Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping team collaboration in workplaces. Meanwhile, women only represent 22% of the global AI workforce, raising questions about whose perspectives drive AI design. This dual reality makes the stakes high: without critical attention, AI may entrench existing gendered dynamics; but with deliberate design, it may open new avenues for equity. Through in-depth interviews with 30 AI professionals (22 women), our work both confirms gendered challenges in male-dominated teams and offers a novel contribution: how those who directly experience these dynamics envision AI’s role in mitigating them. These practitioner-informed design visions reveal AI’s potential of offering multi-level support and empowering women to navigate these teams, and its risks of reinforcing stereotypes and surveillance. We call on the HCI community to explore this emerging design space for equitable human-AI teaming while critically attending to gendered power dynamics.

Unlike conventional social AI agents, AI streamers are multi-modal artificial intelligence systems that engage in autonomous, real-time social interactions with audiences in a dynamic and public online space. Through a qualitative thematic analysis of 1891 comments on a YouTube channel of Neuro-sama, an exemplar of popular AI streamers, we reveal that AI streamers enhance viewers’ experiences through their unique personality development, behavioral autonomy, and nuanced AI-creator relationships; yet they also raise concerns about emotional damage, problematic training data, and heightened moderation challenges in real-time streaming environments. We contribute to HCI at the unique intersection of AI for social needs and live streaming research by highlighting how AI streamers reshape live streaming practices through innovating its creative content creation, novel streamer identity practices, and rich streamer-audience interaction mechanisms. We also propose three design principles for strengthening AI streamers’ social and creative affordances while mitigating identified risks, which inform broader AI agent designs in public online social spaces.

This study investigates how avatar customization in virtual reality (VR) impacts trust formation between unacquainted individuals and how such trust transfers to subsequent face-to-face (FtF) meetings. A user study with 48 participants was conducted, where participants were assigned to either a “Similar-Self” condition, with avatars resembling their real-world appearance, or an “Alt-Self” condition, with creative avatars. The results showed that “Similar-Self” avatars led to higher initial integrity-based trust perceptions, though both avatar conditions exhibited similar trust growth during VR encounters. Trust carried over from VR to FtF with a brief recalibration period and ultimately increased beyond VR levels in FtF encounters. This research provides insights into how VR can support the development of trust in early-stage interactions and offers implications for Social VR platforms to better support trustworthy interactions across virtual-physical boundaries.

Trust plays a critical role in both effective teamwork and successful integration of AI into human-AI teams (HATs), which are becoming increasingly interconnected to tackle large-scale problems. As these HATs grow in complexity, so do the challenges of building, maintaining, calibrating, and aligning trust across HATs, as trust is dynamic, socially influenced, and capable of spreading and evolving over time. To understand the underexplored question of how trust and distrust can spread across HATs, we conducted a laboratory experiment with two interconnected HATs (N=40) distributed across the U.S., each comprising two humans and one AI collaborating over a remotely piloted aircraft system (RPAS) conducting simulated reconnaissance tasks. Our findings show that distrust toward the AI teammate spread more easily than trust, both within and across HATs. While intra-HAT (dis)trust in the AI developed through direct interaction, inter-HAT (dis)trust was more vulnerable to word-of-mouth distrust. Additionally, participants’ trust in the (dis)trust spreader, as well as their team-level trust, reflected in-group favoritism and out-group bias. This work presents the first empirical investigation into trust and distrust contagion across HATs, expanding the current understanding of trust dynamics in multi-agent and multi-team systems. It identifies potential mechanisms driving trust and distrust transfer between interconnected HATs and explores the individual, team, and multi-team level impacts. In doing so, we lay the groundwork for developing theories on trust contagion in multi-agent, multi-team systems, providing valuable insights for future research and design strategies to optimize human-AI collaboration in complex environments.

Social VR's focus on embodied and immersive experiences has led to its increasing popularity and value for education, work, entertainment, and even our everyday social lives. However, there is also a growing concern about emerging harmful behaviours among users in social VR spaces. Despite this, existing work has highlighted a fundamental challenge in effectively identifying and mitigating such behaviours: there is no established terminology or consensus on what should be categorised as harmful behaviours in social VR. In this work, we aim to address this critical gap by providing a foundation for classifying harmful behaviours in social VR, which can help researchers, developers, and policymakers to achieve conceptual clarity and actionable insights for designing safer VR environments. Using a systematic literature review of existing work in this space, we present a comprehensive taxonomy of harmful behaviours identified in existing HCI research and classify them based on dimensions of behaviour modality (i.e., verbal, physical, environmental, and three novel system-, gesture-, and spatial-based categories) and interaction dynamics (i.e., one-to-one, one-to-many). This work provides an important conceptual contribution that enables researchers to better differentiate and systematically investigate these different types of harms in social VR. It also offers valuable guidance for the design of safer social VR environments, e.g., through informing the development of validated scales, codes of conduct, detection algorithms, and other types of interventions.

Social VR's focus on embodied and immersive experiences has led to intensified and more physicalized forms of harassment than other online contexts. Therefore, a growing body of HCI and CSCW work has explored multiple strategies and mechanisms to prevent and mitigate harassment risks in social VR. However, existing works have also highlighted a fundamental challenge in mitigating harassment in social VR - the apparent lack of consensus among social VR users on how to explicitly define harassment and what behaviors should be considered harassing in social VR. In this work, we aim to offer new knowledge on the uncertainty about how harassment is defined and perceived in social VR, particularly by learning from social VR users who have experienced both sides of harassment accusations . Based on interviews with 12 participants with diverse identities who have both been harassed by others and been accused of harassing others in social VR, we unpack how people justify and reflect on their behavior given their prior experiences of both being victims of harassment and being called a harasser. We thus offer unique insights into the complexity of harassment in social VR by highlighting cases of "gray areas" and critical ethical implications in such harassment accusations, which are understudied in the existing literature. We also propose two high-level design principles for new strategies and approaches to foster safe social VR spaces based on people's unique experiences of both sides of harassment accusations in social VR.

