic interfaces that tap into this state through practical principles like variable feedback, supporting variance, and unpredictability. This evolution is accelerated by generative artificial intelligence (AI) as a co-designer. AI makes rapid prototyping easier and supports failing faster. However, AI is not a creative substitute. This work demonstrates that simply prompting AI tools to make experiences more playful yields superficial aesthetic changes because playful is not a logic, language or math problem. To build above and beyond AI, designers must guide this dialogical process with a deep understanding of game design science. The work concludes by showing how the play as interface approach is already solving “tough problems” through Human Computation Games (HCG) and can “give life to the monotony of HCI” by turning dialogue into a dance in a few specific commercial application interfaces. In game design, players act through “game verbs,” the fundamental actions like as jump, run, or speak that structure problem-solving[1]. From this lense, designing games is therefore the process of arranging nouns and verbs to create opportunities for meaningful action. Altering these verbs reframes how problems are understood, as demonstrated in alternative games that replace shooting with unshooting or construct solutions through gestures like hugging [2]. In contrast, HCI relies heavily on a narrow set of dominant interaction verbs, like tap, click, and swipe [3]. Even playful gestures such as swiping remain iterative refinements of the same binary interaction logic. Expanding interaction design requires in the least a broader design vocabulary of gesture verbs, such as, slide, cluster, spin, associate, or mingle. These are the first step toward a more expressive, playful and, non-binary forms of engagement. Notably, AI accelerates prototyping and iteration but functions as a co-designer rather than a creator. Superficial outputs in response to vague prompts reveal that AI cannot independently generate meaningful playfulness. More often through gen-AI playful interaction is reduced to the addition of decorative effects or parameter tuning. By employing a grounding in game design interaction designers can better guide AI dialogically and avoid reproducing common design failures, including the proliferation of low-quality, derivative products. AI supports rapid experimentation only when designers know where to focus their inquiry. Some standard ways to further embrace ludic interfaces is to employ a few basic techniques. These include variable feedback, which replaces binary responses with graded ones, exploratory signals which dialogically highlights variance from a standard, offering multiple paths and solutions to support personal agency. The final example explored is constructive unpredictability, which fosters curiosity and sustained engagement by embracing the kind of inspiration that comes from exposing problems in systems (i.e. the gen AI glitch). In practice, human computation games (HCG) illustrate the potential of this model, transforming repetitive tasks into playful systems for misinformation detection, medical image classification, and biological problem-solving [4]. These examples point toward a broader proposition, that play may become a critical modality for training and interacting with AI-supported systems as well as working beyond their wrote generative propensities toward something uniquely matched to the problems a system aims to address. Figure 1: The 2025 Parlor Social Club App, setup interface, makes the selection of interests more playful by depicting them as a constantly bouncing collection of pictographic elements that the player can use basic 2D game physics to push and bounce selections. Figure 2: The commercial game, Borderland’s 3 from Gearbox Entertainment , employs a DNA based human computation game to make players citizen scientists. The isomorph of game play experience illustrates the ways in which basic interface elements can be made playful, turning mundane interface into something more engaging. | Abstracts |
| Gualeni, Stefano; Van de Mosselaer, Nele | Doors (the game) | Imagine the following situation: you open a door in a videogame. One could argue that it is not really you who opened the door, but rather the player-character. Another objection to the idea that doors can be opened in gameworlds is that one does not actually pursue the action of opening doors, but rather that of inputting certain commands in a controlling device. We could even go as far as saying that no door is involved in that interaction to begin with: one simply clicks on a bunch of pixels that are meant to evoke a door in their imagination. Within game studies and in the philosophy of fiction, the representation of game objects has been subject of much debate, as they can be said to have properties of both fictional entities (they do not really exist, but are meant to be imagined to exist) and of actual digital objects (they are objects generated and upheld by computers that one can persistently and intelligibly interact with). Doors is our 2021 attempt at playable philosophy. It was designed to invite players to interactively examine existing theories about how objects are represented within games and virtual worlds more in general. Each door in the game raises a different question regarding their representation. To play the game online: https://doors.gua-le-ni.com/ For a standalone version to be played at exhibitions and festivals: https://doors.gua-le-ni.com/Doors.zip Please let us know if you need more material. A press kit with hi-rez screenshots is available on the website. | Games and Demos |
| Halina, Emily; Guzdial, Matthew | Representing and Generating Levels Over Time through Playtrace Reconstructive Partitioning | Video games are a dynamic medium experienced over time. While there are many Procedural Content Generation (PCG) approaches for generating video game levels, their generation representations often abstract away this dynamic nature of games. In this paper, we introduce a novel, domain-independent “cake” representation for game levels over time which implicitly encodes dynamic information. We present a novel level generation approach Playtrace Reconstructive Partitioning (PRP) specifically developed for this cake representation. We compare against six state-of-the-art PCG approaches in the game domain of Sokoban, and find that our approach can generate valid levels without sacrificing solution diversity. We believe our cake representation more neatly encodes the implicit, dynamic nature of games compared to existing representations, which allows for our domain-agnostic level generation algorithm PRP. | Game Artificial Intelligence |
| Han, Ruiyang | Queer Failure and the Politics of Emotion in Chinese Visual Novel Games: A Case Study of Sweet Home (纸房子) | The experience of failure in video games contains potential queer implications, especially in indie visual novels that provide limited choices and set inherent failures for players. By analyzing the narratives, mechanisms and fan community of a queer visual novel Sweet Home (纸房子), this paper discusses how the power of queer failure emerges from the game and the online players’ community. Sweet Home is a visual novel game based on a Chinese high school girl’s life, offering players interactive choices to build relationships with four female characters that lead to twelve different predetermined endings. Drawing on Halberstam’s (2011) “queer art of failure”, I explore the losses and failures that the players encounter through tragic plots and “wrong choices”, to discover the alternative, non-linear and fragmented experiences of game that resist the hetero/homonormativity in other mainstream video games. Combining Ahmed’s (2010) theory of emotion politics, this paper examines how emotions produced by game mechanisms and fan practices can reorient attachments and open possibilities for queer political imaginaries. Through conducting digital ethnography within online fandom communities, I analyse players’ emotional expressions and discussions about the endings and several failures they cannot change during the gaming process. Findings show that players doubt and refuse the conventional notion of a “happy ending” and celebrate failure through negative and alienated emotions, challenging dominant normative constructions of happiness and collectively envisioning a queer futurity. This paper contributes to queer theorizing in the Chinese digital context by situating Chinese queer visual novels within the frameworks of queer failure and the cultural politics of emotion. It expands the focus on narrative analysis and blends the tenuous divide between aesthetics and politics in existing queer game scholarship by highlighting the overlooked affective and subversive potentials of fan communities in responding to “game failures”. | Abstracts |
| Han, Xuedi; Fuller, Janet | Gender Division and the Reproduction of Identity Discourse in the Game Companion Industry | Asymmetries in gender roles and discourses about men and women have been addressed across various domains, particularly in the employment sector. This study examines gender divisions within the game companion service. Game companions play a role that accompanies their clients in the game to help them win or gain a better gaming experience. As an emerging occupation, the game companion service has evolved in tandem with the expansion of the gaming industry and the gig economy. The study draws on semi-structured interviews with individuals working as game companions. This qualitative approach allows for close attention to workers’ descriptions of their everyday interactions, the expectations they encounter, and the ways they construct and manage their professional identities. The interviews were analyzed thematically to identify recurring patterns in gendered perceptions and the strategies workers adopt in response. Across the interviews, clear gender distinctions emerged. Male companions were frequently assumed to be technically proficient and better suited for achievement-oriented or competitive play. In contrast, female companions were often approached for conversational, emotional, or entertainment-focused interaction. These assumptions shaped not only clients’ expectations but also workers’ own understandings of their roles. Many participants described negotiating tensions between what clients expected of them and how they saw their own abilities. They adopted a range of strategies, from redefining their skill sets to establishing boundaries in client interactions. This article analyses the realities of gender division in game companion industry and identifies the approaches workers use to manage conflicts and identity struggles encountered during service. When the traditional gender roles influence the identity formation and self-perception of game companions, they have developed specific strategies to address gender-related challenges and concerns about identity. | Abstracts |
| Heller, Tobias; Dyrda, Daniel | Understanding Player Movement in 3D Action-Adventure Games: From Mechanics to Implementation | Modern video games exhibit increasingly complex player movement systems, while accessible and well-structured resources on their underlying implementation remain limited. This paper addresses this gap by analyzing player movement in contemporary 3D action-adventure games. We conduct a comparative study of 20 critically acclaimed titles, quantifying their complexity in terms of movement states and thereby identifying 37 distinct movement mechanics. Building on this empirical analysis, we relate observed mechanics to established implementation paradigms drawn from both academic literature and industry practice. By connecting gameplay features to system design strategies, this work provides a foundation for understanding and designing player movement systems. | Late Breaking Short Papers |
| Holland, Benedikt; Maksymchuk, Dmytro; Saxena, Saloni; Munir, Zain; Liutkus, Žygimantas; Hsieh, Tzu-Hsin; Zaidi, Amir; Kegeleers, Marie; Bidarra, Rafael | Experiencing the environmental impact of AI with the VR serious game Outsourced | Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping daily life, yet its environmental costs such as electricity use, freshwater consumption and electronic waste, remain largely invisible to the public. This lack of awareness persists due to both limited corporate transparency and insufficient media attention. To address this gap, we present Outsourced, a virtual reality (VR) serious game designed to raise awareness on AI’s environmental impact. The gameplay combines VR immersion with a dual-perspective narrative, alternating between home and workplace settings, and illustrating how both individual AI use and corporate practices jointly contribute to ecological degradation. Preliminary evaluation of the game shows that Outsourced effectively conveyed the severity of electricity, water, and e-waste involved in AI infrastructure, though participants struggled to connect their personal AI habits to these resource demands. Our work contributes a novel, immersive approach to environmental education, demonstrating how a VR serious game can make abstract ecological issues tangible and personally meaningful. | Games Beyond Entertainment |
| Horn, Benjamin; Holopainen, Jussi; Aarseth, Espen; Grabarczyk, Pawel; Xiao, Leon | The Unbearable Vacuity of Game Mechanics | “Game mechanics” is a frequently referenced yet contested term in game studies. There have been some efforts to define it, of which perhaps the most widely known is Sicart‟s definition of game mechanics as “methods invoked by agents interacting with the game world.” The term has been explored variously for its tangled relationship to game rules, game narrative, or the player’s ability to complete game tasks that involve a non-trivial amount of manual dexterity, among others. Despite its ubiquitous usage, the question of what exactly is a game mechanic persists. Yet rather than attempt to re-define it, this paper proposes that the term has overstayed its welcome and is not productive in the study of games in its current form. Each of the contributing authors offers a position statement in support of this proposal. The concluding discussion establishes the categorial nature of game mechanics and offers some potential solutions for moving beyond it. | Game Criticism and Analysis |
| Huang, Xiaoxuan | Digital Museums in games as Hybrid Spaces: Evolutionary Narratives and Player Participation in Animal Crossing: New Horizons | The Fossil Gallery in Animal Crossing: New Horizons (ACNH)’s museum (ACM) functions as a ‘hybrid museum’, which combines traditional museum authority with active player participation. By examining how ACM’s Fossil Gallery adapts real-world natural history museums’ narratives through game mechanics, this research discusses the new forms of museums’ digital transformation with video games and provides insights in how video games can support more inclusive and co-creative models of cultural participation. This research utilizes a qualitative approach that combines game content analysis, spatial analysis, and museum studies and ludic narrative theory to investigate the mechanics of ACM’s Fossil Gallery. Through game content and spatial analysis, the study explores the spatial design and evolutionary structure of the gallery and identifies how it mimics traditional museums’ environments while providing different participatory opportunities through gameplay. Traditional natural history museums often shape visitors’ understanding of evolution through their spatial organization, presenting exhibits that lead visitors on a linear journey through evolutionary development (Bennett, 1995). In the case of ACM’s Fossil Gallery, its spatial design mirrors a similar design by displaying fossils in chronological order from primitive life forms to human emergence. This arrangement reflects Bennett’s (1995) ‘exhibitionary complex’ that the museum becomes a disciplinary space to impose a narrative of progress. Also, the application of Juul’s (2005) concept of ‘half-real’ and Salen and Zimmerman’s (2004) theory of ‘meaningful play’ helps to examine how player agency interacts with procedural mechanics. Although players can influence fossil collection and donation sequences during gameplay, the game’s algorithm still controls the gallery’s final display. These approaches together help to explain how ACM’s Fossil Gallery blends traditional museum features with participatory, player-driven engagement. ACM’s Fossil Gallery also introduces different curatorial authority through gameplay. Players actively participate in the creation of the gallery by collecting, identifying, and donating fossils, introducing a ‘semi-decentralized’ participation that players can influence the gallery’s construction to some extent, but not final exhibition layouts, which are still controlled by the game’s mechanics. This is consistent with Simon’s (2010) participatory museums, where authority is shared between institution and audience. The hybrid model demonstrates how video games can become digital partners for museums by reimagining curatorial authority. Unlike traditional exhibitions, where visitors passively consume predetermined content, the ACM’s Fossil Gallery transforms the museum experience into a participatory, co-creative process. Therefore, players can help to construct meaning in this virtual museum and make the game a space for enhancing participatory museum practices through digital technology. This study contributes to museums’ digital transformations and video games’ designs with cultural content. By analyzing player agency during the gameplay, it provides insights into how video games can reshape museums’ interaction with their audiences. Additionally, this research offers implications for designing video games that incorporate cultural, historical, and educational content, suggesting that game mechanics can be a medium for meaningful cultural engagement and learning. References: Bennett, T. (1997). The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. Routledge. Juul, J. (2005). Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. MIT Press. Parry, R. (2007). Recoding the Museum: Digital Heritage and the Technologies of Change. Routledge. Salen, K., & Zimmerman, E. (2004). Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. MIT Press. Simon, N. (2010). The Participatory Museum. Museum 2.0. | Abstracts |
