Role-playing games allow players to explore a digital world through a character's eyes. For minority groups, such as queer players, representation is not a given when playing popular role-playing games. We surveyed a diverse sample of 464 queer and non-queer players and followed up with 31 in-depth interviews. We asked players about their perspectives on their characters' gender and sexual orientation. The quantitative results showed that cisgender men were the least likely group to find gender representation important and heterosexual players were least likely to consider the representation of sexual orientation as important. However, following up with a thematic analysis, we note many nuances and within-group differences. We identify four themes of how players of all identities view character creation - the character as a shield, a guide, a portrayal, and a creation - and discuss how digital games can improve character design and character creation options.

Positionality is a concept that acknowledges subjectivities, values and experiences of researchers as influencing approaches to and outcomes and implications of research; it underlines the importance of reflexivity and self-awareness. To understand how positionality is used in HCI, we conducted two studies: (i) a scoping review of positionality and reflexivity statements in the CHI papers in the last 11 years and (ii) a survey of HCI researchers (n=75). Our findings show that positionality statements are often a box-ticking exercise and their influence on the research is rarely discussed. While positionality statements are often used and requested in papers, they are often restricted to more sensitive areas of research and impact marginalised identities. We argue that positionality statements can be valuable but not as markers of methodological rigour. Our contributions include a current snapshot of positionality in HCI and reflections on the role of positionality statements in HCI.

Flexible working, including in resource-constrained settings such as long-haul flights, poses considerable challenges. While research in mixed reality (MR) offers the potential for enhancing experiences of working on airplanes (WoA), what input modalities and interactions might be suitable for such workspaces is under-explored. To address this gap, we created four design probes and demonstrated their interactions within MR for WoA using a branching decision-based interactive video. 24 participants engaged in the think-aloud study with the video where they selected which probe to watch based on personal preference and order. The follow-up interview further solidified their general preferences for intuitive and friction-free inputs, revealed strong concerns about reliability, discreetness, and portability, and showed high enthusiasm for interactive video. Based on these findings, we contribute a context-driven design space of input modalities for WoA in MR, extending the understanding of design opportunities for inputs with MR in confined spaces.

For individuals with Social Anxiety (SA), interacting with others can be a challenging experience, a concern that extends into the virtual world. While technology has made significant strides in creating more realistic virtual human agents (VHA), the interplay of gaze and interpersonal distance when interacting with VHAs is often neglected. This paper investigates the effect of dynamic and static Gaze animations in VHAs on interpersonal distance and their relation to SA. A Bayesian analysis shows that static centered and dynamic centering gaze led participants to stand closer to VHAs than static averted and dynamic averting gaze, respectively. In the static gaze conditions, this pattern was found to be reversed in SA: participants with higher SA kept larger distances for static-centered gaze than for averted gaze VHAs. These findings update theory, elucidate how nuanced interactions with VHAs must be designed, and offer renewed guidelines for pleasant VHA interaction design.

Failure is an integral element of most games, and while some players may benefit from external support, such as cheat codes, to prompt self-soothing, most games lack supportive elements. We asked participants (N=88) to play Anno 1404 in single-player mode, and presented a money-generating cheat code in a challenging situation, also measuring the personality trait of action-state orientation, which explains differences in self-regulation ability (i.e., self-soothing) in response to threats of failure. Individuals higher in state orientation were more likely to take the offer, and used the cheat code more frequently. The cheat code also acted as an external support, as differences in experienced pressure between action- and state-oriented participants vanished when it was used. We found no negative consequences of using external support in intrinsic motivation, needs satisfaction, flow, or performance. We argue that external support mechanisms can help state-oriented players to self-regulate in gaming, when faced with failure.

Hypersexualization of women video game characters through unrealistic body proportions and revealing clothes is common. Previous work suggested that overexposure to sexualized women characters can harm players, through increased self-objectification and higher rape myth acceptance; however, there have been inconsistencies across studies that we suggest may stem from variations in the study design and other visual characteristics of the characters, such as relying heavily on stereotypes reinforced by colour schemes (e.g., blonde princess). To address this, we designed a text-based game prototype and four identical women characters who varied only in their colour scheme (gold/red or purple/black) and amount of sexualization (through bikini armour and exaggerating body proportions). We measure attributes assigned to the avatar, avatar appeal, rape myth acceptance and self-objectification. 82 participants participated in our online-study in 2021. Most participants found the non-sexualized character versions more appealing than the sexualized characters and were more likely to assign ‘manipulativeness’ to the sexualized character. When presented with the sexualized characters, participants demonstrated higher rape myth acceptance, and more self-objectification.

Mastering the art of stopping initiated actions is vital when playing video games. However, what characteristics make up the perfect warning or stop-signal remains unclear. In the present study we compared performance in a basic and a gamified stop-signal task depending on different stop-signal modalities: auditory, haptic and audio-haptic. Data from a complete within-subjects design (N = 24), revealed an advantage of haptic or audio-haptic stop-signals as compared to purely auditory ones. Further, results show an overall slower performance in the game-version compared to the basic version. With regards to the subjective experience, the results revealed higher motivation to perform in the gamified task, but a somewhat deeper flow experience in the basic task. In sum, these results confirm that stop-signal modality influences reactive response inhibition in both basic and gamified tasks. Future research may extend and generalize these findings to other cross-modal and more complicated gaming setups. Game developers may draw on these findings to optimize the communication of stop signals via vibrations in a handheld controller.

