In game design, curiosity is often a critical driver of player engagement, yet its complex role in influencing player experience remains underexplored.The present study aims to delineate the categorisation and representation of curiosity in game playing and how it contributes to the game experience.A survey of 482 participants was conducted to investigate the multifaceted nature of curiosity.The findings indicate that game-related curiosity encompasses seven broad categories and 13 separate performance dimensions.Notably, the study reveals players' pronounced preference for games that foster social interaction, offer strategic challenges, and strike a delicate balance between uncertainty and the anticipation of future rewards.The results also highlight that beyond appreciation for high-quality games, those that effectively tap into diverse dimensions of curiosity can sustain player engagement.This nuanced comprehension of curiosity within game environments highlights the potential for more focused and efficacious design strategies, potentially augmenting player satisfaction and fostering loyalty.

Virtual Reality Theatre continues to grow as a form of digital creative output for theatre practitioners. However, understanding the common challenges faced during the development of productions by practitioners and the barriers to entry produced by the complexity of platforms is under-researched. This paper provides an in-depth analysis of several challenges identified through semi-structured interviews of practitioners and a thematic review.

Failure constitutes a key mechanic in video games, playing into player experience jointly with questions of challenge and difficulty. While research has started to investigate the effect of failure on the player's experience, it has so far overlooked the design intents and decisions behind its implementation. We interviewed 13 game designers who shared their experiences of reflecting upon and designing failure in a range of commercial titles. Their insights point towards two-sided considerations: the constraints around which designers must design experiences of failure, imposed by a game's production context and industry expectations, and the creative decisions made to work into, or around, those constraints. We find that our participants suggest a re-evaluation of the role of failure in video games, in the player's experience, and in the gaming culture. Our findings raise questions about the underlying values games may communicate through the mechanic and experience of failure, the role of narrative design in resolving possible dissonances, and the communication pipeline between game designers and players; and point towards future avenues for games research to further support game designers.

Esport is a large and still growing industry with vast audiences. Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas (MOBAs), a sub-genre of esports, possess a very complex environment, which often leads to experts missing important coverage while broadcasting live competitions. One common game event that holds significant importance for broadcasting is referred to as a team fight engagement. Professional player's own knowledge and understanding of the game may provide a solution to this problem. This paper suggests a model that predicts and detects ongoing team fights in a live scenario. This approach outlines a novel technique of deriving representations of a complex game environment by relying on player knowledge. This is done by analysing the positions of the in-game characters and their associated cameras, utilising this data to train a neural network. The proposed model is able to both assist in the production of live esport coverage as well as provide a live, expert-derived, analysis of the game without the need of relying on outside sources.

Failure, or the possibility of it, is a key component of a lot of video games. Yet, as of now, research has mostly focused on the learning benefits of failure within game systems: little research has attempted to understand the qualities of failure that video games players focus on during and after their gameplay experiences, or what their personal relationship with failure is. Because research has highlighted the positive aspects of failure through the lens of psychology and education, the current project seeks to explore players’ perspectives in more depth: what do video games players perceive as the benefits of failure? How do they conceptualise a positive gameplay experience where failure is present?

Work in AI-based explanation systems has uncovered an interesting contradiction: people prefer and learn best from why explanations but expert esports commentators primarily answer what questions when explaining complex behavior in real-time strategy games. Three possible explanations for this contradiction are: 1.) broadcast audiences are well-informed and do not need why explanations; 2.) consuming why explanations in real-time is too cognitively demanding for audiences; or 3.) producing live why explanations is too difficult for commentators. We answer this open question by investigating the effects of explanation types and presentation modalities on audience recall and cognitive load in the context of an esports broadcast. We recruit 111 Dota 2 players and split them into three groups: the first group views a Dota 2 broadcast, the second group has the addition of an interactive map that provides what explanations, and the final group receives the interactive map with detailed why explanations. We find that participants who receive short interactive text prompts that provide what explanations outperform the no explanation group on a multiple-choice recall task. We also find that participants who receive detailed why explanations submit reports of cognitive load that are higher than the no explanation group. Our evidence supports the conclusion that informed audiences benefit from explanations but do not have the cognitive resources to process why answers in real-time. It also supports the conclusion that stacked explanation interventions across different modalities, like audio, interactivity, and text, can aid real-time comprehension when attention resources are limited. Together, our results indicate that interactive multimedia interfaces can be leveraged to quickly guide attention and provide low-cost explanations to improve intelligibility when time is too scarce for cognitively demanding why explanations.