| Huang, Zidong; Barroso, Diego | Ludoforming strategies in small-scale open worlds. The design philosophy of Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio | Often, particular cities serve as a setting for narrative development, and in the case of video games, for play as well. Despite the dramatic changes needed to make a preexisting space a playable environment, a designer strives to render those original cities recognizable; there is something that endures after “translation,” a distinctiveness. The Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio has come to be known for the lively and” lived-in” city they have created with Kamurocho. With this kind of design, we may inquire: ●How does a game environment try to conserve and extend the spatial experience of a specific preexisting space? ●How do the ludoforming strategies employed by RGG Studio fit in their overall approach to game design? This paper identifies and compares the techniques employed to translate cities’ “essence” (distinctiveness) into video games. We look at different elements and layers of the district of Kamurocho from the Yakuza/Judgment series (Ryu Ga Gotoku), relating it to its modeling and transformation of a particular area in Tokyo (Kabukicho). We analyze these spaces that manifest the original cities’ essence through a tri-modal methodology based on the following principles and methods: 1. First, we acknowledge the referent, the modality of preexisting (real) spaces that shape a particular virtual environment. Here we turn to Kevin Lynch’s study of -mainly- Los Angeles (1960) for a way to read the image created by real-life cities (in his 2019 comprehensive approach to game-level design, Christopher Totten had already shown the usefulness of Lynch’s five urbanistic elements for a “legible” city). For this first layer, we focus on architecture and urban design (mainly the vertical-horizontal axis), following Lynch and Roberto Venturi (1977A; Venturi et al., 1977), and gauge the “distance to height” proportion of Kamurocho following Ashihara’s study on the primary and secondary profiles of a city (1979). 2. The second spatial modality refers to the ludic topology itself. Building on the previous analysis of Kamurocho as a particular place, we explore the practices and strategies of ‘ludoforming’ (Aarseth, 2019) employed by Ryu Ga Gotoku. Abstracting layers of a built virtual environment (not breaking, but deconstructing; vid. Pearson, 2020) and juxtaposing them with their real-life referents helps us reach previously unexplored levels of urban design within and outside video games. The focus here is on the scale of the modifications, camera control, and behavior, among other elements. 3. Finally, the third modality spouses the idea of “environmental unit” (from urbanist group Atelier Bow-Wow) with the idea of a “narrative garden” (Chapman 2016). This final modality reunites space and life; as such, Adam Chapman’s “narrative garden” provides us with conceptual tools to explore the possibility of constructing diverse narratives. Building on this conceptualization of video game narrative, we identify a design loop between a virtual environment and its stories, or, in more specific terms, between virtual urbanism and its embedded-emergent narratives. Through careful comparisons between the designed spaces within and outside the Yakuza/Judgment world, we articulate strategies or techniques conducive to a vivid experience and creating a lived (virtual) space. Indeed, by examining how the Yakuza/Judgment series translates Kabukicho (real space) into Kamurocho (virtual space), we not only identify clear strategies for developing video game environments but also delve into the ever-evolving relationship between the real and virtual, thus leaving a door open for further research into the mutual influence between urbanism in different realities. | Game Design |
| Ioannou, Nicolas; Frommel, Julian; Sevinçli, Mehmet Can; Poeller, Susanne | “What’s the point?”: How Players Use And Perceive Commendation Systems in Online Multiplayer Games | Commendation systems in online multiplayer games are designed to recognize positive in-game behaviors. Examples include the Honor system (League of Legends) and the Endorsement system (Overwatch). However, we do not know how players use and perceive them. Our mixed-methods study (n = 511) explores how players interact with commendation systems and how they view their usefulness and appeal. Through thematic analysis, we identified four key themes: using commendation systems 1) to reward performance, 2) to reward friendly behavior, 3) without intent or understanding, and 4) distilling preferences for specific versions or features within these systems. We further provide exploratory insights of play-related factors that correlate with high commendation levels, and attitudes towards the systems. We infer that the purpose of commendation systems is not clear to users. We outline aspects in which players need more guidance, and conclude that designers should be more transparent about their intentions and expectations. | Game Analytics and Visualization |
| Jorgensen, Ida Kathrine H.; Halstrøm, Per Liljenberg | The meaning of games is felt not inferred: Stop interpreting games as arguments | This paper proposes a new rhetorical approach to the study of the persuasiveness of computer games. By shifting focus to an epideictic mode of analysis, we argue that games are not primarily vehicles of arguments, but environments that bring values into presence and make them experientially available. In the study of games, rhetoric is applied in two main ways (c.f. Paul 2012): 1) to understand the discourses shaping how games are designed and consumed, focusing on the different ‘texts’ that surrounds games (e.g.Konzack 2007; McAllister 2006; Consalvo & Paul 2013); and 2) to theorize the expressive power of the medium of games, focusing on the elements within games themselves (e.g.Bogost 2007). It is within this latter trajectory that the current approach is positioned. To understand how games persuade us, the field has predominantly focused on argumentation in a narrow, propositional sense. We suggest that this focus, most prominently articulated in Ian Bogost’s (2007) theory of procedural rhetoric, limits how we understand what games do, and how they shape players’ attitudes, identities and values in the moment of gameplay. Furthermore, while Bogost presents procedural rhetoric as a theory of games representation broadly, his analytical focus predominantly fits a certain genre of ‘persuasive games’, ignoring mainstream games for entertainment. Bogost’s influential notion of procedural rhetoric frames games as systems that through rules and algorithmically inscribed processes make claims about “the way systems work in the material world” Bogost (2007, p. 47). This approach treats the medium as a largely neutral container for the conveyance of arguments and assumes that the persuasive force of games lies primarily in the arguments embedded in their procedures, also treating this argument as a singular and recoverable through formal analysis of the mimetic relation between game system and source system. This perspective underestimates the ambiguities and complexity of games as experientially, embodied, and temporally unfolding phenomena, and fails to consider how games cultivate dispositions, make values present, and establish environments in which meaning is felt not only inferred. Although procedural argumentation in games has also been challenged (e.g. Sicart 2011), it still represents a central approach to the rhetorical analysis of games (e.g. Csönge 2024; Evans 2025; Vermeulen 2022). Epideictic rhetoric offers an alternative to procedural argumentation. Epideictic rhetoric is concerned not with deliberation about future actions nor with judgments about past events (forensic rhetoric), but with the rhetorical shaping of values in the present. It is oriented toward praise and blame, towards the constitution and reaffirmation of communal norms (creating what Burke called consubstantiality), and toward making salient what matters here and now (Ovesen 2015). As such, an epideictic analysis of games is less concerned with argumentation, focusing instead on how games stage, amplify and make present values, tensions, and affect within an experiential now. Drawing on examples from a range of contemporary games, including Grand Theft Auto V (2013), Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Nintendo, 2020), and Mario Party Superstars (NDCube, 2021), our presentation discussed and exemplify how an epideictic analysis may shed light on the persuasiveness of computer games. References: Bogost, I. (2007) Persuasive Games. The Expressive Power of Videogames. The MIT Press. Consalvo, M., & Paul, C. A. (2013). Welcome to the discourse of the real: Constituting the boundaries of games and players. Csönge, T. (2024). Agency, Control and Power in Video Games: The Procedural Rhetoric of Inside. Ekphrasis. Images, Cinema, Theory, Media, 31(1), 132-153. Evans, L. (2025). No freedom, no honour: Red Dead Redemption 2 and heritage as procedural rhetoric. In Mobile Heritage (pp. 25-37). Routledge. Konzack, L. (2007). Rhetorics of computer and video game research. The Players’ Realm: studies on the culture of video games and gaming, 110-130. McAllister, K. S. (2006). Game work: Language, power, and computer game culture. University of Alabama Press. Paul, C. A. (2012). Wordplay and the discourse of video games: Analyzing words, design, and play. Routledge. Sicart, M. (2011). Against procedurality. Game studies, 11(3), 209. Vermeulen, L., Birk, M. V., Bateman, S., Schipper, H. S., Nijhof, S. L., & Lu, Y. (2022). “It’s All in the Game” A board game to facilitate disease-related conversations between children with a chronic disease and their peers. In Extended Abstracts of the 2022 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (pp. 140-145). | Abstracts |
| Junnila, Miikka | Actions And Activities As Game Design Building Blocks For Varied Theme-Centric Gameplay | Designing actions and activities is central to making games that both challenge the player through gameplay and let them be im- mersed into the narrative theme of the game. While games often simulate some sort of reality, only a limited amount of actions can be modeled into the simulation. In this research I explore how the actions implemented into two games, Red Dead Redemption 2 and Ghost of Tsushima DIRECTOR’S CUT are used in different con- texts to diversify the player experience, both making the gameplay feel less repetitive and giving the player more narrative agency by letting them act in new ways within the game world. These new contexts can either frame a single action like shooting into some other context than a firefight, for example by letting the player shoot the rope off of a person being hanged, or the new context can be formed through creating activities. These are built by rearrang- ing or re-contextualizing existing actions and other game elements to form new kinds of dynamics into the game, like, for example, when the shooting and sneaking actions are used to make the player hunt animals instead of using them in a firefight. Examples of these techniques are identified from both games, also showing how they are linked to the games’ themes. They create variation and nuances to gameplay that often relies much on tried and tested genre-based fighting and exploration activities. | Game Design |
| Juul, Jesper; Emil, Lundedal Hammar; Murphy, Dooley; Alessandro, Canossa | The Partial Truth about Virtual Objects: How Users Reason About and Explore Intentionally Simplified Environments | There is a popular story about technology in which virtual objects and virtual reality are, or will soon become, “digital twins” of the regular world. In this narrative, a virtual experience possesses (or will possess) all the details of what it represents, making virtual reality “transparent,” with no need to design or learn new interfaces. This story is propagated not only by technology companies but also by designers seeking perfect immersion and presence, and by what we term “Matrix philosophy”: a focus on hypothetical future technology, such as seen in movies, at the expense of existing technologies and experiences. To counterbalance this, we conducted four exploratory studies of how 47 individuals reasoned about and interacted with virtual objects. We examined 1) the reality status users assigned to physical, pictured, and virtual objects; 2) how users used visual style to identify affordances; 3) how novice VR users explored the affordances of virtual objects through direct manipulation; and 4) whether users perceived software as designed intentionally, such that the implementation of an object depends on its intended use. In the studies, users took the properties of pictured and physical objects for granted, but explored the properties of virtual objects in detail, reasoning about them using varied and ad hoc cues—visual style, context, framing, interaction, and genre experience. In hand-tracked VR, novice users approached objects holistically, learning the specific laws and inconsistencies of a simulated world rather than expecting perfect realism. Across all studies, participants tacitly or explicitly understood that virtual objects are pared-down simulacra built for specific purposes, rather than wholesale attempts at recreating their real-world analogues. These studies support what we call the Partialist view: Virtual objects are not fully fictional, real, or unreal, but are intentionally selective and partial implementations of a given object. The study, design, and philosophy of virtual objects must therefore focus on the partial implementations, design decisions, and user strategies for the virtual objects and environments that actually exist. | Game Criticism and Analysis |
| Kawamoto, Takeshi; Perera, Maharage Nisansala Sevwandi; Zimmer, Franziska; Kobayashi, Ryosuke; Irvan, Mhd; Yamaguchi, Rie Shigetomi | Constructing a Replay-Derived Dataset of Controller Operations for Player Authentication in Fighting Games | Player authentication is important to ensure fairness in esports, and fighting games present a particularly challenging setting because of their discrete and limited input modalities and rapidly changing gameplay situations. While prior work has demonstrated the feasibility of controller-operation-based authentication in this domain, it has evaluated the approach only on a single title, leaving the empirical basis for this line of research still narrow. In this paper, using replay data from GUILTY GEAR -STRIVE-, we present a method for constructing a dataset for player authentication, which integrates three types of information: controller operation logs, battle progression, and battle attributes. To demonstrate its utility, we apply an existing controller-operation-based authentication method and show that the dataset supports the evaluation of such methods. We also analyze the relationship between player proficiency and authentication performance, and show that authentication tends to become more difficult as player proficiency increases. Our results show replay-derived data are practical for evaluating and analyzing player authentication in fighting games. | Late Breaking Short Papers |
| Kejstová, Magdaléna; Kriglstein, Simone | Playing with Data: A Systematic Review of Games for Visualization Literacy | People encounter data visualizations daily, yet visualization literacy, the ability to read, construct, and critically assess charts, remains rarely taught in formal education. Games offer engaging, feedback rich environments for practicing these skills. This paper presents a two-phase systematic review that connects general educational game research with visualization literacy games. Phase 1 synthesizes 97 meta-analyzes, mapping dominant design and evaluation practices across educational game research, while Phase 2 analyzes 15 studies, examining how patterns from Phase 1 appear in visualization literacy games. Across both phases, we find a strong reliance on simulation genres, feedback-driven interaction, and short-term pre/post testing, along with underused behavioral logs, standardized engagement scales, and almost no delayed or transfer measures. Visualization literacy games also overemphasize interpretation tasks, neglecting construction and bias detection, and rarely use validated visualization assessments such as VLAT, CALVI, or AVEC. Based on these findings, we propose design-evaluation recommendations that link task focus, genre choice, and a lightweight evaluation bundle, which include validated self-report, interaction logs, and delayed transfer tests. These recommendations offer a structured starting point for designing and studying visualization literacy games. | Games Beyond Entertainment |
| Kelly, Jack; Wardrip-Fruin, Noah; Carstensdottir, Elin | Playing the Model: Ideology, Bias, and the Rhetoric of LLM Games | With advances in generative AI, game designers can delegate some of a game’s procedural logic to an AI model, potentially enabling new dynamic play experiences. But the inability for a designer to consistently control a model’s behavior mean the biases of these models can manifest in the game in unexpected ways. In this paper, we analyze how LLMs and game rules intersect to produce gameplay that is shaped by the biases of the language model. We draw on data studies to trace the ways that language models take on specific ideological commitments through their training, including biases along lines of race, gender, language, religion, geography and more. Using Soraya Murray’s framing of games as playable representations and Stuart Hall’s encoding / decoding model, we analyze how the play dynamics of language model interactions are shaped by these commitments. Through case studies of Infinite Craft and 1001 Nights, we argue that LLM-driven gameplay can produce implicit rhetoric encouraging players to adopt the model’s underlying biases and beliefs. We conclude by reflecting on the implications for future generative AI-based games, arguing for greater criticality in their design. | Game Criticism and Analysis |
| Kennedy, Vee | The Rhetorical Situation of Video Games | Apart from a handful of adjacent inquiries into video games and literacy and procedural rhetoric, the application of rhetorical theory in video games criticism is virtually unexplored. This paper addresses rhetorical analysis as a proposed method for analyzing video games. Rhetorical scholarship is traced through Lloyd Bitzer’s 1968 concept of a rhetorical situation and how further rhetorical theorists including Vatz, Consigny, Bisesecker, and Edbauer have understood and interpreted the concept of the rhetorical situation, including the constituents of creator(s), audience, and message, contextual concerns such as exigences and constraints, as well as genre and purpose. In examining the rhetorical situation of a game, I analyze the speakers (or writers, or rhetors) as the game developers, broadly construed, the audience as both players and casual observers, or anyone who encountered the game in some way. The message would be the game content itself. The context might include things like language and translation, localization, and platform and interface. Exigences would be the circumstances that caused the creative team to produce the game at the particular time it was conceived. The purpose would be the reason the creative team produced the particular game. The genre would be understood as an aspect of medium in which the creative team sought to connect with the game’s audience. Constraints could intersect with any number of the constituents above, such factors preventing access to the audience (cost to play, software loss due to technology obsolescence or hardware decay) or on the developers (budgets, deadlines). Whether we are to take Bitzer’s initial contribution at face value or work from the frameworks provided by the number of scholars following him and responding to him, evaluating the rhetorical situation of games provides ample opportunity to understand the ways in which video games function rhetorically. | Game Criticism and Analysis |
