Social media platforms have become integral to everyday life and serve as the foundation for online communities. These platforms not only enable communication but also shape the ways in which online communities are formed and maintained. In this paper, we examine an online community, the BTS fandom ARMY, using Durkheim’s concept of solidarity, we show how ARMY’s symbolic commitments, collective labor, and boundary negotiations are simultaneously community practices and infrastructural labor that generate cultural and economic value. Using an online survey and ethnographic observations of BTS ARMY, we present the BTS Industrial Complex, an ecosystem of communities all related to BTS that rely on digital platforms to influence and interact with each other. Our contributions are threefold: (1) a conceptualization of the BTS Industrial Complex as a sociotechnical ecosystem, (2) empirical insights into how platforms shape collective action, and (3) implications for HCI in designing for and critically examining large-scale cultural economies.

Modern video game development relies increasingly on live service models and storytelling, putting strain on developer-player interactions and community management, the success of which is key to the success of such games. In this paper we report on a 2.5-year ethnography study on the Destiny player community, specifically on how players and developers interact and communicate about the game, and how is this interaction is affected by and affects ongoing rituals and storytelling in that game.

The Magic Circle has been a subject of continuous debate and criticism, and declared obsolete several times. Despite this, it has endured and reappeared in discussions and comparisons of play and non-play, and the boundaries thereof. It has proven persistent despite all its criticism and yet the reason for its continued existence has not been clarified. Understanding why it has been persistent is crucial to help explain its power as a metaphor. In this paper, we draw on a literature review of the criticisms and defense of the Magic Circle, and argue that it should not be conceptualized as a hard boundary between play and non-play, but rather a social construction that is itself “played with” during play. We argue that the Magic Circle explains the magic (allure, enchantment) of play and thus should be reinterpreted to explain why people play games rather than when they do and do not. This allows us to define how games create a double-nature of seeming like they are frivolous yet are more meaningful, a construct we call "the masquerade of play". It is precisely through socially defining the Magic Circle that players maintain this illusion.

Emotion regulation and coping strategies are key to resilience, problem solving and eventually well-being in everyday life, but investigating or influencing these without adjustable and ecologically valid environments still poses a major challenge. With respect to video games, stressful events can frequently appear and, depending on the individual’s emotion regulation, lead to frustrating experiences, dissatisfied players or even churn – or to a sense of accomplishment, mastery or positive tension. In the greater endeavor of establishing games for studying, controlling and reinforcing resilience, we developed an alternate reality game that unifies the advantages of a fully customizable game environment with the close connection to real-life interactions. To estimate how emotion regulation strategies could be initiated as well as investigated, this work first induces different kinds of established stressors (time pressure, social encounters and being unchangeably stuck) into ordinary gameplay, quantifies the players’ physiological and psychological responses and addresses the participants’ strategies on dealing with these situations. In this paper we present results of the study showing that the induced stressors were effective in constituting stressful situations comparable to real-life experiences; and each of these conditions resulted in different types of physiological and perceived responses and behaviors, e.g. continuous stress in social encounters versus instantaneous stress when notified about time pressure; or frustrating experiences when being forcibly stuck versus stress that participants underwent but were able to work against. With this platform to study how people cope with stress, instituted within a multi-modal mixed-methods evaluation, we contribute to games beyond entertainment towards educating resilience.

The narrative experience of perennial games---ongoing, live games---revolves around the community that plays it. These games serve a fractured form of storytelling, which leaves it to the community to determine what counts as part of the story; or what is considered “canon”. What is canon is a question of who and what the story is allowed to be about, and what is allowed to be in it. Therefore, it is important to understand how players of perennial games understand what is canon and what is not. This paper presents a mixed methods study of an online survey (N=118) and interviews (N=15) of players of the game Destiny 2, with the goal of understanding what events players consider canon and why. The findings indicate that while authorship and conventional game story elements are considered canon, there is still disagreement, especially as the storytelling methods become non-conventional. Players can provide nuanced viewpoints on why an event is or is not canon, and they do not always agree. These results can help designers understand how their decisions influence the community discussions of canonicity, and how properties of their game can help create experiences that lets players see themselves in the work.

Detective stories in games have long been a heavily used inspiration source and setting for games, and it is indeed a fitting genre at first glance with its clearly defined set of expectations, rules, and type of storytelling relying on uncovering the past. It is curious then, that until recently, most detective games have followed a more traditional adventure game structure, with little emphasis on actual investigation in the player’s actions, but where the player more acts as a proxy for the plot to follow its course. However, in recent years, a number of games have shown a tendency to shift this balance, and push the bulk of the detective work onto the players themselves, to leave them with an inscrutable mystery to slowly uncover over the course of the game, to decipher the story of the crime in their mind. This paper will investigate a few of these games as well as compare with literature on traditional detective stories to understand how detective games have typically been a different type of detective story all together, which is crucial to understanding how we can make the player the detective instead of an observer of a detective.