As the world evolves, human-AI teams (HAT) have become increasingly more capable in their ability to complete task objectives. Due to this rising importance, it has become essential to understand the interpersonal dynamism between humans and AI to further optimise their performance potential. Given the demonstrated utility of emotional communication within human-human team structures, this research investigates the nature of AI-sourced positive emotions on human teammates. Through 47 interviews, our findings show that for these AI teammates to be accepted, human teammates have preferences on understanding the emotional utility prior to its presentation, as well as which emotions are situationally acceptable. Also, findings show that integrating emotions within AI teammates has a positive influence on human perceptions and behaviour in a task. In further detail, emotions act as status updates that allow human teammates to not only better understand their teammates' mental states but also understand how their AI teammates perceive the situation around them. Together, this gives insight into how AI emotional expressions influence the perception of social support on the wider Human-AI team. Mainly how emotions can be used to increase acceptance of AI teammates and improve the overall experience human teammates have within the task.

Technical and practical advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have led to AI teammates working alongside humans in an area known as human-agent teaming. While critical past research has shown the benefit to trust driven by the incorporation of interaction rules and structures (i.e. etiquette) in both AI tools and robotic teammates, research has yet to explicitly examine etiquette for digital AI teammates. Given the historic importance of trust within human-agent teams, the identification of etiquette’s impact within said teams should be paramount. Thus, this study empirically evaluates the impact of AI teammate etiquette through a mixed-methods study that compares AI teammates that either adhere to or ignore traditional etiquette standards for machine systems. The quantitative results show that traditional etiquette adherence leads to greater trust, perceived performance of the AI, and perceived performance of the team as a whole. However, qualitative results reveal that not all traditional etiquette behaviors have universal appeal due to the presence of individual differences. This research provides the first empirical and explicit exploration of etiquette within human-agent teams, and the results of this study should be used further design specific etiquette behaviors for AI teammates.

The success of human-AI teams (HATs) requires humans to work with AI teammates in trustful ways over a certain time period. However, how trust evolves and changes dynamically in response to human-AI team interactions is generally understudied. This work explores the evolvement of trust in HATs over time by analyzing 45 participants' experiences of trust or distrust in an AI teammate prior to, during, and after collaborating with AI in a three-member HAT. Our findings highlight that humans' expectations of AI's ability, integrity, benevolence, and adaptability influence their initial trust in AI before collaboration. However, this initial trust can be maintained or revised through the development of situational trust during collaboration in response to the AI teammate's communication behaviors. Further, the trust developed through collaboration can impact individuals' subsequent expectations of AI's ability and their collaborations with AI. Our findings also reveal the similarities and differences in the temporal dimensions of trust for AI and human teammates. We contribute to CSCW community by offering one of the first empirical investigations into the dynamic and temporal dimension of trust evolvement in HATs. Our work yields insights into the pathways to expanding the methodological toolkit for investigating the development of trust in HATs, formulating theories of trust for the HAT context. These insights further inform the effective design of AI teammates and provide guidance on the timing, content, and methods for calibrating trust in future human-AI collaboration contexts.

People often apply gender stereotypes toward computerized agents. Rather than challenging these stereotypes, modern AI technologies controversially use them in creating AI agents that underline stereotypical gendered roles. This approach thus further reinforces the often male-dominated societal gender norms and disenfranchises women and gender non-binary individuals. While this issue has raised concerns in the HCI and CSCW communities, still little is known regarding how to mitigate the negative impacts of embedding gender stereotypes in AI agents. In this paper, we propose an eXplainable AI (XAI) approach to mitigating individuals' gender stereotypes toward AI agents. We conducted an online video vignette experiment with 350 participants randomly assigned to one of the eighteen conditions of a 3 (gender of the agent: woman, man, gender-neutral) x 3 (task gender: feminine, masculine, neutral) x 2 (presence or absence of AI explanation) between-subjects design. Our findings indeed suggest that XAI helped participants avoid applying gender stereotypes toward gendered AI agents, by increasing their understanding of how the agent came to its decision and decreasing their rating of the agent's humanlikeness. We contribute to CSCW research by providing a timely investigation into individuals' gender stereotypes toward the state-of-the-art AI agents and by advancing the empirical understanding of the cognitive processes and mechanisms underlying these gender stereotypes. We also demonstrate how eXplainable AI can effectively suppress the application of social characteristics (i.e., gender stereotypes) toward AI agents by disrupting the said cognitive processes. Insights from this study can inform how future AI technologies should be designed to create a progressive gender reality that will gradually reshape humans' experience and ingrained gender ideologies.

Money is a sensitive and complex component of everyday life, which can significantly affect people's relationships with each other. Recently, emerging digital peer-to-peer (P2P) payment applications continue to complicate how people deal with money with individuals they know in comparison to traditional payment methods such as physical money (i.e., cash). Through an online survey study (N=218), in this paper, we investigate significant differences between using digital P2P payments and traditional payment methods (i.e., physical money) in terms of perceptions of transactions by using a given payment method, perceptions of people's existing interpersonal relationships with their known contacts after such transactions, and future use intention of a given payment method. We thus offer empirical evidence to highlight multidimensional influences of using digital P2P payments on established offline interpersonal relationships compared to using traditional payment methods (i.e., physical money). We also provide crucial new insights to unpack digital P2P payments as a novel technology-mediated interpersonal dynamic in people's everyday lives, which goes beyond merely as a business payment model or a financial service. We additionally provide important directions for designing more supportive and socially satisfactory digital P2P payment platforms in the future by taking the interplay of financial exchanges and interpersonal relationships into consideration.