| Khaled, Rilla; Bethancourt, Matthew | Materializing Design Knowledge with the Method for Design Materialization | We have all at some point encountered the vaporware problem of academic game design practice, where design artifacts once accessible to the academic community have disappeared into the ether. Given the practice-based nature of design and the heavy emphasis placed on artifacts for demonstrating and embodying designerly knowledge, we pose the following question: when we no longer have access to design artifacts, how do we access the knowledge that led to them? The Method for Design Materialization (MDM) is our proposal for a standardized approach to surfacing design practice logics and reasoning. Devised especially for materializing game and interaction design reasoning, and taking inspiration from prototyping theory, reflective practice, interaction design, software development, archival practice, and qualitative research, MDM involves methodical digital archiving of all stages of design and production, coupled with regular and reflective journaling by the designer. The material traces contained in an MDM archive can be used as evidence on which to develop emergent theory about design practice, while the open nature of most MDM archives affords a level of scholarly debate unusual within design-oriented disciplines. To demonstrate MDM in practice, we detail components of a typical MDM archive. To show how MDM facilitates evidence-based theorization of design practice, we present a case study drawing on archive materials for two altctrl game projects, culminating in an emergent theory concerning sibling iterations and spectral parents. | Game Design |
| Koknar, Cenk | Right to Land | Right to Land is a Tetris-inspired critical game about border privilege, bureaucracy, and confinement, conceptually informed by Agamben’s distinction between bios and zoe and his account of bare life. It begins as clean, mastery-driven block stacking, then reframes that “utopia” through a social media frame and a shift into messy physics-based stacking. It introduces two categories, “Specials” and “Others”, where some pieces pass quickly while others are delayed, checked, denied entry, or confined. In line with anti-game design, it intermittently refuses player control, so waiting and powerlessness become the main expressive material rather than a mistake to be solved. It ends with the world closing while refugee pieces remain stuck in an isolated area as life goes on elsewhere. | Games and Demos |
| Kukshinov, Eugene; Poeller, Susanne | De-Normalizing Toxic Behaviour in Competitive Online Games: Players’ Perceptions of Communication, Unsolicited Advice, and Bystander Intervention in League of Legends | Discriminatory behaviours like harassment and bullying are widely normalized in competitive gaming communities, such as League of Legends (LoL). Negativity is often seen as inevitable, which hinders efforts to address online toxicity. These behaviours affect all players, reduce well-being, and cause financial losses in the gaming industry. Our mixed-methods study investigates pathways to de-normalizing harmful behaviour by capturing responses to what is considered normal communication by many players (such as unsolicited advice). Through four conditions, we explore players’ views on resisting or giving in to unproductive demands of other players and their perspectives on bystander support. We provide insights on the prevalence of diverging player viewpoints, and further, propose strategies to improve communication based on player suggestions for creating more positive gaming environments. We highlight the importance of clarifying codes of conduct because there is little agreement between players as to what is or is not acceptable behaviour in games. | Game Criticism and Analysis |
| Kumaran, Vikram; Smith, Andy; Min, Wookhee; Spain, Randy; Mott, Bradford; Lester, James | Generating Clue-Driven Investigative Game Narratives with Large Language Models | Creating interactive narratives where player investigation meaningfully drives story progression remains a central challenge in game design. We present a procedural narrative generation framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to construct clue-driven investigative stories that unfold through character interactions and environmental exploration in a rich 3D game world. At the heart of the framework is a deductive solution model that defines what the player must ultimately infer through conversations with non-player characters (NPCs) and by examining in-world artifacts such as books and posters. This model guides the dynamic generation of characters, relationships, clues, and interactive dialogue to maintain narrative coherence. The framework automatically assembles the generated elements into a playable 3D episode in which players explore narrative elements that progressively reveal and incrementally narrow the space of valid interpretations, culminating in a final deductive conclusion. We evaluate the framework using automated tests of solvability and narrative consistency, as well as player experience studies assessing engagement, clarity, and satisfaction with the investigative gameplay. Results demonstrate that this approach can generate coherent, playable investigative narratives across a broad range of themes and subject matter areas (e.g., STEM, logistics, analytical thinking), enabling more scalable authoring of interactive story-driven games. | GenAI |
| Lankes, Michael; Geiger, Luca | Transient Weapons, Ambivalent Play: A Case Study of Durability in Breath of the Wild | Planned transience is increasingly built into contemporary games, yet its effects on player experience remain underexplored. We present a case study of non-repairable weapon durability in “The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild”, where all regular weapons eventually break and durability is intended to promote exploration and tactical variety. Using an exploratory mixed-methods survey (N=120), we analyse how players describe their strategies, emotions, and value judgements around transient weapons. Quantitative trends highlight systematic conservation, encounter avoidance, and ambivalent enjoyment, while qualitative accounts show durability scaffolding improvisation and a sense of mastery for some players but frustration, anxiety, and restriction for others. Drawing on behavioral economics, self-determination theory, and work on ephemeral digital possessions, we map player responses to this transient system and distil six design patterns for balancing tension and enjoyment in durability-like mechanics, with implications for other transient features in games and related interactive systems. | Game Design |
| Lankes, Michael; Haunschmied, Benedict; Hödlmoser, Alexander; Matzka, Hannah | On My Mark: Effects of diegetic and non-diegetic waypoint marking on player curiosity and exploratory behavior in games | Player guidance systems in video games range from non-diegetic HUD overlays that explicitly direct the player to diegetic cues embedded within the game world. While prior work has shown that the method of guidance shapes player experience, the specific effect of diegetic integration on curiosity and exploratory behaviour remains underexplored. We present a within-subjects study (n = 21) comparing diegetic waypoint marking (colour-coded environmental lighting) with non-diegetic marking (a screen-space UI overlay) in a custom first-person game prototype. In-game telemetry revealed that diegetic markers led to significantly more time spent, greater distance covered, more camera rotation, more optional collectibles found, and less direct movement paths. At the same time, participants rated the diegetic condition as substantially more challenging, leaving open whether the increased movement reflects voluntary exploration or partly navigational difficulty. Self-reported state curiosity did not differ significantly. We discuss the implications for designing guidance systems that balance exploration with navigational clarity. | Late Breaking Short Papers |
| Lankoski, Petri | How do adult game developers deal with platform censorship? | Recent platform crackdowns on adult content, driven by payment processors and anti-porn advocacy groups, have made platform governance an increasingly important issue for game developers. Adult games provide a visible case of how moderation policies reshape both distribution and design practices. This paper presents exploratory findings based on analysing multiple versions of pornographic games and tracking content changes around moments when new platform restrictions were introduced. The analysis identifies three recurring adaptation strategies: (1) modifying content to meet platform standards, (2) externalising explicit material through (Semi)official patches, and (3) using Code words that preserve meaning while avoiding explicit categorisation. These practices suggest that developers and players rely on shared folk theories of discovery to navigate regulatory constraints. Rather than producing simple compliance, platform censorship appears to reorganise adult game ecosystems and shape design decisions, influencing how themes are represented, mechanics communicate meaning, and content is modularised across platforms. | Late Breaking Short Papers |
| Lessard, Jonathan | C’est la vie! | “You have to play with the cards that life deals you” — C’est la vie! takes this saying literally by proposing a deck-building life-sim. In this game, you play from birth to death with each card representing a life event ranging from the small victory of learning to eat with utensils to the small tragedy of suffering from acne in your teenage years. The necessity to maintain “cosmic balance” means that you have to play “bad” cards to earn the cosmic credit to play the good ones. Each life stage is its own little “level” with objectives to achieve. Learn to walk and talk and succeed at babyhood! Doing so, be rewarded with a brand-new custom family picture of your character and a commemorating poem. | Games and Demos |
| Li, Yushan; Li, Mengqi | Thrown into Dreams: The Ontology of Oneiric Worlds in Video Games | Dreams, as an ancient psychophysiological phenomenon, have long captivated scholars across disciplines, from psychoanalysis to neuroscience. In the context of contemporary digital media, video games have redefined dreams, transforming them from passive narratives to interactive, immersive experiences. Games such as Life is Strange and What Remains of Edith Finch allow players to enter, navigate, and reshape dreamscapes, shifting the traditional role of dreams in storytelling. Despite the growing scholarly attention on dreams in games, existing studies tend to focus on their narrative functions or cross-media comparisons, neglecting the deeper philosophical implications. This study seeks to fill this gap by exploring the ontological, ethical, and epistemological dimensions of dreams in video games. Specifically, it asks: How do video games transform dreams into an interactive philosophical medium that engages with key concepts such as consciousness, temporality, and alterity? To answer this question, the study adopts a qualitative, interpretive methodology. A purposive selection of games—What Remains of Edith Finch, Cosmic Sisters Cruise Club, Life is Strange, and The Stanley Parable—is analyzed through their oneiric structures at multiple levels: the symbolic language of narration, the use of color and light, and the design of dreamscapes. The analysis is organized into three dimensions. First, from an ontological perspective, games construct dream worlds that simulate the experience of “thrownness” (Geworfenheit), where players, while retaining agency, are cast into a predetermined and often absurd temporality. Second, on the ethical plane, the ambiguity in dreamscapes fosters empathy through “not-understanding,” allowing players to engage with the Other in a respectful, non-masterful way. Finally, from an epistemological perspective, dreams in games often lead to moments of dissolution, where the boundaries of consciousness blur, creating a profound sense of non-human yet deeply fulfilling vitalism. | Abstracts |
| Lin, Hui En; Bakkes, Sander; Pfau, Johannes | Vanquish Your Past: Shifted Imitation Learning in Hades | This paper investigates generative imitation learning to enhance player-specific adaptation and implicit dynamic difficulty adjustment in video games. The proposed approach captures and reproduces individual player behaviors, enabling more personalized and engaging gameplay experiences, and temporally shifts its deployment by one iteration of a playthrough. To evaluate its effectiveness, we developed “Dark Zagreus”, a modification of the popular action roguelike Hades, in which the final boss is replaced by an AI agent trained via (shifted) imitation learning. The agent learns from the individual player’s most recent successful run and imitates their combat strategies in a dynamic boss encounter. While previous work has approached generative imitation learning as adversarial encounters on an individual basis already, this has not been evaluated on a shifted basis. E.g., in everchanging asynchronous confrontations that encourage players to make strategical thinking forwards and backwards in time (as they have to polish their build and strategies to master the conventional game content, but also risk of overtuning the replicative agent they will have to face in the future). A two-week user study with 20 participants (n = 20) involved approximately one-hour play sessions in which players faced both scripted and imitation-based boss behaviors, followed by a questionnaire assessing player experience and perceived behavioral fidelity. Quantitative results showed no significant differences in player experience metrics or imitation scores between conditions, though qualitatively, a theme emerged that the AI effectively mirrored their tactics, indicating successful behavior replication in specific cases. Performance analyses revealed accuracy comparable to prior imitation-learning-based approaches. Despite limitations such as omitted game mechanics, the findings highlight the potential of realizing novel player experiences in the spirit of DDA through shifted imitation learning. The publicly released source code and approachable player community provides a foundation for future research on adaptive gameplay and player-centric AI design. | Game Artificial Intelligence |
| Liu, Yue; Zheng, Pengze; Ruzanka, Silvia; Chang, Benjamin | Copresence in the CAVE: A Bibliometric Gap Analysis of Immersive Display Research and VR/XR Gameplay | Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE) systems and VR/XR game design research have developed as separate fields for over thirty years. We conducted two CiteSpace bibliometric analyses on Web of Science corpora: one covering CAVE system research (1992–2025, N=260), one covering VR/XR gameplay and game design literature (1996–2025, N=981). The keyword networks show almost no structural overlap. CAVE research clusters around visualization, scientific simulation, and applied domains; game design concepts like player experience, embodied play, and copresence as mechanic are absent. Conversely, VR/XR game design literature shows no engagement with projection-based shared display, asymmetric viewpoints, or co-located multi-user interaction. Three early Unreal Engine projects in a mid-scale projection CAVE at the authors’ lab demonstrate a possible direction for combining CAVE environments with game development tools, showing that this approach produces distinct design outcomes. | Late Breaking Short Papers |
| Liu, Yuqing; Fowler, Allan | Games for Children with Disabilities in Educational Contexts: A Scoping Review | Educational games, with their interactivity and engagement, have become a promising strategy for promoting the learning and development of children with disabilities. However, the existing literature remains thin and fragmented in its coverage and lacks systematic analyses of game content and design features. Therefore, this scoping review explored the evidence on games used in educational contexts for children with disabilities and aimed to synthesise evidence across four dimensions: who the participants were; what types of games were implemented; how games were delivered; and how games for children with disabilities were evaluated. The study aims to identify the relationships between game purposes, types, and forms, uncovering design trends and offering structured insights into the future development of educational games. Following the PRISMA-ScR guideline, we found 39 eligible studies from three databases (ACM, IEEE and Scopus), demonstrating the promise of games for children with disabilities. As a result, future research should expand on the following four areas. Firstly, the scope of research should not only be limited to digital, single-player game formats, but should also explore blended and collaborative gaming experiences that are more applicable to educational environments. Secondly, the learning objectives should extend beyond academic and cognitive outcomes, encompassing a broader range of qualitative skills and social-emotional development areas. Furthermore, it is also necessary to investigate how game elements shape children’s motivation, emotions, and social engagement. Finally, the voices of teachers and children with disabilities should be centred throughout the research by embedding participatory design. | Games Beyond Entertainment |
| Luersen, Eduardo | Discorrelated Earth: Reenacting the Planetary as an Epistemic Image in Computer Games | Digital games and edutainment software such as Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020) and Climate Station (2025) articulate ambitious global imaginaries. The former aspires to generate a real‑time ‘digital twin’ of planet Earth, while the latter invites players to explore the planet’s transformations across 120 years of climate history and to observe possible future scenarios. Despite their notable differences, both games ground their images and game mechanics in global imagery and authoritative simulation datasets, aggregating geospatial data, meteorological archives, and machine‑generated visualizations into synthetic environments while articulating clear procedural rhetorics. In doing so, they express infrastructurally encoded and operational visions of Earth. Against this backdrop, this short paper seeks to initiate a discussion that shifts attention from the representational claims of such simulations to the epistemic foundations of their image‑making logistics. It therefore turns toward the planetary imaging techniques, design protocols, and knowledge infrastructures that enable these games to produce plausible renditions of the planet. By approaching contemporary entertainment software as processes embedded within planetary‑scale infrastructures of computation and visualization, the paper foregrounds the techno‑cultural conditions that underpin the repurposing of knowledge about Earth and climate across different agents in the wider ecology of global imagery production and circulation. | Late Breaking Short Papers |
| Lumbye, Benjamin; Rasmussen, Victor Harbo; Jensen, Mark Bo | The Perfect Date Night: Evaluating Dialogue Systems for Game Development | A fundamental challenge in contemporary interactive narrative is the widening disconnect between academic advancements and the practical realities of commercial authoring tools. Translating research results on dialogue authoring into usable tools requires robust evaluation, yet the field currently lacks standardized, empirical baselines for testing dialogue creation. In this preliminary work, we address this methodological gap by introducing “The Perfect Date Night,” a foundational visual benchmark designed to stress-test the structural and logical capabilities of dialogue authoring systems. Structured as a complex, multi-actor directed graph, our benchmark evaluates critical authoring requirements, including variable manipulation and conditional branching. By establishing a reproducible test case, this work-in-progress exposes the architectural friction points present in contemporary commercial solutions and provides a standardized framework to objectively measure future advancements in narrative design. | Late Breaking Short Papers |
