While normative - "good"- game design and user experiences have been established, we look to games that challenge those notions. Intentional frustration and failure can be worthwhile. Through a reflexive thematic analysis of 31 games we identify how intentionally non-normative design choices lead to meaningful experiences. Working within the established Mechanics Dynamics Aesthetics (MDA) Game Design Framework, we lay out themes to design Shitty User Experiences (SUX). We contribute SUX MDA themes for designers and researchers to counter the status quo and identify new forms of play and interaction.

Social media has become a primary mode of journalism and political discourse as evidenced by recent online political movements. Platforms like YouTube, by monetizing content through advertising revenue, have fostered a new group of online political professionals, including journalists and commentators. Recently, to limit the spread of misinformation and hateful content, these platforms have begun revising their content monetization, recommendation, and removal policies. To explore the impact on creators, we present an interview based study of journalists and political commentators on YouTube. Our participants report that these policies' implementations are inadequate technically and impacting their ability to survive financially. In their view, these policies may result in the suppression of legitimate reporting and discourse that dissents from mainstream consensus. We identify potential systemic effects of these polices and develop implications for the future design of online media.

Game map interfaces provide an alternative perspective on the worlds players inhabit.compared to navigation applications popular in day-to-day life, game maps have different affordances to match players' situated goals. To contextualize and understand these differences and how they developed, we present a historical chronicle of game map interfaces. Starting from how games came to involve maps, we trace how maps are first separate from the game, becoming more and more integrated into play until converging in smartphone-style interfaces. We synthesize several game history texts with critical engagement with 123 key games to develop this map-focused chronicle, from which we highlight trends and opportunities for future map designs. Our work contributes a record of trends in game map interfaces that can serve as a source of reference and inspiration to game designers, digital physical-world map designers, and game scholars.

Our objective is to explore distributed forms of creativity that arise in play to help guide and foster supportive research, game design, and technology. This workshop seeks to bring together researchers, game designers, and others to examine theories of creativity and play, game design practices, methods for studying creativity in play, and creative play experiences. Participants will present work, video prototype, discuss topics, and contribute to outcomes.

In recent years, online education's reach and scale have increased through new platforms for large and small online courses. However, these platforms often rely on impoverished modalities, which provide limited support for participation in social learning experiences. We present Collaborative Live Media Curation (CLMC), a new medium for sharing context and participation in online learning. CLMC involves collaborative, synchronous collection, creation, and assemblage of web media, including images, text, video, and sketch. CLMC integrates live media including streaming video, screenshares, audio, and text chat. We deploy and study LiveMâché, a CLMC technology probe, in four situated online learning contexts. We discovered student and instructor strategies for sharing context and participating including creating curations in advance, sketching to illustrate and gesture, real-time transformations, sharing perspective, and assembling live streams. We develop implications through live experience patterns, which describe how spatial and computing structures support social activities.

In the physical world, teammates develop situation awareness about each other's location, status, and actions through cues such as gaze direction and ambient noise. To support situation awareness, distributed multiplayer games provide awareness cues - information that games automatically make available to players to support cooperative gameplay. The design of awareness cues can be extremely complex, impacting how players experience games and work with teammates. Despite the importance of awareness cues, designers have little beyond experiential knowledge to guide their design. In this work, we describe a design framework for awareness cues, providing insight into what information they provide, how they communicate this information, and how design choices can impact play experience. Our research, based on a grounded theory analysis of current games, is the first to provide a characterization of awareness cues, providing a palette for game designers to improve design practice and a starting point for deeper research into collaborative play.

Social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have become a critical tools for the coordination of activist movements and demonstrations. Additionally, live streaming platforms like Periscope have started to emerge as modalities for reporting on and remotely experiencing activist activities. In this design fiction, we present LiveDissent, a fictional media platform that leverages both established and emerging technologies to support remote participation in activist demonstrations. These technologies include mobile live streaming, telepresence robots, unmanned aerial vehicles, and digitally augmented picket signs. LiveDissent brings these technologies together into an aggregated platform for remotely watching and participating in demonstrations. We discuss a planned in the wild study at an upcoming demonstration, through which we will explore the design and implications of social media and telepresence for participation in activism. Finally, our authors' statement connects to related prior work and explores potential research and ethics questions.