Indie game developers are often defined as game developers who are typically not employed by or affiliated with tech giants or large gaming companies/publishers. Although people may decide to "go indie" for various purposes, indie game development has become a crucial part of the global gaming culture. However, this community is now facing unprecedented tensions as generative AI technologies are shifting how games can be designed, produced, and experienced. Through a qualitative analysis of 3,091 online posts and comments from subreddits and Facebook groups for indie game developers, we offer an in-depth investigation of how indie game developers perceive and envision the multifaceted role of generative AI in their creative practices. Our empirical investigation reveals that generative AI both promotes and harms indie game developers' endeavors to innovate the traditional game production model, which further influences the nature and workflow of creativity in game development. We also propose three principles for designing future generative AI technologies to improve indie developers' work while mitigating potential risks, harm, and negative impacts of AI. We hope that this study can help design and develop future generative AI technologies to foster and sustain more democratic and inclusive practices in game development rather than replacing human creators.

The popularity of social virtual reality (VR) platforms such as VRChat has led to growing concerns about new and more severe forms of online harassment targeting one's identity characteristics (i.e., identity-based harassment ). Social VR users with marginalized identities (e.g., women, LGBTQIA+ individuals, and racial/ethnic minorities) have been reported as particularly vulnerable to such harassment. This is mainly because social VR can make one's offline identity known to others (i.e., what we term identity revelation in this work) through a unique combination of avatar design, voice use, and immersive full- or partial-body tracking. To address these safety concerns, there is an urgent need to unpack the complex dynamics surrounding how one's offline identity is (mis)perceived by others, and how these (mis)perceptions may affect identity-based harassment in social VR. This study thus utilizes a large-scale survey with 223 social VR users across six continents/regions of the world with varying social VR experiences and identities to investigate (1) the relationship between identity-based harassment in social VR and (mis)perceptions of selective identity revelation practices, (2) how embodying one's identity in social VR might actually be less risky than once thought, and (3) how who you are does still matter when it comes to identity-based harassment in social VR. It also highlights the need to better account for understudied aspects of identity-based harassment in social VR and to better educate social VR users on the interplay between harassment and (mis)perceived identity revelation in these spaces.

As AI becomes more advanced in natural language processing, the research on AI's communication in teaming environments is getting more attention in CSCW/HCI. Even though AI's communication serves as an essential part of facilitating team coordination and shaping team outcomes, the impact of AI's communication modality on human-AI teamwork is still understudied. Using a mixed-design experiment and follow-up group interviews with 100 participants, we investigate the impact of AI's communication modality, one of AI's most essential communication characteristics, on team coordination and team outcomes in two different human-AI team compositions, human-human-AI teams, and human-AI-AI teams. Our findings highlight the trade-offs between AI's verbal communication and visual communication, which inspire two design recommendations on how to apply AI's verbal and visual communication to support human-AI coordination effectively. Our study generates an initial understanding of the role that AI's communication will have in ensuring team effectiveness in human-AI teams in the CSCW/HCI field.

Non-profit driven indie game development represents a growing open and participatory game production model as an alternative to the traditional mainstream gaming industry. However, this community is also facing and coping with tensions and dilemmas brought by its focus on artistic and cultural values over economic benefits. Using 28 interviews with indie game developers with a non-profit agenda across various cultures, we investigate the challenges non-profit driven indie game developers face, which mainly emerge in their personal or collaborative labor and their endeavors to secure sustainable resources and produce quality products. Our investigation extends the current HCI knowledge of the democratization of technology and its impact on the trajectory of innovating, designing, and producing future (gaming) technologies. These insights may help increase the opportunities for and retention of previously underrepresented groups in technology production and inform effective decision/policy making to better support the creativity industry in the future.

Although social support can be a vital component of gender and sexual identity formation, many LGBTQ+ individuals often lack offline social networks for such support. Traditional online technologies also reveal several challenges in providing LGBTQ+ individuals with effective social support. Therefore, social VR, as a unique online space for immersive and embodied experiences, is becoming popular within LGBTQ+ communities for supportive online interactions. Drawing on 29 LGBTQ+ social VR users’ experiences, we investigate the types of social support LGBTQ+ users have experienced through social VR and how they leverage unique social VR features to experience such support. We provide one of the first empirical evidence of how social VR innovates traditional online support mechanisms to empower LGBTQ+ individuals but leads to new safety and equality concerns. We also propose important principles for rethinking social VR design to provide all users, rather than just the privileged few, with supportive experiences.

Extensive HCI research has investigated how to prevent and mitigate harassment in virtual spaces, particularly by leveraging human-based and Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based moderation. However, social Virtual Reality (VR) constitutes a novel social space that faces both intensified harassment challenges and a lack of consensus on how moderation should be approached to address such harassment. Drawing on 39 interviews with social VR users with diverse backgrounds, we investigate the perceived opportunities and limitations for leveraging AI-based moderation to address emergent harassment in social VR, and how future AI moderators can be designed to enhance such opportunities and address limitations. We provide the first empirical investigation into re-envisioning AI’s new roles in innovating content moderation approaches to better combat harassment in social VR. We also highlight important principles for designing future AI-based moderation incorporating user-human-AI collaboration to achieve safer and more nuanced online spaces.

Online harassment against women - particularly in gaming and virtual worlds contexts - remains a salient and pervasive issue, and arguably reflects the systems of offline structural oppression to control women's bodies and rights in today's world. Harassment in social Virtual Reality (VR) is also a growing new frontier of research in HCI and CSCW, particularly focusing on marginalized users such as women. Based on interviews with 31 women users of social VR, our findings present women's experiences of harassment risks in social VR as compared to harassment targeting women in pre-existing, on-screen online gaming and virtual worlds, along with strategies women employ to manage harassment in social VR with varying degrees of success. This study contributes to the growing body of literature on harassment in social VR by highlighting how women's marginalization online and offline impact their perceptions of and strategies to mitigate harassment in this unique space. It also provides a critical reflection on women's mitigation strategies and proposes important implications to rethink social VR design to better prevent harassment against women and other marginalized communities in the future metaverse.