| Lundblade, Kirk | Bending the Arc of (Ludo)History: Discursive Contestations Within the (Hi)Story-Design-Space of Crusader Kings III | Video games are an increasingly prominent medium for popular engagement with history, and players of such games increasingly complement their play with play discourse mediated by platform-hosted communities of play; this play and play discourse frequently occurs within a mode of production which troubles the notion of the game as a singular artefact and instead invites consideration of the game as a continual historical and historicizing process. Through discourse analysis conducted on data collected from online communities centering the historical grand strategy game series Crusader Kings, this work examines how scholarly grammars centered around notions of historical possibility in play can be expanded to match a discursive context where the possibility space is itself in flux and open to contestation within community spaces. The resultant framework has clear implications for both the study of historical games and for the study of game communities which may nonetheless incorporate historical discourses into their own discursive contestations. | Game Criticism and Analysis |
| Maycock, Heather | Choice Aesthetics: Decision Trees and Political Possibility in Detroit: Become Human | This abstract pertains to a research paper in its early stages of development on the aesthetic design and treatment of decision-making elements in role-playing video games and how this relates to questions of autonomy and agency within game worlds. Rather than focusing on how players choose to make decisions or what factors influence them, this research is more interested in examining how choices and decisions are grammarised and structured in their (re)presentation to players, and how this speaks to wider ideologies and politics identifiable in gameplay experience. For this presentation, Quantic Dream’s 2018 story-driven and decision heavy game Detroit: Become Human will undergo analysis. In particular, I examine how the branching decision trees presented at the end of each of the game’s chapters to track the player’s decisions establishes a rigid set of possibilities that flattens the nuance of political action and undermines not only the game’s apparent messaging, but also real instances of human oppression that Detroit: Become Human references throughout its game text. These decision trees present various outcomes to be uncovered, revealed and unlocked by play. I read them through new materialist theoretical works on agency as a relational position, with events becoming nodes of intra-active possibility that players traverse and navigate between. The aesthetic visual design of the decision trees, however, with their inflexible straight lines between events and binary grammarisation of things like friendship and ‘public approval’ also effectively codifies an aesthetic of objective veracity which maintains and consolidates a particular stance on the relationships between violence, political action and protest, one that works to sanitize or defang real political struggles of the past and ones that are still ongoing, such as those against systematic marginalization. Reading these decision trees in context of Detroit: Become Human’s wider narrative about the possibility for personal autonomy in an advanced android species and the resultant struggle for recognition of these androids as people, this presentation considers how the aesthetic design of moments of decision making and the decision trees that result from them relate personal political responsibility to a wider imagined upheaval within the game world. | Abstracts |
| Melhart, David; Dockhorn, Alexander; Drachen, Anders | AURA: Automated Analysis and Reporting of Therapeutically Applied Table-top Role-Playing Games | There is a well-documented global shortage of therapeutic, educational, and social support for neurodivergent children and youth, with substantial downstream consequences for individual well-being and societal costs in adulthood. While early and sustained support is known to be both humane and economically effective, existing service models struggle to scale, particularly during transitions from childhood to adulthood. Therapeutically Assisted Role-Playing Games (TARPGs) have recently emerged as a promising, group-based intervention that combines guided play, narrative structure, and social skill rehearsal to support neurodivergent development. Case studies consistently report positive outcomes, including increased engagement, social connection, emotional regulation, and self-efficacy. However, current research remains dominated by small-scale and non-experimental studies, and practical barriers persist for wider adoption, especially for carers without formal therapeutic training. This paper introduces AURA (AI-Assisted Understanding of Role-play), a novel system designed to support therapists and carers running TARPG sessions. AURA addresses a key practical challenge in TARPG facilitation: documenting complex, multi-player narrative sessions without disrupting live interaction. By analysing audio and/or video recordings of sessions, AURA generates structured post-session summaries, key event timelines, and player profiles, enabling facilitators to focus on participants rather than note-taking. AURA aims to lower barriers to entry, extend TARPG capacity beyond scarce clinical settings, and support more scalable, evidence-informed interventions for neurodivergent children and youth. | Games Beyond Entertainment |
| Meng, Han; Zheng, Junjie | Deciphering the Hunter’s Note: How Digital Game Cultures Cultivate Rituals and Shared Ideologies in Paratextual Spaces | While digital games cultivate rich shared ideologies, how players materialize these digital identities and communal values within physical, paratextual spaces remains underexplored. To address this, we present an ethnographic study investigating how gamers perform and negotiate their in-game identities through collaborative guestbook practices at the official Monster Hunter Bar in Tokyo. Through 4.5 hours of in-situ observation and analysis of eight physical “Hunter’s Notes,” we examined visitors’ situated social behaviors and multi-modal inscriptions. Our findings reveal that players utilize multilingual handwriting and drawing as a social ritual, communicating through a shared visual vocabulary of game lore, such as weapon memes, NPC roleplay, and character illustrations, to bridge cultural barriers. By conceptualizing gamer inscription as a community-building performance, this work illustrates how digital foundations create powerful, asynchronous rituals, contributing novel insights into how game-centric societal norms reflect and challenge real-world communication conventions. | Late Breaking Short Papers |
| Miltiadis, Constantinos | SpaceTimeCraft: A Strong Concept for Designing and Analyzing Embodied Movement in Virtual Environments | Embodied spatial movement in virtual environments is a unique mode of interaction and a core aesthetic of digital media, best exemplified in videogames and VR applications. Despite its ubiquity and prominence, fundamental research bridging theoretical analysis, empirical investigation, and design practice remains limited. This gap is increasingly significant given the resurgence of movement-intensive gaming, and growing empirical evidence for the cognitive benefits of such interactive experiences. To address this, we integrate insights from literature and media artifacts, and pursue exploratory videogame prototyping to investigate the fundamental and invariant components of virtual navigable experience (VNX) through the edge case of non-Euclidean environments. With SpaceTimeCraft, we introduce a “strong concept” suggesting VNX as a spatiotemporal enactive process emerging from the synthesis of three heterogeneous components (1) spatial construction, (2) environmental simulation, and (3) vicarious phenomenological intentionality. This provides a minimally elegant model that unites diverse perspectives, serving as a flexible framework to conceptualize VNX, and to analyze and compare different instances. It also contributes a generative design pattern for novel applications, a capacity we demonstrate through a configurable videogame prototype. Through this work we also contribute an integrative mode of research through gamemaking, and an elaboration of annotated portfolios. | Game Design |
| Morrissey, Kathleen; Tokey, Samin Shahriar | Attune for You: Exploring Solarpunk Through Decolonial Design | Attune for You, is an ongoing role-playing game project that explores solarpunk beyond its visual style. Although solarpunk is often recognized through bright natural environments and sustainable technologies, this project focuses more directly on its social and political ideas, especially decolonial thinking, consent, repair, autonomy, and coexistence. Set on Mars, the game follows Escropita, a human volunteer who works with the martians called the Mycaris through fungal auditory communication rather than colonial control or technological domination. The game combines a 3D world with 2D character assets and includes systems centered on limited energy use, infrastructure repair, and player agency and NPC’s consent, and audio generated from living mushrooms. This paper describes the game’s design, its connection to solarpunk, and the ways its mechanics, visuals, and audio aim to express the genre’s broader values beyond its aesthetic norms. Finally, we outline a planned user study to examine how players interpret these design choices and perceive solarpunk themes through gameplay. | Late Breaking Short Papers |
| Mott, Bradford; Vandenberg, Jessica; Penilla, Carlos; Lester, James; Ozer, Elizabeth | A Theory-Informed Narrative-Centered Model to Foster AI Literacy and Biomedical Career Interest | As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly central to healthcare and biomedical research, there is a growing need for learning experiences that help students understand core AI concepts while envisioning meaningful future career pathways. This paper presents a theory-informed narrative-centered model designed to foster foundational AI literacy and biomedical career interest among early adolescent learners aged 11–14. Grounded in narrative-centered learning and social cognitive theory, the model articulates how narrative structure, role-based engagement, and consequential decision-making can support self-efficacy development, conceptual understanding, and emerging interest in AI-enabled biomedical work. Building on this framework, we describe the design of a narrative-centered educational game in which learners assume the role of a medical intern and investigate patient cases using AI diagnostic tools. We then report findings from a pilot study with 25 students who played the game and participated in focus groups, drawing on gameplay trace data, in-game reflections, and qualitative feedback. Findings suggest high engagement, productive use of AI tools, and positive indications of perceived understanding of AI concepts. The combined theoretical, design, and empirical contributions demonstrate how narrative-centered educational games can function as powerful contexts for research through games, offering insight into how youth reason about AI while informing the design of career-connected learning environments. | Games Beyond Entertainment |
| Munk, Morten Ib Kjærgaard; Valdivia, Arturo; Burelli, Paolo | High-quality generation of dynamic game content via small language models: A proof of concept | Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promise for dynamic game content generation, but they face critical barriers, including narrative incoherence and high operational costs. Due to their large size, they are often accessed in the cloud, limiting their application in offline games. Many of these practical issues are solved by pivoting to Small Language Models (SLMs), but existing studies using SLMs have resulted in poor output quality. We propose a strategy of using SLMs specialized through aggressive fine-tuning on narrowly scoped tasks. Such models could form the basis for agentic networks designed with attention to the narratological framework in question, potentially representing a more practical and robust solution than their larger, cloud-dependent counterparts. To validate this approach, we present a proof-of-concept focusing on a single specialized SLM. We introduce a minimal RPG loop revolving around rhetorical battles of reputations, powered by this model. We demonstrate that a simple retry-until-success strategy reaches adequate quality (as defined by an LLM-as-a-judge scheme) with predictable latency suitable for real-time generation. While replacing the LLM-as-a-judge with a local method remains an open question, our results showcase the feasibility of this approach for real-time SLM-based content generation under typical game engine constraints. | GenAI |
| Murtas, Vittorio; Rodas, Juan-David; Lombardo, Vincenzo | Designing Serious Games on Contemporary Music: A Case Study on Poème Électronique | The communication of intangible heritage, especially for the contemporary repertoire, is a hard challenge. Interactive narratives can address this challenge by integrating the stories told by media scholars with physical and virtual engagement devices that display stylistic, cultural, and performative dimensions. In this context, contemporary music is particularly challenging, because of its opening to non-traditional sound timbres, spatial arrangement of the performance, multimodality of experience. This paper introduces the mixed-reality serious game Edgar à GoGo, designed to foster post-listening engagement and enable players to explore both the sound components and their sequencing within an electroacoustic piece. The piece is a paradigmatic composition of Edgard Varèse, the Poème Électronique (1958), a landmark of electroacoustic music originally conceived for the Philips Pavilion at the Brussels World’s Fair. This piece was a component of the multimedia show conceived by Le Corbusier, with the collaboration of Iannis Xenakis, to display the potentials of Philips technology at the time. The game has been developed in a virtual prototype and has been evaluated by experts, whose comments have been taken into account for the definitive design, including physical twins that will embody material affordances for anchoring the intangible heritage. The narrative is experiential and non-linear, unfolding through discovery, manipulation, and recomposition of sound objects, echoing the creative principles of musique concrète. | Games Beyond Entertainment |
| Nakayama, Yuta; Noh, Seung-Tak; Xie, Haoran; Miyata, Kazunori; Fukusato, Tsukasa | Sketch-based Deposition Modeling of Voxel Game Stages | This paper proposes a sketch-based interface to interactively design 3D voxel game stages. Given the mouse-drag operations, our system automatically computes the corresponding 3D locations from the visible voxel surface and the base grid to place or delete blocks one-by-one. Our method integrates seamlessly into existing modeling tools. We demonstrate the robustness of our system through a variety of modeling results. In addition, we conducted a user study and validated that our system is effective for realizing game stage designs as envisioned by users. | Late Breaking Short Papers |
| Pacheco, Miguel Arrais | The Queer Art of Interpellation: Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley and Gabriel Massan’s Video Games | This presentation examines two experimental art games: ‘SHE KEEPS ME DAMN ALIVE’ by Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley (UK) and ‘Third World: The Bottom Dimension’ by Gabriel Massan (Brazil). I explore how digital media affordances, game mechanics, narrative design, and installation context produce ethically and culturally engaged player experiences. I ask: how can critical art games enact interpellations that situate players within queer, trans, and postcolonial frameworks? How do these games, presented as immersive installations in contemporary art exhibitions, structure audience participation to produce reflection alongside affective and embodied engagement? I focus on Brathwaite-Shirley’s ‘SHE KEEPS ME DAMN ALIVE’ (Arebyte Gallery, London, 2021–22) and Massan’s ‘Third World: The Bottom Dimension’ (Serpentine Galleries, London, 2023). Both are installation-based games demanding active participation, yet they employ distinct strategies to guide player interaction. My analysis shows how these games operate as experimental systems for exploring human behaviour, decision-making and embodied experience. Brathwaite-Shirley uses first-person shooter (FPS) conventions and direct address to guide players, presenting commands, warnings, and reproaches while asking participants to shoot characters who threaten Black transgender individuals. Yet the game subverts traditional FPS logics: players are not given precise guidance and are admonished for deriving excitement from violence. Trial-and-error interaction produces the inevitable digital death of innocents, transforming interactivity into a device for tension, complicity, guilt and reflection. Massan offers an open-world design populated by fantastical beings who provide narrative cues and information about game mechanics. Navigational freedom and a sense of discovery structure the story and frame player agency within a postcolonial logic, foregrounding the ethical and political stakes of movement and choice. Massan adopts subtle techniques based on seductive aesthetics and design, drawing the player into a digital natural world where it becomes progressively clear that, to survive, one must become an agent of exploitation of the inhabitants indigenous to the land. Ultimately, both games perform interpellations of the audience through digital interaction, making the player’s position central to the work’s meaning. And, while Brathwaite-Shirley’s work thematises Black transgender subjects and experiences and Massan’s reenacts settler-colonial logics, both their practices address the interwoven problematics of white cisheteronormativity and coloniality. This analysis draws on queer theory allied to postcolonial thought, including Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, José Esteban Muñoz, micha cárdenas and their engagements with J.L. Austin’s concept of the performative quality of the ‘speech act’ and Louis Althusser’s notion of ‘interpellation’ as an ideological hailing. Brathwaite-Shirley and Massan extend these frameworks, foregrounding transqueer and indigenous positionalities and reversing interpellation onto the participating audience in complex ways. These works exemplify the focus of FDG 2026: “Research through Games; Research for Games.” They treat games as experimental systems or interactive laboratories for observing human and cultural dynamics while simultaneously advancing game design practice. They equally demonstrate how mechanics, narrative, and installation context produce nuanced ethical and socio-cultural experiences. By bridging humanities-informed critique and experimental game design, this presentation shows how art games expand understandings of player agency, interpellation and the potential of digital games as tools for research and imaginative critical enquiry. | Abstracts |