Tabletop role-playing games are experiencing a peak in popularity and prior work shows that role-playing can be beneficial for mental health. While little research effort has been invested into this area, most studies point towards positive outcomes of playing tabletop role-playing games. This work explores the potential for the acceptance of flaws through role-playing by comparing how novice and expert players approach character creation. The results of this exploratory study show that experienced role-players are more likely to report that they want to play a character with weaknesses and less likely to be interested in playing a flawless character. Additional findings and implications are discussed in the paper.

Toxicity in multiplayer gaming is an ongoing problem that threatens the well-being of players, gaming communities, and game developers. Meanwhile, interventions that promote positive interactions and proactively create positive gaming spaces are still in their infancy; little is known about how players respond to positivity. In our study, 959 League of Legends players were presented with either 10 positive chat logs or 10 negative chat logs, and asked to reflect on the content and how representative such communication is of their own gaming experiences. We thematically coded participants' free-form answers (identifying the themes normalize, acknowledge, downplay, cope, blame, and make personal), and compared the positive and negative conditions in terms of theme prevalence. Our findings show that participants were more likely to normalize and acknowledge toxic negativity than positivity. Furthermore, the dominant response to positivity consisted of downplaying messages as not representative and rare, and even expressing suspicion that messages must have been fabricated or intended as sarcasm. Participants overwhelmingly cope by muting chat, protecting them from toxic interactions, but leaving them unexposed to positive communication and other beneficial social interactions within play.

Social interactions are an essential part of many digital games, and provide benefits to players; however, problematic social interactions also lead to harm. To inform our understanding of the origins of harmful social behaviours in gaming contexts, we examine how trait psychopathy influences player perceptions and behaviours within a gaming task. After measuring participants’ (n=385) trait-level boldness, meanness, and disinhibition, we expose them to neutral and angry social interactions with a non-player character (NPC) in a gaming task and assess their perceptions, verbal responses, and movement behaviours. Our findings demonstrate that the traits significantly influence interpretation of NPC emotion, verbal responses to the NPC, and movement behaviours around the NPC. These insights can inform the design of social games and communities and can help designers and researchers better understand how social functioning translates into gaming contexts.

The growing number of video chat users includes socially anxious people, but it is not known how video chat interfaces affect their interpersonal interactions. In our first study, we use a get-to-know-you task to show that when video feedback of oneself is disabled, higher social anxiety is associated with more public self-awareness, use of 2nd person pronouns, and experienced anxiety. Higher social anxiety was linked to discussing more topics, but discussing more topics only elicited higher self-disclosure and trust when social anxiety was low. In our second study, we assess these same effects using a presentation layout video chat interface and observe no effects of social anxiety on public self-awareness, 2nd person pronoun use, or number of topics discussed; no effect of feedback on experienced anxiety; and no link between number of topics and self-disclosure. Video chat adopters and designers should consider how feedback and interface layout affect conversations.

Digital biomarkers of mental health issues offer many advantages, including timely identification for early intervention, ongoing assessment during treatment, and reducing barriers to assessment stemming from geography, age, fear, or disparities in access to systems of care. Embedding digital biomarkers into games may further increase the reach of digital assessment. In this study, we explore game-based digital biomarkers for social anxiety, based on interaction with a non-player character (NPC). We show that social anxiety affects a player's accuracy and their movement path in a gaming task involving an NPC. Further, we compared first versus third-person camera perspectives and the use of customized versus predefined avatars to explore the influence of common game interface factors on the expression of social anxiety through in-game movements. Our findings provide new insights about how game-based digital biomarkers can be effectively used for social anxiety, affording the benefits of early and ongoing digital assessment.

As digital gaming has grown from a leisure activity into a competitive endeavor with college scholarships, celebrity, and large prize pools at stake, players search for ways to enhance their performance, including through coaching, training, and employing tools that yield a performance advantage. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a non-invasive brain stimulation technique that is presently being explored by esports athletes and competitive gamers. Although shown to modulate cognitive processing in standard laboratory tasks, there is little scientific evidence that tDCS improves performance in digital games, which are visually complex and attentionally demanding environments. We applied tDCS between two sessions of the Stop-Signal Game (SSG; Friehs, Dechant, Vedress, Frings, & Mandryk, 2020). The SSG is a custom-built infinite runner that is based on the Stop-Signal Task (SST; Verbruggen et al., 2019). Consequently, the SSG can be used to evaluate response inhibition as measured by Stop-Signal Reaction Time (SSRT), but in an enjoyable 3D game experience. We used anodal, offline tDCS to stimulate the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (rDLPFC); a 9 cm² anode was always positioned over the rDLPFC while the 35 cm² cathode was placed over the left deltoid. We hypothesized that anodal tDCS would enhance neural processing (as measured by a decrease in SSRT) and improve performance, while sham stimulation (i.e., the control condition with a faked stimulation) should lead to no significant change. In a sample of N = 45 healthy adults a significant session x tDCS-condition interaction emerged in the expected direction. Subsequent analysis confirmed that the statistically significant decrease in SSRT after anodal tDCS to the rDLPFC was not due to a general change in reaction times. These results provide initial evidence that tDCS can influence performance in digital games.

