There has been growing concern about digital well-being, especially given the emerging adverse impact of technology overuse. While prior studies have developed a variety of stand-alone techniques to combat technology overuse, little work has been done to build interventions directly into technologies to regulate usage. In this study, we designed three interventions that remind players to take a break in a casual mobile game. We explored players’ experiences with these interventions through a 4-day deployment study and follow-up interviews (N=16). Findings suggest that while some players had a positive experience with the game that had built-in interventions, others experienced unintended outcomes such as disrupted immersion or longer play sessions. We also found that interventions seemed to be more likely to succeed when players experienced a sense of accomplishment or negative emotions. We discuss the implications of the study and provide preliminary suggestions for designing built-in interventions.

Counsellors use Motivational Interviewing (MI) to boost intrinsic motivation for healthier lifestyles by supporting 1) the identification of personal values and 2) the linking of these values to personal reasons for change. Research is needed to increase the reach of such interventions through the use of online tools. Thus, we explored the use of defamiliarization and poetic gameplay in a serious game, to make habitual health choices difficult and ‘unfamiliar’ in order to promote players’ contemplation about their personal reasons for health. Our evaluation indicates that the players demonstrated evidence of processes of change such as self-reevaluation, environmental reevaluation, and improving decisional clarity. We observed that these methods could promote dialogic reflection with different points of view, but was less effective at promoting transformative reflection that would lead to change. We conclude with a discussion of promising future directions for research.

Replay of interactive stories is an essential characteristic of the medium, enabling players to both see whether their choices impact the narrative, and work towards an understanding of the story and underlying system. Despite the centrality of replay to the form, little work has been done to investigate what motivates people to replay interactive stories, or when and why they stop replaying. In this paper, we report on the results of an exploratory qualitative observational study of 12 participants (aged 22 to 28) replaying the visual novel The Shadows that Run Alongside Our Car, a short work that presents a post-apocalyptic survival story from the perspective of two different playable characters and involves four dialogue choices leading to one of three possible endings. Unlike previous models of rereading, our observations suggest that players' reasons for deciding whether or not to replay change fluidly as their sense of closure changes, and players are deciding based not just on whether they have reached closure, but also on their estimate of the likelihood of seeing something new or moving closer to closure versus the effort required to replay. This suggests a need to rethink earlier, more simplistic models of rereading in interactive stories.

Based on an analysis of 49 popular contemporary video games, we develop a descriptive framework of visual interaction cues in video games. These cues are used to inform players what can be interacted with, where to look, and where to go within the game world. These cues vary along three dimensions: the purpose of the cue, the visual design of the cue, and the circumstances under which the cue is shown. We demonstrate that this framework can also be used to describe interaction cues for augmented reality applications. Beyond this, we show how the framework can be used to generatively derive new design ideas for visual interaction cues in augmented reality experiences.

This paper explores the use of Weir's concept of emotional agency as a way to understand how agency can arise when players make meaningful decisions bearing emotional significance, regardless of whether these actions have major consequences. Through close readings of The Wolf Among Us, Kentucky Route Zero and Oxenfree, we suggest that emotional agency is linked to an illusion of agency on a local level, and a sense of affection towards the characters. However, emotional agency is potentially in conflict with global agency, when the desire to traverse other narrative routes is constrained by a player's sense of affection for the playable character. Based on these observations, we propose that emotional agency arises when moment-to-moment choices and responses, bearing sentimental value, accumulate to form a sense of attachment to characters in a game or interactive story.

Improvisation often requires performers to anticipate each other's upcoming actions to coordinate their performance. Traditionally, improvisation does not involve explicit representation of upcoming actions, relying instead on implicit cues and overt gestures. Providing a concrete representation of these actions may impact the nature of improvisation. To explore how performers use such a representation, we introduce the "temporal window", a shared workspace for collaborators to indicate upcoming actions shortly before those actions are carried out. We describe versions for music and storytelling, and present results of an observational study of use of these systems by 11 pairs of participants. Participants used the temporal window in various ways, including using knowledge about upcoming actions when performing live, and adjusting upcoming actions based on knowledge of both the live performance and upcoming actions. These observations can inform design to support improvisation as well as other systems that support anticipating upcoming actions.

The paper investigates the limits of what authors can vary procedurally to encourage and reward rereadability in procedural hypertext fiction. Exploring these issues raises a methodological challenge: how do we study re-reading in the context of stories that change? We have developed an adapted form of the Piagetan clinical interview to do this. Using this approach, we have determined that readers, surprisingly, do not want to experience endless variation when rereading interactive stories. Instead, they are looking for some form of closure, either in terms of "understanding the story", reaching the "best ending" for the characters in the story, or finding the "most interesting" version of the story. This has implications for the design/authoring of interactive stories and interactive art and entertainment.

We describe NetEffect, a highly-scalable architecture for developing, supporting and managing large, media-rich, 3D virtual worlds used by several thousand geographically dispersed users using low-end computers (PCs) and modems.NetEffect partitions a whole virtual world into communities, allocates these communities among a set of servers, and migrates clients from one server to another as clients move through the communities.It devotes special attention to minimizing the network traffic, in particular, the traftic that must go through servers.HistoryCity, a virtual world for children, has been developed on NetEffect and is currently being beta-tested for deployment in Singapore.

Most studies of collaborative writing have focused on mature writers who have extensive experience with the process of writing together. Typically, these studies also deal with short, somewhat artificial tasks carried out in a laboratory, and thus do not extend over a period of time as real writing usually does.