| Park, Geunyoung | Pre-Balancing Structural Risk Screening for Crafting Economy Design | Crafting economies are often evaluated only after prices and rates are specified, although some unsupported states can be screened earlier from structure alone. We present a claim-bounded pre-balancing method that separates what pre-numeric structure and categorical source/sink annotations can exclude, what they can only flag, and what requires later numeric analysis. On a typed production graph with recipe-level AND semantics, we apply bottleneck, exchange-role, and bootstrap checks to an induced seven-discipline Elancia crafting subgraph (520 items, 331 recipes, 866 total nodes). The screen identifies one witness-supported bottleneck, four outgoing exchange-deficit cases, and three bootstrap failures under an NPCShop+Gathering baseline. We then translate those signals into a profession-topology redesign sketch that reduces maximum binary source share from 50.0% to 29.4%, eliminates zero-outgoing cases, and raises mean unique out-partners from 0.86 to 2.43. We treat the comparison as actionability evidence rather than recipe-level validation. | Late Breaking Short Papers |
| Paulus, Ottar; Pan, Huajing | Playful Cultural Heritage: Exploring Embodied Interaction of Museum Artifacts | The digital visualization of physical museums has become increasingly popular worldwide, which undoubtedly enhances public accessibility. However, digitalization of cultural heritage does not necessarily evoke new observation experiences. Most digital museums are limited in their interactivity, allowing only passive information delivery. As Nguyen [1] mentioned, “many interactive computer art museum installations lack certain game features”, which still follow a traditional curation method. In contrast to the substantial research on the visualization and virtual reconstruction of cultural artifacts [2], research on embodied museum artifacts in games remains limited. To fill in the gap, by adopting the method of Research through Design, this project explores the interdisciplinary possibility that combines game design and cultural heritage through the embodied interaction of museum artifacts. The embodied experience goes beyond mere observation and passive documentation of heritage artifacts, thus allowing the audience to overcome physical restrictions and approach museum artifacts from hidden perspectives. The embodied interaction design covers three main categories: i) Simulation, by simulating the artifacts from the first-person perspective, the player gains an immersive experience of the embodied environment of the artifacts; ii) Perspective switching, by exchanging perspectives with the artifacts, the player can reflect on the dualistic relation between the the observer and the observed; iii) Synaesthesia, by evoking synaesthesia through embodied perceptions, the player can experience affective resonance with the artifacts. In the playtests, players’ interpretations and emotional responses will be collected through questionnaires and interviews, the collected data will be analyzed and contribute to iterative design. The paper further reflects on the ethical considerations surrounding the representation of cultural artifacts [3] and their sustainability according to the FAIR principles [4]. Besides, it also involves self-reflection on the responsibility when conducting heritage visualisation [5], especially on balancing the historical accuracy and entertainment. REFERENCES [1]Nguyen CT. (2017). Philosophy of games. Philosophy Compass. 12:e12426. https://doi.org/10.1111/phc3.12426 [2]Zhang, J., Wan Yahaya, W. A. J., & Sanmugam, M. (2024). The Impact of Immersive Technologies on Cultural Heritage: A Bibliometric Study of VR, AR, and MR Applications. Sustainability, 16(15), 6446. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16156446 [3]Manžuch, Z. (2017). Ethical issues in digitization of Cultural Heritage. EliScholar. https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/jcas/vol4/iss2/4/ [4]Grant, R. (2022). Reusable, FAIR Humanities Data: Creating Practical Guidance for Authors at Routledge Open Research. International Journal of Digital Curation 17(1): 1-15. http://dx.doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v17i1.820 [5]Denard, H. (2012). A New Introduction to the London Charter. In Bentkowska-Kafel, A., Denard, H. & Baker, D. (eds.) Paradata and Transparency in Virtual Heritage. Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities Series. London: Routledge: 57-71. DOI: 10.4324/9781315599366-7 | Abstracts |
| Pavel, Emilia; Papenmeier, Andrea; Gómez-Maureira, Marcello A. | Gone With the Wind: Evaluating the Impact of Diegetic Guidance Systems on Exploration in Games | In open-world video games, navigational guidance plays an important role in shaping the player’s experience. There is a prevailing assumption in game design that diegetic guidance, which embeds navigational cues directly into the game world, produces stronger immersion than non-diegetic implementations such as a Heads-Up Display (HUD). However, this assumption is rarely tested empirically. To address this gap, we created a custom exploration game environment that incorporates both guidance types. We conducted a within-subjects study with ten participants, measuring perceived spatial immersion through two components of the Game Experience Questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. Quantitative results show a non-significant trend favouring diegetic guidance on both Sensory and Imaginative Immersion and Flow, with large effect sizes suggesting the study was underpowered. Qualitative findings support this trend, with participants describing diegetic guidance as more immersive and exploratory, and HUD guidance as clearer and more task focused. Rather than treating these systems as opposing approaches, the findings suggest they function as complementary instruments, each covering gaps the other leaves open. | Late Breaking Short Papers |
| Pinto, Filipe; Luz, Filipe | Complicit by Design: Convergence and Alienation in Interactive Fourth Wall Breaks | Fourth wall breaks are commonly understood as reflexive techniques that disrupt immersion by foregrounding the constructed nature of a fictional work. While this account holds for non-interactive media, it does not fully explain how fourth wall breaks function in video games, where events unfold through player action. This paper argues that interactivity enables fourth wall breaks to operate in two distinct experiential directions. We introduce a distinction between alienation-oriented and convergence-oriented fourth wall effects. Alienation effects increase rational distance by positioning the player as an external observer, whereas convergence effects collapse that distance by implicating the player’s actions, awareness, and responsibility within the fictional frame. This distinction is developed through conceptual analysis and illustrated through a comparison between The Beginner’s Guide and Spec Ops: The Line, demonstrating how similar reflexive strategies can produce opposing player experiences. To ground the framework in player experience, we draw on illustrative excerpts from an ongoing interview study with players of narrative-driven games. These accounts suggest that awareness of fictionality can coexist with sustained immersion, ethical discomfort, and perceived accountability. By reframing fourth wall breaks as bidirectional experiential effects rather than inherently distancing devices, this paper offers a design-relevant framework for analyzing reflexivity, ethical engagement, and player implication in interactive narrative games. | Game Criticism and Analysis |
| Poglitsch, Christian; Bardakji, Philipp; Pirker, Johanna | Performance Of Large Language Models As Hearthstone Agents | This paper investigates the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) as autonomous agents in the digital collectible card game Hearthstone. While traditional numerical agents have demonstrated strong results in competitive game environments, the reasoning capabilities of LLM-based agents remain largely unexplored in this context. To address this gap, we developed an LLM-driven Hearthstone agent using the Sabberstone framework to evaluate several models, including GPT-4o, GPT-4o-mini, o3-mini, and GPT-5-mini, across multiple decks and prompting strategies. Our experiments compare their win rates against established numerical agents and analyze the impact of different prompting techniques, such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT), Reverse Chain-of-Thought (RCoT), ReAct, and Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) prompting. The results indicate that all LLMs outperform random agents, with GPT-5-mini achieving performance comparable to leading numerical agents. Among the prompting strategies, DAG achieved the highest win rate, whereas ReAct performed significantly worse. These findings highlight both the current limitations and the promising potential of LLMs for strategic reasoning and decision-making in complex, rule-based digital games such as Hearthstone. Leveraging their natural language understanding capabilities, LLMs have the potential to act as intelligent virtual companions, guiding and supporting players through the initial phases of gameplay. | Game Artificial Intelligence |
| Qian, Benjamin; Arachchige, Thisuka Matara; Zhou, Gallon; Lianto, Nicholas; Wang, Zixuan; Wünsche, Burkhard C. | BeatWeights: A VR Dumbbell Exergame on Music, Rhythm, and Motivation in Strength Training | Strength training is critical for health and longevity, yet many people find conventional resistance exercise monotonous or intimidating. Immersive virtual reality (VR) exergames offer a promising way to reframe strength training as playful and engaging. Prior work has shown that rhythm-based VR games enhance motivation for cardiovascular exercise, where users typically perform continuous, cyclic movements that map naturally onto musical beats; however, it remains unclear whether rhythmic music and synchronization provide similar benefits in strength training contexts, which emphasise slower, segmented repetitions and strict form control. We present BeatWeights, a VR rhythm exergame in which players perform dumbbell bicep curls while working as a fast-food employee who scoops and throws fries to customers. The game integrates strength-based repetitions with either synchronised rhythm cues, non-synchronised background music, or no music at all. In a within-subjects study (N = 16), participants completed three one-minute sessions – synchronised music, non-synchronised music, and silence – while we measured intrinsic motivation using the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory and perceived exertion using the Borg CR10 scale. A Friedman test revealed a significant effect of condition on the Interest/Enjoyment subscale, with both musical conditions producing higher enjoyment than silence, but no significant differences between synchronised and non-synchronised music. No significant effects were observed for Value/Usefulness, Effort/Importance, muscle fatigue, or physical exertion. These findings suggest that music in VR strength exergames primarily boosts affective engagement rather than reducing perceived effort, and that precise movement–beat synchronisation may be less important for short-duration, form-focused strength training than for rhythmic cardiovascular exercise. | Games Beyond Entertainment |
| Qiang, Pete Jiadong; Hao, Morgan Yu | NeuroPatrol: Designing Inclusive BCI (Brain-computer Interface)-VR Games for the Metastable Brain Dynamics | Non-invasive BCI (Brain-computer Interface) games remain trapped in a binary, command-driven paradigm that reduces complex neural activity to deliberate on/off signals [1]. This reduction creates technically stiff systems and produces sterile clinical-driven experiences that disinterest neurodivergent players, non-experts and confine BCI gaming to a scientific tool within the laboratory. Drawing on coordination dynamics [2, 3, 4], this project re-orients design toward metastability, that is, the brain’s functional regime in which integration and segregation transiently coexist, enabling flexibility, creativity, and adaptive behaviour. Metastability is not a compromise between order and disorder but the very condition of meaningful coordination, graphically described as the “squiggle” sense [5]. Crossing this insight with posthumanist theory [6] and diffractive game design [7] yields a core proposition: effective BCI games must treat measurement as “intra-action”, not representation, and cultivate an aesthetic that is itself non-binary, metastable, co-constitutive, and generative. NeuroPatrol is a practice-led case study that materialises these principles. Players inhabit a near-future farming landscape in VR where they tend hybrid bio-mechanical crops, guide herds, and repair ecological networks through slow, care-based actions. The environment uses photogrammetry and Gaussian Splatting to reconstruct landscapes from Bath, Frome, and Wells (Somerset, UK), employing a deliberate fragmentation approach. Every entity continuously oscillates between coherent, high-fidelity form and flickering, point-cloud dissolution, enacting the metastable aesthetic both visually and sonically. The current VR-only alpha prototype already embodies this framework by establishing foundational game mechanics and visual language, serving as a boundary object in ongoing co-design with autistic, ADHD, and chronically fatigued communities. To further implement non-binary BCI game design, this project will use passive EEG (electroencephalogram) to explore real-time correlates of metastability. Using accessible EEG hardware like the Emotiv EPOC X with ultra-lightweight VR headset Bigscreen Beyond 2, the system will compute exploratory approximations of heuristic signatures [4], such as variability in global synchrony (akin to std-KOP, reflecting integration) and shifts in spectral power (akin to std-IGNITE, reflecting segregation and flexibility), adapting lab metrics for the noisy, dynamic context of VR gaming. These indices do not represent a pre-existing mind but enact a diffractive intra-action [6], co-constituting player and gameworld through measurement itself. The resulting non-command modulations subtly shape ecosystem regeneration and NPC behaviours, which embrace neurodivergent patterns as aesthetically generative rather than erroneous. By foregrounding community-led calibration and a diffractive aesthetics built on accessible tools, NeuroPatrol offers three concrete contributions: (1) metastability as a new physiological and embodied paradigm for neuroadaptive games, (2) a replicable model of posthumanist BCI-VR design that moves beyond arousal-valence frameworks, and (3) an inclusive methodology proving that ethical and intimate neurotechnology can be developed outside laboratories with and for neurodivergent publics and various patient groups. The project argues that the future of compelling brain-controlled play lies less in perfect mental joysticks than in learning to co-perform with the brain’s own metastable tendencies. REFERENCES [1] Fabien Lotte, Yann Renard, and Anatole Lécuyer. 2008. Self-Paced Brain-Computer Interaction with Virtual Worlds: A Quantitative and Qualitative Study “Out of the Lab”. In 4th International Brain-Computer Interface Workshop and Training Course 2008, Graz, Austria, 281–286. [2] J. A. Scott Kelso. 1995. Dynamic Patterns: The Self-Organization of Brain and Behavior. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. [3] Emmanuelle Tognoli and J. A. Scott Kelso. 2014. The Metastable Brain. Neuron 81, 1, 35–48. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2013.12.022 [4] Fran Hancock, Fernando E. Rosas, Andrea I. Luppi, Mengsen Zhang, Pedro A. M. Mediano, Joana Cabral, Gustavo Deco, et al. 2024. Metastability demystified — the foundational past, the pragmatic present and the promising future. Nature Reviews Neuroscience (December 2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-024-00883-1 [5] J. A. Scott Kelso and David A. Engstrøm. 2024. The Squiggle Sense. Springer Nature Switzerland, Cham, Switzerland. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-59369-7 [6] Karen Barad. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press, Durham, NC. [7] Jiadong Qiang. 2023. HyperBody: An Experimental VR Game Exploring the Cosmotechnics of Game Fandom through a Posthumanist Lens. Ph.D. Dissertation. Goldsmiths, University of London, London, UK. https://doi.org/10.25602/GOLD.00034521 | Abstracts |
| Riley, Allen; Wallace, Andy | Hypnogenesis | Hypnogenesis is a psychedelic video synthesizer space shooter that uses video feedback as a core gameplay mechanic. Hypnogenesis combines arcade gameplay with an artistic practice called video synthesis, which involves shaping electromagnetic waves into abstract moving images. By exploring the game, players simultaneously experiment with the creation of emergent visuals. Before video games, televisions were mostly not interactive; they were one-way receivers for broadcast signals. In the 1960s and 1970s, video artists like Nam June Paik artistically experimented with ways of interacting with video, for instance by placing a magnet on top of a television to warp the image, or by creating video feedback by pointing a video camera at its own output monitor to create emergent visual patterns. We imagine that Hypnogenesis is part of an alternate history of games that followed from this spirit of experimentation. In other words, what if video games were based on video synthesizers? | Games and Demos |
| Rimer, Emil; Petersen, Anthon Kristian Skov; Ploug, Rasmus; Scirea, Marco | Quest of Aivengarde: Comparative Study of Player Experience Across LLM Dialogue Systems | Non-player character (NPC) dialogue plays a crucial role in games. Narrative-driven video games in particular depend on NPCs to help shape the player experience by contributing to narrative, immersion, and player agency. Current technologies allow large language models (LLMs) to create dynamic, context-sensitive dialogue for NPCs, yet their impact on player experience remains underexplored. Quest of Aivengarde is a custom-built role-playing game developed as a research testbed for comparing four dialogue system designs: a static control version and three LLM-driven variants that rephrase, hybridize, or fully generate NPC dialogue. Building on previous pilot and demo studies, this paper integrates the system design and full empirical evaluation to examine how levels of generative agency affect interaction quality, immersion, and player engagement. Using mixed-methods analysis of behavioral logs and post-game surveys from 64 participants, results suggest that fully open-ended LLM dialogue fosters longer, more natural conversations and is particularly engaging for casual players. We discuss design trade-offs between narrative control and conversational freedom and propose a practical framework for selecting and combining LLM-driven dialogue approaches in future game development and research. | GenAI |