As social Virtual Reality (VR) grows in prevalence, new possibilities for embodied and immersive social interaction emerge, including varied forms of interpersonal harm. Yet, challenges remain regarding defining, identifying, and mitigating said harm in social VR. In this paper, we take an alternative approach to understanding and designing solutions for interpersonal harm in social VR through the lens of consent, which circumvents the lack of consensus and social norms on what should be defined as harm in social VR and reflects the embodied, immersive, and offline-world-like nature of harm in social VR. Through interviews with 39 social VR users, we offer one of the first empirical explorations on how social VR users understand consent as "boundaries," (re)purpose existing social VR features for practicing consent as "boundary setting," and envision the design of future consent mechanics in social VR to balance protection and interaction expectations to mitigate interpersonal harm as "boundary violations" in social VR. This work makes significant contributions to CSCW and HCI research by (1) uncovering how social VR users craft novel conceptualizations of consent as boundaries and harm as unwanted boundary violations, and (2) providing three foundational principles for designing future consent mechanics in social VR informed by actual social VR users.

Recently, AI is integrating into teams to collaborate with humans as a teammate with the goal of achieving unprecedented team outcomes. Much of the coordination between humans and AI teammates relies on human-AI communication, which is challenging due to AI's limitations on natural language communication. Thus, it is essential to identify and develop effective communication strategies for AI teammates in human-AI teams to facilitate the coordination process. Through interviews with 60 participants who collaborated with an AI teammate in a multiplayer online game, in this paper, we explore communication strategies that humans expect AI teammates to apply to support human-AI coordination and collaboration in dyadic teaming environments, and how the AI teammate's communication can impact teaming processes. Our findings highlight four communication strategies AI teammates should apply to support their coordination with humans in dyadic teaming environments. We also find that AI teammates' proactive communication with humans could facilitate the development of human trust and situation awareness, whereas AI lacking such proactive communication is often not perceived as a teammate. Our study extends the current CSCW/HCI research on human-AI communication in teaming environments by shedding light on how communication should be structured in dyadic human-AI teams for effective and smooth collaboration.

Understanding emerging safety risks in nuanced social VR spaces and how existing safety features are used is crucial for the future development of safe and inclusive 3D social worlds. Prior research on safety risks in social VR is mainly based on interview or survey data about social VR users' experiences and opinions, which lacks "in-situ observations" of how individuals react to these risks. Using two empirical studies, this paper seeks to understand safety risks and safety design in social VR. In Study 1, we investigated 212 YouTube videos and their transcripts that document social VR users' immediate experiences of safety risks as victims, attackers, or bystanders. We also analyzed spectators' reactions to these risks shown in comments to the videos. In Study 2, we summarized 13 safety features across various social VR platforms and mapped how each existing safety feature in social VR can mitigate the risks identified in Study 1. Based on the uniqueness of social VR interaction dynamics and users' multi-modal simulated reactions, we call for further re-thinking and re-approaching safety designs for future social VR environments and propose potential design implications for future safety protection mechanisms in social VR.

The contemporary understanding of gender continues to highlight the complexity and variety of gender identities beyond a binary dichotomy regarding one’s biological sex assigned at birth. The emergence and popularity of various online social spaces also makes the digital presentation of gender even more sophisticated. In this paper, we use non-cisgender as an umbrella term to describe diverse gender identities that do not match people’s sex assigned at birth, including Transgender, Genderfluid, and Non-binary. We especially explore non-cisgender individuals’ identity practices and their challenges in novel social Virtual Reality (VR) spaces where they can present, express, and experiment their identity in ways that traditional online social spaces cannot provide. We provide one of the first empirical evidence of how social VR platforms may introduce new and novel phenomena and practices of approaching diverse gender identities online. We also contribute to re-conceptualizing technology-supported identity practices by highlighting the role of (re)discovering the physical body online and informing the design of the emerging metaverse for supporting diverse gender identities in the future.

Current Social VR literature provides limited insight on one of the most critical behaviors for developing and maintaining interpersonal relationships: self-disclosure. Therefore, we present an online survey (N = 126) investigating how users disclose personal information to each other in Social VR. Our results indicate that many participants see in Social VR access to authentic connections with others despite tending towards skepticism and privacy concerns. Most users disclose sexuality-related information, lifestyle preferences, and personal goals. In contrast, information that breaks anonymity, such as real names and more intimate aspects of oneself, are shared less commonly. Thereby, self-disclosure decisions depend on factors like the relationship to or age of disclosure recipients, the privacy of a virtual environment, the group size, or the activity context, and is driven by different goals, i.a., relational development or exploration of oneself. These insights advance the understanding of current Social VR users and their behavior by directing future research on self-disclosure-based relationship building in Social VR and outlying broader design implications for the future metaverse.

This paper focuses on embodied visibility emerging in social Virtual Reality (VR) as a new lens to explore how queer users build and experience visibility in nuanced ways. Drawing on 29 queer social VR users' experiences across various countries and cultures, we identify three main strategies for building and experiencing embodied visibility in social VR, limitations of each strategy, and impacts of such visibility on queer users' identity practices online and offline. We broaden current studies on queer visibility online and expand the traditional lens of selective visibility by highlighting how embodiment both supports and challenges the multidimensional online presentations of queer identity. We also propose potential design considerations to further support diverse queer users' visibility in social VR and inform future directions for creating inclusive online social experiences.