Live streaming is becoming a popular way to share experiences with others. When concurrent video streams of the same event are available, it can be challenging to decide which streams to view and to manage the experience across multiple streams. We designed and developed the SocialStreamViewer prototype that aggregates multiple streams from an event and visualizes others' viewing, hearting, and text chat activity. It also enables users to replay portions of streams. A lab study of SocialStreamViewer explored how people experience an event remotely through multiple streams, and how they use social signals from other viewers' activities. We found that 1) providing multiple streams is beneficial; 2) replaying back in time is highly valued since it helps ensure that users will not miss interesting content; and 3) visualizing other viewers' activities helps users decide which stream to watch.

Previously, video streaming sites were at the fringes of online social media. In the past two years, live streams of video games, on sites such as Twitch.tv, have become very popular. Live streams serve as meeting grounds for player communities. The Twitch streaming medium combines broadcast video with open IRC chat channels. In conjunction with gameplay, viewer participation and community building gain emphasis. Twitch streams range in size and nature, from intimate communities with fifty viewers, to massive broadcasts with tens of thousands. In this paper, we present an ethnographic investigation of the live streaming of video games on Twitch.

In building location-based services, it is important to present information in ways that fit with how individuals view and navigate the city. We conducted an adaptation of the 1970s Mental Maps study by Stanley Milgram in order to better understand differences in people's views of the city based on their backgrounds and technology use. We correlated data from a demographic questionnaire with the map data from our participants to perform a first-of-its-kind statistical analysis on differences in hand-drawn city maps. We describe our study, findings, and design implications for location-based services.

We present culturally based design (CBD), a new paradigm for designing embodied natural user interaction (NUI) with digital information by drawing on customary ways that people use physical objects. CBD coalesces experiences, practices, and embodied mental models of pre-digital activities as a basis for the design of interactive systems. We apply CBD to address trans-surface interaction, the manipulation of information artifacts from one device to another. We develop Trans-Surface Rummy, because the game involves highly dynamic combinations of turn taking and non-linear out of turn play, while transferring information artifacts to and from private and social surfaces. Through the CBD process, we create the trans-surface wormhole, an embodied interface technique. We investigate the trans-surface wormhole's efficacy and other aspects of culturally based design with young students, and with elderly members of our local bridge club. We derive implications for the design of trans-surface interaction, and more broadly, from the process of CBD. We initiate a research agenda for trans-surface interaction.

We used the situated context of real-time strategy (RTS) games to address the design and evaluation of new pen + touch interaction techniques. RTS play is a popular genre of Electronic Sports (eSports), games played and spectated at an extremely high level. Interaction techniques are critical for eSports players, because they so directly impact performance.

Fire emergency responders rely on team coordination to survive and succeed in high-stress environments, but traditional education does not directly teach these essential skills. Prior simulations seek the highest possible fidelity, employing resources to capture concrete characteristics of operating environments. We take a different tack, hypothesizing that a zero-fidelity approach, focusing on human-centered aspects of work practice, will improve team coordination learning. Such an approach promotes simulation focus by developing an alternative environment that stimulates participants to engage in distributed cognition. The costs of simulation development are reduced.

Crisis response engenders a high-stress environment in which teams gather, transform, and mutually share information. Prior educational approaches have not successfully addressed these critical skills. The assumption has been that the highest fidelity simulations result in the best learning. Deploying high-fidelity simulations is expensive and dangerous; they do not address team coordination. Low-fidelity approaches are ineffective because they are not stressful. Zero-fidelity simulation develops and invokes the principle of abstraction, focusing on human-information and human-human transfers of meaning, to derive design from work practice. Our principal hypothesis is that crisis responders will experience zero-fidelity simulation as effective simulation of team coordination. We synthesize the sustained iterative design and evaluation of the Team Coordination Game. We develop and apply new experimental methods to show that participants learn to cooperate and communicate, applying what they learn in practice. Design implications address how to employ the abstraction principle to develop zero-fidelity simulations.

We take the work practices of fire emergency responders as the basis for developing simulations to teach team coordination. We introduce non-mimetic simulation: economic operational environments that represent human-centered components of practice, such as team structures and information flows, without mimicking concrete aspects of an environment. Emergent team coordination phenomena validate the non-mimetic simulation of fire emergency response.