| Ring, Patrizia; Pricken, Marc; Masuch, Maic | When Worlds Collide: How Real Collisions and Fear of Colliding Influence the User Experience in VR | As private virtual reality (VR) use increases, so do injuries from real-world collisions. Beyond physical harm, both actual collisions and the fear of colliding may affect the user experience, particularly presence, which can be considered a core aspect of VR. In two studies, we examined the relationship between presence, collision anxiety (CA), and real collisions during VR use. Our results indicate that collisions themselves do not significantly reduce presence but do increase CA. Furthermore, while presence was not a significant predictor of CA, we replicated prior findings that disorientation in the physical environment heightens collision anxiety. These findings suggest that disorientation and (fear of) collisions affect fundamental aspects of VR experiences. Hence, the results highlight the importance of considering the users’ subjective feeling of safety when designing for safe VR use, not only to minimize the risk of injuries but also to maximize the user experience. | Game Design |
| Saiger, Michael; Cutting, Joe; Snell, Rebecca; Thompson-Lee, Sophie; Slawson, Daniel; Klassen, Robert | Communicating STEM Teaching Careers Through Persuasive Game Design: A Focus Group Study | In the UK there is a national shortage of teachers in STEM disciplines, with recruitment challenges compounded by high attrition rates among early-career teachers. To address this, we are developing a persuasive video game to inform STEM undergraduates about teaching careers while helping them assess their fit for the profession. This paper presents the first stage of our design process: co-designing with potential end-users through paper prototypes and focus groups. We conducted focus group interviews and individual semi-structured interviews with STEM undergraduates (n=9, aged 18-23) involving career discussions and interactive play sessions with a paper prototype of our narrative game, TeachQuest. Using thematic analysis, we identified two themes related to teaching career perceptions (Extrinsic barriers shaped by prior experience & Confidence in skills and qualities influence intrinsic motivation) and two themes related to game design preferences (Content and Reflection). Our findings reveal novel insights about the skills and qualities undergraduates believe are required for teaching, and demonstrate how paper prototypes can elicit detailed feedback on persuasive game design. We contribute design guidelines for persuasive career recruitment games that emphasise embedded reflection mechanisms, authentic decision-making, and balanced representation of career realities. These guidelines extend beyond teacher recruitment to inform the design of career exploration games more broadly. | Games Beyond Entertainment |
| Samuel, Marly Muudeni; Duthie, Bradley A; Corcoran, Chloe; Auala, Selma; Bunnefeld, Nils | Integration of games and models as an approach to support inclusive environmental conservation | Socio-ecological conflicts involving human beings, wildlife, livestock, and crops present significant challenges for communities and impact sustainable development efforts. This research explores the use of interactive simulation games that closely replicate and model real world social-ecological systems and scenarios. These games are used to understand, learn and collect data about environmental lived experiences and player decision-making patterns. As part of this research, we developed EcoKnowGames Creator, a tool for integrating valid scientific models with video games. Focusing on Namibia as a scope country, we created a conflict game over lion conservation to engage participants in workshops, collect data on decision-making behaviours, investigate conflict mitigation strategies, and promote inclusive environmental conservation. This paper explains how the simulation game was used to explore decision-making patterns and trade-offs in a conservation conflict. It further addresses how games can facilitate dialogue and contribute evidence to inform research and support the uptake of inclusive sustainable conservation goals. | Late Breaking Short Papers |
| Sankar, Abirami; Cerundolo, Nicole; Langrock, Alexander; McGivney, Eileen | Insight Check: Systems of Oppression and Player Motivation in Tabletop Roleplaying Games | When playing a tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG), themes related to systems of oppression, such as racism and sexism, arise frequently. Players of TTRPGs must decide how to confront these systems, if they choose to engage with them at all. Prior studies indicate that TTRPGs can directly influence a player’s sense of social responsibility and moral reasoning and can reinforce biases among players. In this paper, we present a work-in-progress investigation into players’ motivation when deciding to include or exclude systemic oppression within the game world. We report findings from the first phase of qualitative interviews with players of Dungeons & Dragons, a popular TTRPG. The study presents broader implications that can inform the TTRPG community, such as recommendations for participatory design and intentional design for cultural representation. | Late Breaking Short Papers |
| Schaetzle, Julia; Baumann, Nicola; Poeller, Susanne | The Two Faces of Power Remastered: Facets of Explicit Power Motivation in Baldur’s Gate 3 | Character creation in digital role-playing games allows players to construct roles and express motivational orientations. Drawing on Motive Disposition Theory, this study examines whether different construals of explicit power are reflected in character creation priorities. We distinguish between dominance-oriented (personalized), leadership-oriented (socialized), and prosocial-oriented (socialized) forms of power motivation, as well as overall power motivation, and examine their associations with appearance and ability choices in Baldur’s Gate 3. In a laboratory study, participants completed explicit motive measures and created a character in-game. Dominance-oriented power was associated with greater emphasis on visual appearance and visually assertive traits, whereas leadership-oriented power predicted stronger prioritization of functional abilities and strategic configuration. Leadership motivation was reflected more strongly in self-reported character intentions than in concrete skill selections, while prosociality and overall power showed no significant associations. These results suggest that specific power orientations, rather than global power motivation, shape how players construct and position their characters, highlighting character creation as a site for motivational expression. | Late Breaking Short Papers |
| Sevinçli, Mehmet Can; Ioannou, Nicolas; Poeller, Susanne | Toxic Behavior in League of Legends Through the Lens of Psychological Reactance Theory: The Role of Communication Styles | Toxicity in gaming communities is a persistent issue, which negatively impacts player experiences. We introduce Psychological Reactance Theory to this research field and utilize it as a lens to explore the mediating role of psychological reactance between player communication styles and the tendency of players to escalate an in-game conversation with toxicity. We recruited 60 League of Legends players and randomly assigned them to one of two conditions (autonomy-supportive vs. freedom-threatening messages). All participants were presented with in-game chat messages and asked how they would respond to them by utilizing the State Psychological Reactance Scale and the Toxic Behavior Scale. Players in the freedom-threatening condition experienced more state psychological reactance, which in turn led to a self-reported intention to retaliate by responding to the messages with unproductive behaviors. We interpret our findings through the perspective of Psychological Reactance Theory. We provide theory-informed insights on toxic behavior as a response to unproductive communication styles that can deteriorate in-game interactions. | Game Analytics and Visualization |
| Shen, Feifei; Wu, Wei | From Oral Histories to Play: A Practice-to-Mechanic Pipeline for AR Cultural Heritage Games | Existing place-based AR games treat place as a generic stage, leaving mechanics disconnected from what makes a site culturally meaningful. This paper presents a community-grounded practice-to-mechanic pipeline for transforming oral history into place-based AR cultural heritage gameplay, demonstrated through three AR encounters in Boston Chinatown. Drawing from interviews with residents, business owners, and community leaders, we identified three themes: nourishment, celebration and play, and practiced movement. We translated each into a site-specific AR encounter using Snap Spectacles. The pipeline moves from oral history collection through thematic analysis, site mapping, and activity clustering to interaction design, ensuring game mechanics reflect how cultural knowledge is practiced and transmitted. Early design reflections suggest that grounding mechanics in community practice, rather than technology, produces encounters structurally tied to the places where they occur. Future work will involve co-design and player evaluation with residents and visitors, and the development of an AI-powered audio storytelling guide for situated navigation. | Late Breaking Short Papers |
| Siddique, Md Rakib Jahan | Session Architecture Predicts Mobile Game Retention: A Single-Studio Case Study | This single-studio case study examined 35 mobile game prototypes (2023–2025) to identify behavioral predictors of Day~1 retention and explore whether expert-coded design features show promise for future validation. Session frequency demonstrated robust predictive validity for Day 1 retention (r=0.84, p<0.001), consistent with established churn prediction literature. Exploratory integration of expert-coded design features—particularly creative confidence (r=0.63)—suggests potential complementary value beyond automated behavioral metrics, though the single-rater design precludes generalization. The 71\% retention improvement over the study period coincided with design feature improvements. This work establishes session frequency as a robust behavioral signal and identifies design dimensions warranting multi-studio validation with independent raters. | Late Breaking Short Papers |
| Springer, Barnabás | Playable folklore – Digital games and the representation of folklore and cultural heritage | Digital games increasingly serve as media of cultural transmission and representation. Interactive structures can communicate intangible values, myths and worldviews, yet they also reveal challenges of authenticity, cultural reduction or aesthetic appropriation, raising the broader question of how folklore can be represented through interactive systems without losing contextual richness. This project investigates these tensions through a research-by-design case study on the representation of folklore and cultural heritage in digital games. Situated at the intersection of folklore studies, heritage research and game design, the work foregrounds the conceptual distinction between folklore (as a living, variable, processual form of expression) and cultural heritage (as codified, safeguarded and institutionally preserved). Drawing on Ben-Amos (2023), it adopts the premise that tradition becomes heritage when it is managed and staged for external consumption. Digital media preserve and circulate cultural practices, yet they simultaneously introduce fixity. Codes, systems and representational conventions stabilise what is fluid, collectively interpreted and continuously renegotiated in lived settings. Digital codification turns dynamic processes into managed entities. Existing scholarship has addressed historical knowledge transmission, virtual heritage and spatial reconstruction (Champion 2006; Mochocki 2021). However, these approaches rarely focus on folklore’s underlying logics or on how they may be translated into mechanics or systemic design. Research on digital folklore (De Seta 2019) foregrounds participatory culture and vernacular creativity, but has seldom been applied to game design through practice-based methods. This gap underlines the need for understanding how folklore can inform systems, rules and mechanics in addition to narrative and aesthetics. The central research question guiding the project is: How can folklore and cultural heritage be represented in digital games in a respectful and responsible manner, and how do these representations shape and influence design processes? Two secondary questions support the analysis: how specific design decisions emphasise, transform or omit folkloric aspects; and how existing frameworks can support ethical, culturally grounded design. The theoretical foundation draws on four models. Cultural presence (Champion) supports examining how cultural, social and environmental presence emerges in the prototype. Folk mechanics (Ensslin) helps analyse how systemic structures convey folkloristic meaning. Digital folklore (De Seta) provides a lens for understanding folklore’s behaviour in digital spaces. Mnemonic hegemony (Hammar) offers a critical approach to pressures toward simplification, dominant narratives and selective remembrance. Together, these form the basis of a Playable Folklore framework that treats games as cultural systems rather than display cases. Methodologically, the project employs a research-by-design approach centred on a folklore-inspired prototype, drawing on design journals, team discussions, mechanic outlines, iteration notes and early playtest insights. These materials trace moments where cultural grounding intersects with production constraints. The project is expected to contribute in three ways: by analysing how folklore informs systems during development rather than retrospectively; by operationalising theoretical models within small-team workflows; and by examining how mnemonic pressures, codification and commodification influence creative decisions. Ultimately, the project reflects on the potentials and limits of translating living cultural processes into interactive systems, arguing that respectful engagement lies in embracing variation, negotiation and systemic openness. | Abstracts |
| Stone, Jon | Broken Fragments of Truth / Some Ludokinetic Poems | I propose to demonstrate, using a single screen, a number of different ludokinetic poems. ‘Ludokinetic poetry’ is a term I coined in my 2022 monograph Dual Wield: The Interplay of Poetry and Video Games to describe poetry that “acknowledges, integrates or otherwise engages the player within a ludic system” (Stone, 2022, p.111). The term is fairly flexible and does not apply solely to digital media; a ludokinetic poem could take the form of a solo, competitive or collaborative card game, for instance, or a role-play activity. In all its forms, however, ludokinetic poetry gives rise to the question: what does the player come away with that rewards their investment in the ludic system yet does not negate the essential open-endedness of the poem? ‘Broken fragments of truth’ is a phrase from Aubrey Thomas de Vere’s assessment of Keats, published in Edinburgh Review in 1849. The fuller quote is “one who would rather walk in mystery than false lights, who waits that he may win, and who prefers the broken fragments of truth to the imposing completeness of a delusion” (de Vere 1849, 345). It has long suggested itself to me as a usefully succinct account of the appeal of lyric poetry in an age of digital and cinematic wonders, as well as an intimation of why that appeal is relatively narrow. From a game studies perspective, it helps explain why the emergence of poem-game hybrids of all kinds is only a recent development: games promise the satisfaction of completion, of definitively overcoming a challenge, or at least keeping track of your progress. Once a game aspires to poetry, it must compromise on this promise. Once a poem aspires to playability, it must try to be something more than a ‘broken fragment’. This selection will include: ‘Aubade with Camoufleur’, a poem in the form of a time-loop puzzle; ‘Lowes, Welves, Pennylicks’, a set of memory puzzle poems; ‘The Whisky Shop’, a reconfigurable pantoum, and ‘Cheap Talk’, a reaction-based conversation simulator. Attendees will be able to access them all from a single menu. | Games and Demos |
| Tan, Joshua; Li, Colin; Lange-Nawka, Dominik; Wünsche, Burkhard; Wen, Elliott | Pedalling Without Penalty: Investigating the Effects of Exercise Intensity on Cybersickness in VR Cycling | Exergames can motivate sedentary individuals to adopt more active lifestyles, and VR implementations offer even greater engagement. However, VR exergames can also induce cybersickness, which may threaten long-term adherence. Since exercise and cybersickness share several physiological symptoms, it remains unclear whether increased exertion contributes to greater discomfort. This study examined whether exercise intensity affects cybersickness during VR cycling. Participants completed three fixed-path sessions, each lasting 2.5 minutes, at no, light, and moderate exertion while providing real-time and post-session sickness ratings. Exercise intensity did not significantly affect cybersickness across conditions. While further research is needed, these findings suggest that short VR cycling sessions may incorporate light to moderate physical effort without increasing discomfort, enabling designers to vary workout intensity to enhance motivation without introducing additional cybersickness risk. | GameDev |
| Tate, Gemma | Narrative Game Mechanics: An analysis of Undertale | The interplay of mechanics as a form of story expression creates experiences that deeply resonate and can allow allow players to more directly interact with the narrative. As such, stories with this interplay are important as they help create a method by which players can more quickly learn and understand the intended story of the game through its confluence of rules to bolster the narrative being told. Through this unique union of mechanics and narrative, players are better able to be immersed within the experience, their in game actions serving to embodying the narrative being told, instead of being a passive observer like in other forms of media. The author has found this best exemplified in the indie roleplaying game Undertale, where it not only uses gameplay mechanics to elevate its narrative but makes some mechanics core narrative elements themselves. | Game Criticism and Analysis |
| Taylor, Alex | The Drammen Croquis Project | Video – Early Functional WIP https://youtu.be/vopzcz808K0 The Drammen Croquis Project is an ongoing practice-based research project produced in collaboration with artists affiliated with Drammen Kunstforening. (The Drammen Art Association). The project investigates the digitisation of physical art through a foundational games-design perspective. By incorporating aspects of exploration, open-world level design, puzzles and an inventory system, the project aims to explore a further gamified exhibition format compared to conventional digital artistic exhibitions. By collaborating with artists from Drammen Kunstforening, the project also aims to test novel and collaborative ways of digitalisation of exhibition practices through a games perspective. Utilising Unreal Engine 5, the research intends to take advantage of the higher fidelity in light and material simulation to explore novel ways of transforming existing physical works. The project further explores how virtual environments enable the manipulation and recontextualisation of artworks in ways that would be unfeasible in the physical world. The project contributes to research on games as cultural and exhibitory systems by demonstrating how game design principles can be further applied to the digitisation and presentation of art, enabling new forms of transformative play. | Games and Demos |