Computer-mediated collaboration has long been a core research interest in CSCW and HCI. As online social spaces continue to evolve towards more immersive and higher fidelity experiences, more research is still needed to investigate how emerging novel technology may foster and support new and more nuanced forms and experiences of collaboration in virtual environments. Using 30 interviews, this paper focuses on what people may collaborate on and how they collaborate in social Virtual Reality (VR). We broaden current studies on computer-mediated collaboration by highlighting the importance of embodiment for co-presence and communication, replicating offline collaborative activities, and supporting the seamless interplay of work, play, and mundane experiences in everyday lives for experiencing and conceptualizing collaboration in emerging virtual environments. We also propose potential design implications that could further support everyday collaborative activities in social VR

No abstract available.

The advent of various in-game purchasing systems has led to several ethical concerns in contemporary gaming ecosystems, including the monetary dark patterns in game design and the potential harms on gamer welling by introducing cheating, gambling, and addictive mechanisms. These concerns have resulted in the rise of tensions regarding the impacts of in-game purchases on players who pay versus those who do not pay, such as their perceptions of "fairness" in highly competitive gaming contexts when spending is involved. Using 2,685 Reddit posts from five subreddits of popular online sports and card games that focus on player-to-player competition, we investigate how players of these games perceive fairness of their in-game purchases. This research expands our existing knowledge on ethical concerns and fairness in gaming by highlighting consumers' (players') diverse ethical judgments regarding the increasingly popular monetization mechanisms in modern gaming. It also highlights ethical dilemmas surrounding competition, spending, and enjoyment in online gaming and informs the design of future digital consumption systems for fairer, healthier, and more ethical gaming dynamics.

Harassment has long been considered a severe social issue and a culturally contextualized construct. More recently, understanding and mitigating emerging harassment in social Virtual Reality (VR) has become a growing research area in HCI and CSCW. Based on the perspective of harassment in the U.S. culture, in this paper we identify new characteristics of online harassment in social VR using 30 in-depth interviews. We especially attend to how people who are already considered marginalized in the gaming and virtual worlds contexts (e.g., women, LGBTQ, and ethnic minorities) experience such harassment. As social VR is still a novel technology, our proactive approach highlights embodied harassment as an emerging but understudied form of harassment in novel online social spaces. Our critical review of social VR users' experiences of harassment and recommendations to mitigate such harassment also extends the current conceptualization of online harassment in CSCW. We therefore contribute to the active prevention of future harassment in nuanced online environments, platforms, and experiences.

This paper explores the role of live streaming in distributed collaborative software development using indie game development, an end-user driven creative community, as an example. We conducted 27 in-depth interviews with indie game developers from various cultures and countries, who had engaged in live streaming for collaborative software development either as a streamer or a viewer. Our findings show how live streaming can be used by indie game developers to support their endeavors to innovate the traditional game development model, which goes beyond just learning and teaching technical skills. We also highlight the potential challenges indie developers face in this process. We thus make unique contributions to CSCW by bridging the previously often disconnected research agendas on collaborative software development and live streaming. We also provide potential directions for designing future live streaming platforms to better support distributed collaboration in emerging end-user driven creative activities.

An emerging research agenda in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work focuses on human-agent teaming and AI agent's roles and effects in modern teamwork. In particular, one understudied key question centers around the construct of team cognition within human-agent teams. This study explores the unique nature of team dynamics in human-agent teams compared to human-human teams and the impact of team composition on perceived team cognition, team performance, and trust. In doing so, a mixed-method approach, including three team composition conditions (all human, human-human-agent, human-agent-agent), completed the team simulation NeoCITIES and completed shared mental model, trust, and perception measures. Results found that human-agent teams are similar to human-only teams in the iterative development of team cognition and the importance of communication to accelerating its development; however, human-agent teams are different in that action-related communication and explicitly shared goals are beneficial to developing team cognition. Additionally, human-agent teams trusted agent teammates less when working with only agents and no other humans, perceived less team cognition with agent teammates than human ones, and had significantly inconsistent levels of team mental model similarity when compared to human-only teams. This study contributes to Computer-Supported Cooperative Work in three significant ways: 1) advancing the existing research on human-agent teaming by shedding light on the relationship between humans and agents operating in collaborative environments, 2) characterizing team cognition development in human-agent teams; and 3) advancing real-world design recommendations that promote human-centered teaming agents and better integrate the two.

Awareness, and specifically, spatial awareness, has long played a pivotal role in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work research in both theory and design. This significant background gives awareness the ability to answer challenges facing human-agent teams in communication and shared understanding. As such, the current study investigates the effects of spatial information level (low, high) on the development of team cognition and its outcomes in varying compositions of human-agent teams (human-human-agent, human-agent-agent) versus human-only (human-human-human) teams. The mixed-methods study had teams complete several rounds of the NeoCITIES emergency response management simulation and complete various team cognition and perception measures, followed by qualitative free-response questions. The study found that human-only teams did not perform at the same level as human-agent teams, with multi-agent human-agent teams having the best performance. A significant interaction, though with inconclusive simple main effects, displayed the trend that human-agent teams had better team mental model similarity when spatial awareness was high rather than low, while human-only teams experienced the reverse trend. Qualitative findings identified that high spatial awareness jump-started team cognition development, fostered more accurate shared mental models, enhanced the explainability of the agent, and helped the iterative development of team cognition over time.

Social virtual reality (VR) has emerged as a popular online space for teenagers to interact and socialize. It attracts teens due to the broad range of immersive activities and social engagement opportunities, along with diverse users in terms of age and interest. Yet, little is known about teenagers’ experiences and understandings of this emerging online social space, especially regarding what aspects may attract or dissuade them to social VR. To explore this question, we conducted in-depth interviews with 20 teenagers (e.g., ages 13-18) and reported findings regarding what attracted them to engage in social VR and challenges with social VR that may dissuade them from using it. Our findings contribute to the growing body of scholarship on teenagers’ experiences in emerging, novel online social spaces and highlight potential design implications for creating safer and more fulfilling social VR experiences for teenagers.