The treatment of social anxiety through digital exposure therapy is challenging due to the cognitive properties of social anxiety-individuals need to be fully engaged in the task and feel themselves represented in the social situation; however, avatar customization has been shown to increase both engagement and social presence. In this paper, we harness techniques used in commercial games, and investigate how customizing self-representation in a novel digital exposure task for social anxiety influences the experience of social threat. In an online experiment with 200 participants, participants either customized their avatar or were assigned a predefined avatar. Participants then controlled the avatar through a virtual shop, where they had to solve a math problem, while a simulated audience within the virtual world observed them and negatively judged their performance. Our findings show that we can stimulate the fear of evaluation by others in our task, that fear is driven primarily by trait social anxiety, and that this relationship is strengthened for people higher in trait social anxiety. We provide new insights into the effects of customization in a novel therapeutic context, and embed the discussion of avatar customization into related work in social anxiety and human-computer interaction. ?

Social anxiety is a prevalent problem that affects many people with varying severity; digital exposure therapy-which involves controlled exposure to simulations of feared social situations alongside cognitive restructuring-can help treat patients with anxieties. However, the need to personalize exposure scenarios and simulate audiences are barriers to treating social anxieties through digital exposure. In this paper, we propose game streaming as an exposure therapy paradigm for social anxiety, supporting it with data from two studies. We first propose a framework describing requirements for exposure therapy and how game streaming can fulfill them. We select demand and performance visibility from these characteristics to showcase how to manipulate them for experiences of gradual exposure. With Study 1, we provide evidence for these characteristics and support for the framework by showing that a game's demand affected expected fear of streaming games. In Study 2, we show that the prospect of streaming led to elevated fear, a necessary property for effective exposure therapy. Further, we show that the effect of streaming on expected fear was similar for participants who can be considered socially anxious. These findings provide evidence for the essential effect of exposure therapy, which serves as a first step towards the validation of streaming as a social anxiety treatment. Our paper provides an initial, important step towards a novel, broadly applicable, and widely accessible digital approach for the treatment of social anxiety.

Socializing is an important part of why people choose to play games and is at the core of many game mechanics. Anxiety and fear about social interactions can lead to withdrawal from socializing in the physical world, yet players with social anxiety preferentially choose MMORPGs — a highly social genre — raising questions of whether social anxiety expresses differently during in-game interactions. In the present study (N=181), we explore whether and how social anxiety translates into MMORPGs. By developing a measure of in-game social anxiety, we find that although fear and apprehension of socializing in the physical and game worlds are related, they differently affect preferences, behaviours, and experiences. Social anxiety in the physical world drives reasons for playing, whereas in-game anxiety affects behaviours, reducing participation in activities related to socializing and difficult in-game challenges. Our findings can inform the design of social games and the links between social anxiety and social gaming.

Emphasis effects - visual changes that make certain elements more prominent - are commonly used in information visualization to draw the user's attention or to indicate importance. Although theoretical frameworks of emphasis exist (that link visually diverse emphasis effects through the idea of visual prominence compared to background elements), most metrics for predicting how emphasis effects will be perceived by users come from abstract models of human vision which may not apply to visualization design. In particular, it is difficult for designers to know, when designing a visualization, how different emphasis effects will compare and how to ensure that the user's experience with one effect will be similar to that with another. To address this gap, we carried out two studies that provide empirical evidence about how users perceive different emphasis effects, using three visual variables (colour, size, and blur/focus) and eight strength levels. Results from gaze tracking, mouse clicks, and subjective responses in our first study show that there are significant differences between different kinds of effects and between levels. Our second study tested the effects in realistic visualizations taken from the MASSVIS dataset, and saw similar results. We developed a simple predictive model from the data in our first study, and used it to predict the results in the second; the model was accurate, with high correlations between predictions and real values. Our studies and empirical models provide new information for designers who want to understand how emphasis effects will be perceived by users.

Spherical fish tank virtual reality (FTVR) displays attempt to create a virtual "crystal ball" experience using head-tracked rendering. Almost all of these systems have omitted stereo cues, making them easy to build, but it is not clear how much this omission degrades the 3D experience. In this study, we evaluate performance and subjective effects of stereo on 3D perception and interaction tasks with a spherical FTVR display. To control for calibration error and tracking latency, we perform the evaluation on a simulated spherical display in VR. The results of our study provide a clear recommendation for the design and use of spherical FTVR displays: while omitting stereo may not be readily apparent for users, their performance will be significantly degraded (20% - 91% increase in median task time). Therefore, including stereo viewing in spherical displays is critical for use in FTVR.