| Tokey, Samin Shahriar; Boudaoud, Ben; Spjut, Josef; Claypool, Mark | Adaptive Time Delay for Improving Player Experience and Fairness in First-Person Shooter Games with Network Latency | In a multiplayer networked game, actions for players with higher latencies are received and (potentially) acted upon later than players with lower latencies, leading to unfairness, especially important in competitive games. Time delay is a latency compensation technique that can mitigate this unfairness by adding latency to players with lower latency so that all players experience the same latency. Although this provides equal latency to all players, it unnecessarily degrades the responsiveness for the lower-latency players when the players are not interacting. We propose an adaptive time delay technique that only adds latency to low-latency players when they are interacting with players with higher latency. We conducted three separate user studies assessing player performance and experience with network latency and different compensation techniques. Analysis of the results shows adaptive time delay improves average quality of experience compared to fixed time delay while preserving time delay’s fairness. | GameDev |
| Tokey, Samin Shahriar; Boudaoud, Ben; Spjut, Josef; Claypool, Mark | Impact of Frametime Spikes on Performance and Quality of Experience in Platformer Games | Frametime spikes can disrupt gameplay in games, affecting both player performance and experience, but the effects of these spikes on navigation based tasks is not well-studied. This work investigates how frametime spikes impact players performing navigation-focused tasks in a platformer game. An open-source platformer game, SuperTux Classic, was modified to deliberately create spikes in frametimes when players performed certain actions, while recording performance and assessing quality of experience (QoE). Thirty-eight participants completed eight distinct navigation-based tasks, each with predetermined spike durations. Analysis of the data shows that the effects of frametime spikes on player performance depends on the task, but the effects on QoE are largely independent of task. | GameDev |
| Torras, Dídac Jiménez | Can a visual novel creation workshop effectively elicit bias regulation? | According to Edelman and DataReportal, the West is going through a media polarisation and social media usage surge, with peaks on short-form content platforms like TikTok, that increase stereotypes. Video games could counterbalance these trends. In this article I present the results of a visual novel creation workshop to regulate biases. This pilot trial workshop lasted 13 sessions, each 1 hour. The pilot included 23 experimental group students and 27 control group ones (16 years, 66% female) from a high school in Barcelona, Spain. The preliminary results from the 30 final respondents show that biases may be too complex to introduce to high school students, and that there are multiple barriers to introducing visual novels in the classroom (needing laptops, connection, programming knowledge and specific tools), and few advantages (creative motivation and perspective-taking iteration). Nevertheless, part of the interviewed students were interested in having more time to work and to try other students’s games, suggesting that visual novel workshops have potential, but may require extended intervention times. | Late Breaking Short Papers |
| Touzos, Amina Antonia | Waiting, Failing, Caring: Chronic Illness as Play in “you’re just imagining it” (npckc 2025) | Video games have long been read as cultural texts. However, their potential for analysis within the medical humanities and disability studies has seen relatively little comprehensive academic discourse thus far (Görgen & Simond 2020; Ellis, Leaver, & Kent 2023). While existing work at the intersection of games and health often emphasizes players’ mental health or focuses on serious games used for medical training, these approaches seldom explore what video games themselves can teach us about health cultures and the representation of illness, disability, mental health, and care. This paper argues that games such as “you’re just imagining it,” a semi-autobiographical chronic illness simulation game developed by npckc (2025), challenge dominant gaming norms of control and cure. Instead, they foreground dependence, uncertainty, and frustration as central objects of gameplay – embracing, as the game’s introduction notes, that “It’s also not very fun.” Framed by this year’s FDG theme, “Research through Games; Research for Games,” this paper proposes a medical humanities-informed, disability studies-oriented approach to video game analysis. It considers video games not only as storytelling devices and subjects of cultural study but also as simulated spaces for rethinking how health, illness, disability, and care are represented and how these experiences are made accessible or inaccessible to players. Here, the medical humanities offers a humanistic approach to analyzing illness and health practices in culture (Goyal & Hegele 2022). Disability studies, in turn, critically investigates how society constructs and responds to disability and care discourses, often also in relation to terminal or chronic illnesses (Price 2024; Patsavas 2015). In “you’re just imagining it,” players follow an unnamed first-person narrator on their seven-year chronic illness journey, monitoring their pain, need for rest, finances, and medications, as well as visiting different doctors. Through a close reading of the game’s narrative, mechanics, and audiovisual design, I examine the narrator’s experiences with chronic illness, disability, and care, including interactions with medical personnel, navigating different treatment plans, and diagnoses. By interlacing methods from game studies, disability studies, and medical humanities, I further analyze how “you’re just imagining it” frames these complex experiences as interactive spaces where players act, fail, wait, and witness. In doing so, players engage with care practices by negotiating empathy and inhabiting the roles of both a disabled person and a companion. The analysis of “you’re just imagining it” shows how the game provides a perspective on chronic illness and disability through care rather than cure. By situating it alongside other titles like “Spiral” (Folklore Games 2024) and “That Dragon, Cancer” (Numinous Games 2016), I suggest that contemporary games about illness and disability invite players, researchers, and game designers alike to reflect on and challenge how health and care are represented and designed (for) in video games. | Abstracts |
| Truesdell, Erin J.K.; Faas, Travis | “Several Hundred Freaks and No One Else”: Practitioner Perspectives on Alternative Controller Design and Development in the MAGFest Indie Arcade Community | The practice of designing and creating alternative control (or “alt control”) games — playful experiences that use non-traditional input or output devices — has grown rapidly in academic and independent game design spaces in recent decades, with distinct overlap between the two spheres. Due to this close coupling, it is imperative that scholars working with alternative controllers or in adjacent fields build a rich knowledge of the contributions of other practitioners who may not always participate in academic spaces. Towards this end, we sought to build an understanding of contemporary patterns and practices in alternative controller game design and development through interviews with six members of a major event-based alternative control game development community in the United States. Themes that emerged included the importance of regular showcase events to maintain and structure the scene, the significant role event-based and regional communities play in ideation and knowledge sharing, a focus on spatial and embodied experiences, experimentation with a multitude of materials, and limited profitability as a rationale to create artistically-oriented experiences. Furthermore, interviewees described significant passionate hobbyist developer presence, experimental orientation, and a strong focus on in-person interactions, as well as a variety of potential futures centered on maintaining and growing the field despite inherent financial challenges of alternative controller development. As scholar-practitioners continue to examine the potential of alt controls to shape playful interaction, practices, knowledge, and ideas from the broader practitioner community can provide key support and considerations for alt control design in the academic sphere. This paper develops greater understanding of the practices of designer-developers actively working in the alt control field and promotes ongoing engagement between alt control designer-developers across contexts. | Game Design |
| Uemura, Oura; Saga, Ryousuke | A Time Series Causal Analysis of Engagement Factors in Live Streaming Using Continuous-Time Structural Equation Modeling | This study investigates the dynamic processes that shape viewer engagement in live streaming by integrating audio-derived emotional features with chat-based behavioral indicators. Building on theories of social presence and emotional contagion, we model the reciprocal interaction between streamers and viewers using Continuous-Time Structural Equation Modeling (CTSEM). Data were collected from popular Japanese game streams and transformed into one-minute multimodal segments containing speaking frequency, vocal intensity, speech sentiment, chat frequency, donation behavior, and chat sentiment. The CTSEM analysis reveals four key findings: (1) both viewer engagement and the streamer’s verbal expression exhibit rapid self-damping autoregressive dynamics; (2) the streamer’s expressive behavior—reflected in speaking frequency, vocal intensity, and emotional tone—shows a substantial positive association with subsequent viewer engagement; (3) viewers’ collective activity similarly influences the streamer’s expressive behavior, forming a reciprocal feedback loop; and (4) the relative magnitude of these paths suggests that streamer-driven affective cues exert a comparatively stronger influence within the real-time interaction system. These results highlight live streaming as a short-horizon yet stable emotional–behavioral system characterized by continuous mutual adaptation. The study demonstrates the utility of CTSEM for modeling real-time social interaction and offers practical implications for optimizing interactive design and streamer communication strategies. | Game Analytics and Visualization |
| Varsaluoma, Jukka | Mapperoni: A Tool for Teaching the Basics of Level Design | Teaching introductory level design often relies on sketches and simplified exercises, which can make it difficult for beginners to understand how spatial decisions translate into first-person experi- ence. This paper introduces Mapperoni, a lightweight web-based tool that converts a 2D layout image into a simple 3D environment, enabling rapid experiential evaluation without the complexity of full game engines. The tool was deployed in an undergraduate game design course and examined by combining teacher observations and a condensed UTAUT-based student survey. Results indicate that students found the tool easy to use, engaging, and helpful for understanding core spatial concepts such as scale, navigation flow, and player guidance. Technical limitations such as performance issues and the lack of integrated editing tools were highlighted. The findings suggest that minimalistic, easily accessible tools can effectively support early stage level design education by lowering technical barriers and encouraging iterative experimentation. | Late Breaking Short Papers |
| Vasquez, Juan Carlos | Not a Game, Yet on Steam: Reception of a Game Art Project in a Mainstream Gaming Ecosystem | This study examines how an experimental game art project navigated Steam’s mainstream gaming ecosystem. Released in 2023 as a free, 30-45 minute contemplative experience, the project eschewed traditional gameplay for spatial audio, philosophical narrative, and environmental traversal. Despite lacking conventional mechanics, it achieved 35,034 claims and a 74.5% positive rating across 51 reviews before delisting in mid-2025. Mixed-methods analysis reveals a clear divide: supporters praised visual spectacle, immersive audio, and emotional depth, validating “art over gameplay”; critics rejected it as “not a game,” citing missing interactivity and technical features (menus, saves, settings). The project succeeded through strategic accessibility—zero cost, brief duration, high production values—which lowered barriers while maintaining artistic integrity. Findings demonstrate that mainstream platforms can accommodate experimental work under specific conditions, though algorithmic visibility systems simultaneously enable and constrain such projects. This case contributes empirical evidence to debates about medium boundaries and offers practical insights for artists disseminating experimental interactive art through commercial gaming infrastructure. | Game Criticism and Analysis |
| Villeneuve, Joey; Zhou, Hongwei; Melcer, Edward | Serious Games for Cognitive Bias Mitigation: A Review of Learning Mechanisms and Design Approaches | Serious games have shown promise in mitigating cognitive biases, but existing designs differ in how they conceptualize debiasing and learning. To map this design space, we conducted a directed qualitative content analysis of 16 bias mitigation games across four dimensions: learning foundations, level of intervention, content integration, and content delivery. Our results reveal that despite substantial variation in how debiasing content is incorporated, games overwhelmingly frame debiasing as an individual cognitive task with sociocultural mechanisms largely absent or limited to multiplayer. These findings highlight a narrow conceptualization of debiasing and point to underexplored opportunities for incorporating social and systemic mechanisms such as accountability, observational learning, and collaborative play. | Late Breaking Short Papers |
| von Rickenbach, Mario; Frei, Michael | Coin | Insert coin, please, thank you. A web-based toy by Playables (https://playables.net) https://coin.playables.net/?clean | Games and Demos |
| Vrettis, Panagiotis; Pfau, Johannes; Frommel, Julian | Prometheas: A System for Promoting Prosocial Behavior in Online Multiplayer Games | Despite their potential for positive social interactions, games are limited in directing players and encouraging prosocial behaviors. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a system promoting prosocial behavior in games that tracks the players’ in-game prosocial behavior and provides feedback, self-reflection, and ranks based on their prosocial actions. We conducted a user study with $16$ participants, in which we used a version of this system with mocked tracking through manual annotation, evaluating the effects of the system on increasing prosocial actions over two gameplay sessions. The results indicate that the system significantly increased the overall number and the variety of prosocial actions. We further explore system usability and qualitative data on the players’ self-reflection triggered through the system. Overall, this work supports the potential value of a dedicated system for fostering more prosocial behaviors in game behavior. | Game Design |
| Vrettis, Panagiotis; Pfau, Johannes; Frommel, Julian | Behavior Ranking Systems in Online Multiplayer Video Games: An Analysis & Design Space | In modern online multiplayer video games, players experience a plethora of social interactions like communication, competition, and completion of shared goals. Those experiences are, however, hindered by toxic behavior. Game developers have sought to counteract such behaviors by introducing what we call Behavior Ranking Systems, i.e., systems that track and assess player in-game behavior, based on which players are assigned ranks and receive rewards or punishments accordingly. Despite their important role, information on the functionality of these systems is difficult to find, limited in detail, and often outdated. In this paper, we provide a review of four prominent Behavior Ranking Systems, analyze their designs in detail, and identify their features. Based on our review, we define a design space encompassing the core features of a Behavior Ranking System to inform the design of new such systems. | Game Design |
| Wang, Jingrong; Jiang, Ziyuan | Social Navigation as Gameplay: A Hybrid Social Physics Engine for Deduction Games | When LLMs directly drive NPC dialogue in social deduction games, a single information leak collapses the entire puzzle structure, a consequence far more severe than in casual social simulations. This paper presents a three-layer hybrid architecture that relocates LLM involvement to a narrow intent classification boundary, while delegating social state evolution to the Ensemble social physics engine and natural language output to a RiveScript dialogue module. A turn-taking mechanism integrating adjacency pair rules and probabilistic volition-weighted bidding coordinates multi-NPC discussion without central LLM mediation. Evaluation through dialogue breakdown analysis across 20 sessions (598 turns) reveals that repetition accounts for 60\% of breakdowns, traceable to a structural bottleneck where the scripting layer collapses the engine’s fine-grained action variants into shallow response pools. An adapted Bi-Fact evaluation of the NLU layer confirms that the narrow-channel design achieves stable factual accuracy at the cost of systematic semantic compression. Playtesting further surfaces an emergent genre shift: players reorient from evidence-based deduction toward social relationship management, suggesting that social physics engines may constitute a generative substrate for a distinct interactive genre. | Late Breaking Short Papers |
| Wang, Ziyi; Holopainen, Jussi | Fostering Social Interaction Through Game Design: A Case Study of It Takes Two and Overcooked! 2 | Video games are increasingly recognized for fostering social interaction, yet limited research examines how specific mechanics influence social dynamics during co-located play. This qualitative case study compares It Takes Two and Overcooked! 2 to investigate how game mechanics and design features trigger distinct patterns of player interaction. Through gameplay sessions and video analysis, we found that mechanical asymmetry in It Takes Two fosters balanced participation and light-hearted collaboration within a low-pressure environment, while systemic pressure in Overcooked! 2 encourages strategic coordination and intense teamwork under stress. Both games promote cooperation through different pathways, demonstrating that interdependence structure and pacing fundamentally shape interpersonal dynamics. This research contributes insights for designers to intentionally align mechanics with desired social outcomes, as well as provides a structured approach to gameplay analysis. | Late Breaking Short Papers |