This paper focuses on how the emerging social VR systems, as new and unique social interaction spaces that afford high-fidelity and multidimensional physical presence, may support building interpersonal relationships in a more nuanced, immersive, and embodied way. Based on 30 interviews, our investigation focuses on 1) the main reasons why people build and foster interpersonal relationships in social VR; 2) various novel activities through which users can foster relationships in social VR; and 3) the complicated influences of social VR mediated relationships on users’ online and offline social lives. We contribute to better understanding mediated interactive experiences by shedding light on the novel role of social VR in transforming how people meet, interact, and establish connections with others compared to other forms of media. We also provide potential directions to inform the design of future social VR systems to better afford healthy, fulfilling, and supportive interpersonal relationships.

Game jams are intense and time-sensitive online or face-to-face game creation events where a digital game is developed in a relatively short time frame (typically 48 to 72 hours) exploring given design constraints and end results are shared publicly. They have increasingly become emerging sites where non-professional game developers, amateurs, and hobbyists engage in bottom-up technological innovation by collaboratively designing and developing more creative and novel digital products. Drawing on 28 interviews, in this paper we focus on how game developers collaborate as small teams to innovate game design and development from the bottom up in virtual game jams (i.e., exclusively online) and the unique role of virtual game jams in their technological innovation. We contribute to CSCW by providing new empirical evidence of how team practices for innovation may emerge in a novel technology community that is not widely studied before. We also expand a growing research agenda in CSCW on explicating nuanced social behaviors, processes, and consequences of bottom-up technological innovation.

The role of digital gaming on parenthood and parent-child relationships is a common research interest in HCI and CHI PLAY. Yet, how technology co-use, such as co-playing digital games, affords and impacts parent-child relationships is still understudied. Using 20 in-depth interviews of adults who had co-played modern digital games with their parents and/or children, in this paper we investigate parent-child relationships mediated by co-playing modern digital games. We update prior HCI and CHI PLAY research on game-mediated parent-child relationships by suggesting a "democratized" family life and a fading digital divide for families with favorable digital game co-play experiences. We also contribute to HCI and CHI PLAY by providing new perspectives of technology co-use in the context of gaming, such as an important relational tool that parents can use to promote conversations with their child(ren). These insights can further inform the design of future play to better support parent-child interactions during digital game co-play.

A large body of research has underscored the importance of the cognitive process of team cognition and its relation to team performance. However, little research has focused on applying such an important teamwork process to computer-mediated collaboration within a fast-paced virtual environment. In this paper, we use esports as a research platform to address this limitation due to its fast-paced nature and its heavy reliance on teamwork. We report the experience and perceptions of 20 players with regard to their descriptions of team cognition within esports. We found that esports players relied on their game experience and understanding of role interdependencies in order to develop team cognition with strangers. We also found that experienced teams utilized a mutual understanding of teammate skills and personalities in order to predict responses and limit the verbal communication required to make quick team decisions. We contribute to CSCW by extending the cognitive understanding of computer-mediated collaboration and by advancing research on team cognition and how it can occur within a fast-paced virtual environment.

HCI researchers interested in enhancing democracy have introduced methods and technologies that support democratic political processes, such as voting, and more broadly on empowering people to more fully participate in an increasingly technologized world. The aspiration for technologies to support meaningful democratic outcomes is not misplaced. In 2019, headlines around the world announced that Taiwan had become the first Asian country to legalize same-sex marriage, an impressive political achievement. But it was also an impressive technical achievement, the outcome of a concerted effort to develop responsive and impactful direct democracy platforms. We offer a sociotechnical genealogy of the process, informed by theory of deliberative democracy. We identify three opportunities for future HCI contributions: supporting less visible consensus-es, developing civic journeys, and engaging in deliberative experience design.

Live streaming is a unique medium that merges different layers of communication by facilitating individual, group, and mass communication simultaneously. Streamers who broadcast themselves on live streaming platforms such as Twitch are their own media entity and have the challenge of having to manage interactions with many different types of online audiences beyond the translucent platform interfaces. Through qualitative interviews with 25 Twitch streamers, in this paper we share streamers’ practices of discovering audience composition, categorizing audience groups, and developing appropriate mechanisms to interact with them despite geographical, technological, and temporal limitations. We discuss streamers’ appropriation of real-time signals provided by these platforms as sources of information, and their dependence on both technology and voluntary human labor to scale their media entity. We conclude with design recommendations for streaming platforms to provide streamer-centric tools for audience management, especially for knowledge discovery and growth management. .

Understanding how and why users reveal information about their self in online social spaces and what they perceive as privacy online is a central research agenda in HCI. Drawing on 30 in-depth interviews, in this paper we focus on what type of information users disclose, to whom they reveal information, and concerns they had regarding self-disclosure in social Virtual Reality (VR) - where multiple users can interact with one another through VR head-mounted displays in 3D virtual spaces. Our findings show that overall, users felt comfortable to disclose their emotions, personal experience, and personal information in social VR. However, they also acknowledged that disclosing personal information in social VR was an inevitable trade-off: giving up bio-metric information in order to better use the system. We contribute to existing literature on self-disclosure and privacy online by focusing on social VR as an emerging novel online social space. We also explicate implications for designing and developing future social VR applications.