| Willumsen, Ea Christina Valentin | Cashing In on More Than Learning: Digital Games and Audience Experience in a Cultural History Money Exhibition | Digital games in museums have often been examined as exhibited artifacts (e.g., Naskali, Suominen & Saarikoski, 2013; Prax, Eklund & Sjöblom, 2019) or as engaging components of virtual exhibitions (Wang et al., 2024). Gamification and game-based learning have also entered the museum space, with research emphasizing games as tools for “enhancing visitor engagement and learning” (Li & Zhang, 2025, p. 1) and play as “a structure to support visitor learning” (Fróes & Walker, 2011, p. 487). Yet, focusing primarily on learning risks overlooking other dimensions of audience experience. As Beale (2011) argues, games contribute to a shift from the museum as “keeper of artefacts” to a “collection of stories” (p. 25). While these stories may teach visitors something new, the experience itself holds intrinsic value, reshaping how audiences perceive cultural history museums beyond glass cases and didactic displays. This study adopts an audience-centric perspective to explore visitor experiences in KA-CHING! Show Me the Money, an exhibition on the history of money at the National Museum of Denmark. While KA-CHING! includes traditional elements: glass cases, texts, and infographics, it is structured around a digital game: The Money Game. Framed by three interactive stations – The Money Quiz, The Hamster Wheel, and The Investment Game –visitors engage with the concept of money through simple game mechanics. Drawing on walk-alongs (Skov, Lykke & Jantzen, 2019) with 18 visitors in seven groups, participant observation over three days, and an exit survey with 101 respondents, this presentation examines how audiences experience the digital game as part of a cultural history exhibition: not merely as learning or entertainment, but as something more. List of References Beale, K. (2011). Introduction. In Beale, K. (Ed.) Museums at Play. Games, Interaction and Learning. MuseumsEtc. Fróes, I., & Walker, K. (2011). The art of play: exploring the roles of technology and social play in museums. In Beale, K. (Ed.) Museums at Play. Games, Interaction and Learning. MuseumsEtc. Li, H., & Zhang, M. (2025, May). Museum game-based learning: innovative approaches from a constructivist perspective. In Frontiers in Education (Vol. 10, p. 1576207). Frontiers Media SA. Naskali, T., Suominen, J., & Saarikoski, P. (2013). The introduction of computer and video games in museums – Experiences and possibilities. In Making the History of Computing Relevant: Proceedings of the IFIP International Conference on the History of Computing (HC) (pp. 226–245). Springer. Prax, P., Eklund, L., & Sjöblom, B. (2019). ‘More like an arcade’ – The limitations of playable games in museum exhibitions. Museum & Society, 17(3), 242–258. Skov, M., Lykke, M., & Jantzen, C. (2019). Introducing walk-alongs in visitor studies: A mobile method approach to studying user experience. Visitor Studies, 21(2), 189-210. Wang, H., Gao, Z., Zhang, X., Du, J., Xu, Y., & Wang, Z. (2024). Gamifying cultural heritage: Exploring the potential of immersive virtual exhibitions. Telematics and Informatics Reports, 15, 100150. | Abstracts |
| Wittrock, Wieger; Gómez-Maureira, Marcello A. | Next Level Generation: Adaptive 3D Procedural Terrain Driven by Player Skill | Procedural Content Generation (PCG) is increasingly common in game development, enabling automated creation of diverse environments. A related technique, Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment (DDA), is used to personalise challenges to individual players. However, despite the potential synergy between these approaches, 3D terrain generation is usually approached separately from player ability, relying instead on pre-determined difficulty curves that treat all players the same. This research investigates an Experience-Driven PCG (EDPCG) framework for adaptively modifying 3D terrain generation parameters, including slope, roughness, and obstacle density, based on player skill. Through a custom-built navigation game, we compared linear difficulty progression against adaptive terrain in a between-subjects study (n = 30). While both conditions produced high enjoyment scores, the adaptive system yielded a highly significant reduction in player tension, and players perceived the experience as more consistently well-matched to their ability. This work demonstrates that skill-based 3D terrain adaptation is a promising tool for creating inclusive, balanced gaming experiences. | Late Breaking Short Papers |
| Wu, Alyce; Nguyen, Trisha; Parent, Katherine; Ramos, Emily | Building and Burning Fandom Libraries: Maintenance in Transnational Media Ecologies through English-speaking Ensemble Stars!! Fans | This study examines the English-speaking fandom of Ensemble Stars!! (Enstars), a character-driven Japanese multimedia franchise whose global reach was heavily driven by extensive fan-led efforts such as translation work and other community-driven resources. In particular, we focus on the Enstars community’s development of and reliance on the Unofficial English Ensemble Stars!! Wiki (the Wiki), the franchise’s unofficial fan-wiki. Through a digital ethnography drawing on an archival analysis of posts across social media platforms, a 7-week open-access online survey, and 15 in-depth text-based interviews, we trace how three major franchise events – the 2021 copyright takedown of Wiki-hosted fan-translations, the 2022 official English Ensemble Stars!!Music release, and the 2025 KAGETSU event’s major character-unit change – reshaped the community’s informal infrastructures and relationships with its parent company. By analyzing how fan-created resources and paratexts shape a franchise’s accessibility, how corporate interventions may destabilize established fan-networks, and how interactions between actors impact fans’ perceptions of the game’s parent company, this research highlights the ongoing contention over authority in fandom spaces and how these tensions influence community structures, brand loyalty, and the long-term sustainability of international fandoms. This work contributes to broader conversations surrounding social structures and interpretive work in contemporary game-oriented ecosystems, exploring games as texts shaped not only by producers but also by the interpretive labor of their communities. | Game Criticism and Analysis |
| Xie, Zhongyu; Won, Kwanghee | Group-Supervised Contrastive Learning for Semantic PCG Map Representations | Learning general-purpose representations for symbolic procedural content generation (PCG) remains challenging due to the domain gap between discrete tile maps and natural images, and the lack of reusable semantic backbones for analyzing generated content. A key challenge in PCG is that diverse maps may share identical design intent when generated from the same control parameters, creating many-to-one semantic mappings. Standard contrastive learning approaches struggle in this setting, often treating semantically equivalent maps as negatives, leading to fragmented embedding spaces. In this paper, we present a controlled study on learning semantic representations for symbolic maps aligned with natural language. We introduce a group-supervised contrastive learning framework that addresses semantic ambiguity through two complementary mechanisms: (1) a data construction pipeline that expands parameter-based templates into diverse natural language descriptions using Large Language Models (LLMs), and (2) a group-supervised multi-positive contrastive objective that aligns text embeddings with sets of maps generated under shared control parameters. We evaluate our approach in a Zelda-based grid environment against visual (CLIP, ResNet) and statistical (Tile-MLP) baselines. Results show that explicitly modeling semantic groups leads to improved retrieval accuracy (60.8\% R@5 versus 25.7\% for statistical baselines), with larger gains under out-of-distribution settings. Moreover, the learned representations support zero-shot inference of abstract gameplay concepts such as solvability and threat level without task-specific supervision. These findings suggest that parameter-guided semantic alignment is a promising direction for building reusable and interpretable representation backbones for PCG analysis. | GenAI |
| Xu, Kaijie; Verbrugge, Clark | High Dimensional Procedural Content Generation | Procedural content generation (PCG) has made substantial progress in shaping static 2D/3D geometry, while most methods treat gameplay mechanics as auxiliary and optimize only over space. We argue that this limits controllability and expressivity, and formally introduce High-Dimensional PCG (HDPCG): a framework that elevates non-geometric gameplay dimensions to first-class coordinates of a joint state space. We instantiate HDPCG along two concrete directions. Direction-Space augments geometry with a discrete layer dimension and validates reachability in 4D (x,y,z,l), enabling unified treatment of 2.5D/3.5D mechanics such as gravity inversion and parallel-world switching. Direction-Time augments geometry with temporal dynamics via time-expanded graphs, capturing action semantics and conflict rules. For each direction, we present three general, practicable algorithms with a shared pipeline of abstract skeleton generation, controlled grounding, high-dimensional validation, and multi-metric evaluation. Large-scale experiments across diverse settings validate the integrity of our problem formulation and the effectiveness of our methods on playability, structure, style, robustness, and efficiency. Beyond quantitative results, Unity-based case studies recreate playable scenarios that accord with our metrics. We hope HDPCG encourages a shift in PCG toward general representations and the generation of gameplay-relevant dimensions beyond geometry, paving the way for controllable, verifiable, and extensible level generation. | Game Artificial Intelligence |
| Xu, Kaijie; Verbrugge, Clark | (Perlin) Noise as AI coordinator | Large scale control of nonplayer agents is central to modern games, while production systems still struggle to balance several competing goals: locally smooth, natural behavior, and globally coordinated variety across space and time. Prior approaches rely on handcrafted rules or purely stochastic triggers, which either converge to mechanical synchrony or devolve into uncorrelated noise that is hard to tune. Continuous noise signals such as Perlin noise are well suited to this gap because they provide spatially and temporally coherent randomness, and they are already widely used for terrain, biomes, and other procedural assets. We adapt these signals for the first time to large scale AI control and present a general framework that treats continuous noise fields as an AI coordinator. The framework combines three layers of control: behavior parameterization for movement at the agent level, action time scheduling for when behaviors start and stop, and spawn or event type and feature generation for what appears and where. We instantiate the framework reproducibly and evaluate Perlin noise as a representative coordinator across multiple maps, scales, and seeds against random, filtered, deterministic, neighborhood constrained, and physics inspired baselines. Experiments show that coordinated noise fields provide stable activation statistics without lockstep, higher spatial coverage and regional balance, better diversity with controllable polarization, and competitive runtime. We hope this work motivates a broader exploration of coordinated noise in game AI as a practical path to combine efficiency, controllability, and quality. | Game Artificial Intelligence |
| Xu, Kaijie; Bugti, Mustafa; Verbrugge, Clark | How Far Can We Go with Pixels Alone? A Pilot Study on Screen-Only Navigation in Commercial 3D ARPGs | Modern 3D game levels rely heavily on visual guidance, yet the navigability of level layouts remains difficult to quantify. Prior work either simulates play in simplified environments or analyzes static screenshots for visual affordances, but neither setting faithfully captures how players explore complex, real-world game levels. In this paper, we build on an existing open-source visual affordance detector and instantiate a screen-only exploration and navigation agent that operates purely from visual affordances. Our agent consumes live game frames, identifies salient interest points, and drives a simple finite-state controller over a minimal action space to explore Dark Souls–style linear levels and attempt to reach expected goal regions. Pilot experiments show that the agent can traverse most required segments and exhibits meaningful visual navigation behavior, but also highlight that limitations of the underlying visual model prevent truly comprehensive and reliable auto-navigation. We argue that this system provides a concrete, shared baseline and evaluation protocol for visual navigation in complex games, and we call for more attention to this necessary task. Our results suggest that purely vision-based sense-making models, under discrete single-modality input and without explicit reasoning, can effectively support navigation and environment understanding in idealized settings, but are unlikely to be a general solution on their own. | Game Artificial Intelligence |
| Xu, Ruiyu | Interpretability of Design Fusion: Framework Construction to Improve Semi-autonomous AI-NPC Interactive Experience | Introduction and Core Question Recently, breakthroughs have been made in generative agents and large-scale behavioral models, allowing some non-player characters (NPCs) to evolve from scripted entities into semi-autonomous actors capable of improvisation, emotional coordination, persistent memory, and adaptive dialogue. While these NPCs expand game openness, they also raise numerous challenges. Players struggle to infer the internal logic of the driving systems; designers find it difficult to accurately shape and control behavioral expectations; and regulators increasingly require greater transparency from AI-driven interactive media. Faced with these challenges, traditional explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) methods rarely provide effective guidance for the gams, as ambiguity, unpredictability, and illusion are deliberate design elements rather than system flaws. These tensions lead to a central question: how can games preserve the expressiveness and semi-autonomy of AI-NPCs while still providing players understandable behavioral cues and meeting emerging transparency expectations? Existing Gapes Current game AI research mainly focuses on manipulation risks, behavior tuning, and difficulty balancing, while XAI emphasizes technical principles and post hoc explanations. However, neither adequately addresses the inherently experiential nature of interpretability in games. What players really need is not access to internal model states, but understandability at the interactive level. This understanding can promote players’ predictions, build trust, and ultimately consolidate their agency in the game. Design Integrated Interpretability (DIX) Framework To fill this gap in theory and practice, this study formally proposes the Design-Integrated Explainability (DIX) framework. DIX is a conceptual model native to the game, which aims to embed interpretability into the interaction design of NPCs, rather than imposing it on the system as an external interpretability requirement. DIX is based on the latest research results in generative agents, behavioral modeling, and interpretability cues in interactive systems, and proposes four complementary mechanisms to achieve behavioral understandability without sacrificing game aesthetics: 1. Systems-level readability: Convey consistent and learnable patterns through NPC categories, behavior prototypes, ability provision, daily routines, and feedback loops, allowing players to infer extensive behavioral logic. 2. Local interpretive cues: At the moment of interaction, through animation pauses, posture changes, dialogue marks or tiny feedback, the NPC’s intentions or changes in constraints are revealed without destroying the immersion. 3. Diegetic transparency: Use narrative frameworks within the game world (such as codexes, background settings, metaphors, character biographies, or fictional AI structures) to explain NPC behavior at the narrative level rather than through warnings outside the game. 4. Agency-based explanation: Design an interaction structure that allows players to actively explore the inner logic of NPCs through dialogue trees, repeated encounters, behavioral tests, or systematic exploration, thereby generating player-led understanding. Regulatory Alignment and Contribution This study further examines how DIX interfaces with regulatory expectations, particularly the EU AI Act’s provisions on users’ right to know. Compared with technical XAI, DIX provides an appropriate operationalization path for transparency for entertainment systems: it not only defines when AI-NPC constitutes a high-risk interaction, but also offers a domain-specific interpretation of the obligation to know and supports game studios to effectively balance narrative coherence and player trust when integrating generative agents. The contributions of this study are structural: 1. Theoretical reconstruction: It repositions interpretability as a game design and interaction issue rather than a simple additional regulatory requirement. 2. Framework foundation: It provides a basic conceptual framework for analyzing and building interpretable AI-driven NPCs. 3. Future directions: It clearly outlines future empirical and technical research paths, including behavioral model trajectory comparison, player interpretive research, and generative agent prototype implementation. | Abstracts |
| Zhang, Annie; Zhou, Hongwei; Melcer, Edward; Hellemans, Kim | Addressing Anxiety Through Games: A Review of Therapeutic Design Strategies | While video games show promise as tools for treating anxiety, the therapeutic strategies embedded in their designs remains un- derexplored. This paper presents an analysis of 14 academic and commercial games developed to address symptoms of Anxiety Dis- orders. We apply the Comparative Psychotherapy Process Scale to examine how therapeutic techniques are translated into the de- sign of these games. Our findings reveal a strong emphasis on CBT aligned strategies, while PIT aligned strategies are comparatively underrepresented. This distinction also highlights two overarching design approaches (educational and emotional) that reflect different therapeutic paradigms. | Late Breaking Short Papers |
| Zheng, Keyang; Healy, Pat; Wang, Samuel; Farzan, Rosta | Toxic Pings: An Interview Study on Hostile Nonverbal Communication Among Teammates in DotA 2 and League of Legends | Anti-social behaviors with the label “toxicity” are commonly understood as inescapable when playing online games with strangers, particularly in multiplayer online battle arenas (MOBA). Prior work in understanding in-game toxicity has primarily focused on verbal communication methods such as voice and text chat, which we extend into non-verbal communication, such as pings, emotes, and map annotations. In a semi-structured interview study among ten players of popular MOBAs (League of Legends and Dota 2), we explored players’ perspectives on perceived toxicity through nonverbal communication features and the consequences of that toxicity. Our results echo prior work that “toxicity” refers to an exceptionally broad domain of behaviors and discuss player perceptions that may contribute to its normalization. In regard to nonverbal communications, pings stand out as players’ primary nonverbal communication method, primarily as strategic communication, but often also toxic pings, which players consider unique in their form and intensity of toxicity compared to verbal communications. We discuss design implications for MOBAs, particularly in the context of player perspectives on limiting communication exclusively to nonverbal communication. | Game Design |