Much HCI research seeks to contribute to technological agendas that lead to more just and participative labor relations and practices, yet that research also raises concerns about forms of exploitation associated with them. In this paper, we explore how U.S. independent [indie] game developers' socio-technological practices inject forms of labor, capital, and production into the game development industry. Our findings highlight that indie game development 1) seeks to promote an alternative to business models of game development that depend on free and immaterial labor; 2) builds offline networks at different scales to develop collectives that can sustain their production; and 3) emphasizes how distributed collaboration, co-creation, and the use of free tools and middleware make game production more widely accessible. The research contributes to HCI research that seeks to explicate and mitigate emerging forms of exploitation enabled by new technologies and processes. Our critical review of indie developers' practices and strategies also extends the current conceptualization of labor and technology in CSCW.

Self-presentation in online digital social spaces has been a long standing research interest in HCI and CSCW. As online social spaces evolve towards more embodied digital representations, it is important to understand how users construct and experience their self and interact with others' self in new and more complicated ways, as it may introduce new opportunities and unseen social consequences. Using findings of an interview study (N=30), in this paper we report an in-depth empirical investigation of the presentation and perception of self in Social Virtual Reality (VR) - 3D virtual spaces where multiple users can interact with one another through VR head-mounted displays and full-body tracked avatars. This study contributes to the growing body of CSCW literature on social VR by offering empirical evidence of how social VR platforms afford new phenomena and approaches of novel identity practices and by providing potential design implications to further support such practices. We also expand the existing research agenda in CSCW on the increasing complexity of people's self-presentation in emerging novel sociotechnical systems.

The phenomenon of end-user driven technological practices such as DIY making, hacking, crafting, and open design/manufacturing is shaping debates in HCI and CSCW about participatory innovation dynamics. However, prior research also reveals two limitations, namely, unequal participation in decision-making and the neglect of middle-tier "pro-amateur" end users. In this paper, we use independent [indie] game development as a case to explore the above-mentioned two key issues. Specifically, we highlight the importance of small teams, "crafting," and "democracy" in supporting and facilitating middle-tier end-users' engagement with technology. Our focus on indie game developers, an understudied group of middle-tier end users in HCI and CSCW, offers new empirical evidence of the dynamic process through which pro-amateurs can participate in technological innovation. Understanding their practices and the socio-technological challenges that they face, therefore, informs the design of more participatory technologies that both allow hobbyists' and experts' innovation and support the technological practices performed by users who are at the middle-tier. This not only promotes the democratization of technology and bottom-up innovation but also adds nuance to existing literature on end-user driven technological practices.

Esports commentating, the practice of reporting, explaining, and elaborating live competitive gameplay to spectators, is a centerpiece of esports as a rapidly growing spectator sport and an essential component of today's growing gaming/live streaming ecosystem. In particular, esports commentators face three unique challenges: the preparation for conducting real time commentating on highly dynamic esports games; the complexity of in-the-moment decisions during the game's broadcast; and the balance between personal self-presentation and professional content presentation. Yet this emerging and novel sociotechnical practice and how these challenges affect esports commentators' live performance and self-presentation practices has received relatively little research attention in HCI and CSCW. In this paper, we endeavor to address these limitations by empirically analyzing 19 esports commentators' sociotechnical practices. Our findings highlight the complex interaction dynamics involved in esports commentating as well as the importance of professionalism and social presence in esports commentators' self-presentation. In order to execute seamless and spontaneous commentary, commentators must be studious and engage in much prior research and have a clear sense of self. We contribute to the growing CSCW literature on esports commentating practices by revealing esports commentators' unique decision making process presenting information and their self-image.

Exploring communication dynamics in digital social spaces such as massively multiplayer online games and 2D/3D virtual worlds has been a long standing concern in HCI and CSCW. As online social spaces evolve towards more natural embodied interaction, it is important to explore how non-verbal communication can be supported in more nuanced ways in these spaces and introduce new social interaction consequences. In this paper we especially focus on understanding novel non-verbal communication in social virtual reality (VR). We report findings of two empirical studies. Study 1 collected observational data to explore the types of non-verbal interactions being used naturally in social VR. Study 2 was an interview study (N=30) that investigated people's perceptions of non-verbal communication in social VR as well as the resulting interaction outcomes. This study helps address the limitations in prior literature on non-verbal communication dynamics in online social spaces. Our findings on what makes non-verbal communication in social VR unique and socially desirable extend our current understandings of the role of non-verbal communication in social interaction. We also highlight potential design implications that aim at better supporting non-verbal communication in social VR.

Driven by state-of-the-art AI technologies, human-AI collaboration has become an important area in computer-supported teamwork research. While human-AI collaboration has been investigated in various domains, more research is needed to explore human perceptions and expectations of AI teammates in human-AI teaming. To achieve an in-depth understanding of how people perceive AI teammates and what they expect from AI teammates in human-AI teaming, we conducted a survey with 213 participants and a follow-up interview with 20 participants. Considering the context-dependency of teamwork, we chose to study human-AI teaming in the context of multiplayer online games as a case study. This study shows that people have mixed feelings toward AI teammates but hold a positive attitude toward future collaboration with AI teammates in general. Our findings highlight people's expectations for AI teammates in a rapidly changing collaborative environment (e.g., instrumental skills for in-game tasks, shared understanding between humans and AI, communication capabilities, human-like behaviors and performance), as well as factors that impact people's willingness to team up with AI teammates (e.g., pre-existing attitudes toward AI, previous collaboration experience with humans). We contribute to CSCW by shedding light on how AI should be structured in human-AI teaming to support highly complex collaborative activities in CSCW environments.

What makes a city meaningful to its residents? What attracts people to live in a city and to care for it? Today, we might see such questions as concerns for HCI, given the emerging agendas of smart and connected cities, IoT, and ubiquitous computing: city residents' perceptions of and attitudes towards smart city technologies will play a role in technology acceptance. Theories of "placemaking" from humanist geography and urban planning address themselves to such concerns, and they have been taken up in HCI and urban informatics research. This theory offers ideas for developing community attachment, heightening the legibility of the city, and intensifying lived experiences in the city. We add to this body of research with an analysis of several initiatives of City Yeast, a community-based design collective in Taiwan that proposes the metaphor of fermentation as an approach to placemaking. We unpack how this approach shapes their design practice and link its implications to urban informatics research in HCI. We suggest that smart cities can also be pursued by leveraging the knowledge of city residents and helping to facilitate their participation in acts of perceiving, envisioning, and improving their local communities, including but not limited to smart and connected technologies.

HCI recognizes the importance of visions as both a design and futuring approach and a problem-solving technique. One challenge of visioning work is who can propose and shape IT visions and how they can achieve the widespread buy-in needed to make them efficacious. In this paper, we focus on the potential of making, open design, and open manufacturing for contributing toward, if not fully achieving, the broadening of participation in IT envisioning. We use Taiwan’s MakerPro, a manufacturers and IT R&D community as a case to unpack what collective IT visioning looks like, how it shapes IT agendas concretely, and the implications for open design/open manufacturing research agenda in HCI. Our findings reveal how MakerPro members constructed and developed visions for open design and open manufacturing in Taiwan, obstacles to such visions, and how these obstacles can be collaboratively overcome through a participative and even democratic process. We also show that the collective purposiveness not only defines a regional vision agenda but also embraces an entire nation’s future.

Recent HCI research on social creativity and bottom-up innovation has highlighted how concerted efforts by the government policy and business communities to develop innovation ecosystems are increasingly intertwined with IT research and development. We note that many such efforts focus on cultivating regional advantage [20] in the form of innovation hubs that are situated in and leverage distinct sociocultural histories and geographies. Cultivating regional advantage entails achieving broad consensus about what that region's advantage might be, that is, the construction of a regional advantage imaginary beyond the policies, IT supports, and practices to make it happen. Here, we document how an ongoing public debate among makers and manufacturers in Taiwan as a region-distinguished by direct engagement with design, fabrication, prototyping, and manufacturing processes-are proposing pathways toward a regional advantage that both reflects Taiwan's recent sociocultural and economic histories and also its near future aspirations.

On live streams, viewers can support streamers through various methods ranging from well-wishing text messages to money. In this study (N=230) we surveyed viewers who had given money to a streamer. We identified six motivations for why they gave money to their favorite live streamer. We then examined how factors related to viewer, streamer, and viewer-streamer interaction were associated with three forms of social support provision: emotional, instrumental, and financial support. Our main findings are: parasocial relationship was consistently correlated with all three types of social support, while social presence was only related with instrumental and financial support; interpersonal attractiveness was associated with emotional and instrumental support and lonely people were more likely to give instrumental support. Our focus on various types of social support in a live streaming masspersonal platform adds a more detailed understanding to the existing literature of mediated social support. Furthermore, it suggests potential directions for designing more supportive and interactive live streaming platforms.

Recent research in CSCW, urban informatics, and sociotechnical systems has proposed new framings and emphases of the city as a locus of research on computing and called for a heightened focus on the entanglements of social policy and design. Yet there are relatively few empirical investigations of actual policy-design entanglements in specific cities, and of those available, non-Western cities are underrepresented. We report an empirical study of the 2010 Taipei International Flora Expo (TIFE) as a case to explore these urban informatics/social computing issues. Specifically, we offer an empirically grounded analysis of design as a mechanism of public futuring and debates, which contributes to a better understanding of "participatory urbanship" [6]; and we do so focusing on a non-Western city, both to ensure a broader representation of urban ways of life and also to de-center Western experiences as the primary basis of urban informatics theory in CSCW.

Existing studies in the field of HCI and CSCW have pointed to the significance to investigate computer-mediated intimacy and brought together concerns in ubiquitous computing, affective technologies, and experience design. However, existing conceptualizations of intimacy in collaborative online systems are largely based on empirical studies of systems that have similar social dynamics and user groups, which could lead to a bias in investigating intimacy. Using Audition, a dance battle Multiplayer Online Game with a popular marriage system, as our field site, we focus on dyadic intimacy in a non-violent online social space that has many young non-Caucasian and female users. We contribute to both confirming and further advancing existing theories of computer-mediated intimacy using this new dataset. We also suggest promising future directions for exploring the subjective intimate experiences in a scientifically defensible way.

Virtual marriage is a complex social activity in virtual worlds, yet it has received relatively little research attention. What happens when an important relationship such as marriage is transformed into gameplay? In this paper we present an empirical study of how players perceive, experience, and interpret their in-game marriages, especially with regard to representations of gender and sexuality, in an online game (Audition) where a ludological simulation of marriage is centrally embedded in gameplay. Findings reveal that marriage-as-ludic-rule-system and marriage-as-significant-sociocultural-institution provide a double set of gameplay/social/psychosexual resources that players collaboratively learn and perform, and that this negotiation is a source of pleasure, frustration, and meaning in the game. These findings can contribute to understanding the specificity and heterogeneity of players' gender representation in virtual worlds and inform the design of mixed reality games that simulate important life events for learning.

Online dating systems are the most common way people meet their marriage partners online. Nevertheless, online daters struggle to evaluate personality traits of potential partners using profile pages and private messaging in these systems. Meanwhile, Multiplayer Online Games (MOGs) have emerged as a popular way young people find romantic partners for relationships in the physical world. We conducted two interview studies -- one concerning evaluation behavior in online dating systems (n=41) and the other concerning collaborative activities in MOGs (n=35). Insights from these studies reveal the weaknesses in evaluation tools native to online dating and suggest that collaborative activities could potentially address evaluation challenges in online dating. The paper concludes with a discussion of a series of design concepts for online dating in order to improve users' abilities to evaluate their potential romantic partners for in-person meetings.