Developing systems to spark face-to-face interactions between strangers is a recurring challenge that may benefit from drawing together inspiration from many different creative fields. This paper presents a design fiction that makes accessible over 50 diverse examples of objects and environments that might help foster new social encounters. Unlike most design fiction, this narrative is not about the future, but about an alternative present. The designs discussed are all real objects - either functional prototypes or interactive exhibits. The fiction is that these already existing artefacts are a commonplace, and not particularly remarkable part of the everyday. Thus the strange is made familiar by unusual designs being presented as a universal normality. Each individual element is "real" in that it has not been invented for the purpose of this review, however the overarching story uses a fictional frame to place all this work in the same world. We hope immersion in this narrative can enrich perspectives and debates around designing to support social interaction.

Esports (competitive videogames) have grown into a global phenomenon with over 450m viewers and a 1.5bn USD market. Esports broadcasts follow a similar structure to traditional sports. However, due to their virtual nature, a large and detailed amount data is available about in-game actions not currently accessible in traditional sport. This provides an opportunity to incorporate novel insights about complex aspects of gameplay into the audience experience – enabling more in-depth coverage for experienced viewers, and increased accessibility for newcomers. Previous research has only explored a limited range of ways data could be incorporated into esports viewing (e.g. data visualizations post-match) and only a few studies have investigated how the presentation of statistics impacts spectators’ experiences and viewing behaviors. We present Weavr, a companion app that allows audiences to consume data-driven insights during and around esports broadcasts. We report on deployments at two major tournaments, that provide ecologically valid findings about how the app’s features were experienced by audiences and their impact on viewing behavior. We discuss implications for the design of second-screen apps for live esports events, and for traditional sports as similar data becomes available for them via improved tracking technologies.

Bots are estimated to account for well over half of all web traffic, yet they remain an understudied topic in HCI. In this paper we present the findings of an analysis of 2284 submissions across three discussion groups dedicated to the request, creation and discussion of bots on Reddit. We set out to examine the qualities and functionalities of bots and the practical and social challenges surrounding their creation and use. Our findings highlight the prevalence of misunderstandings around the capabilities of bots, misalignments in discourse between novices who request and more expert members who create them, and the prevalence of requests that are deemed to be inappropriate for the Reddit community. In discussing our findings, we suggest future directions for the design and development of tools that support more carefully guided and reflective approaches to bot development for novices, and tools to support exploring the consequences of contextually-inappropriate bot ideas.

In this paper we investigate how online counter-discourse is designed, deployed and orchestrated by activists to challenge dominant narratives around socio-political issues. We focus on activism related to the UK broadcast media’s negative portrayal of welfare benefit claimants; portrayals characterised as “poverty porn” by critics. Using critical discourse analysis, we explore two activist campaigns countering the TV programme Benefits Street . Through content analysis of social media, associated traditional media texts, and interviews with activists, our analysis highlights the way activists leverage the specific technological affordances of different social media and other online platforms in order to manage and configure counter-discourse activities. We reveal how activists use different platforms to carefully control and contest discursive spaces, and the ways in which they utilise both online and offline activities in combination with new and broadcast media to build an audience for their work. We discuss the challenges associated with measuring the success of counter-discourse, and how activists rely on combinations of social media analytics and anecdotal feedback in order to ascertain that their campaigns are successful. We also discuss the often hidden power-relationships in such campaigns, especially where there is ambiguity regarding the grassroots legitimacy of activism, and where effort is placed into controlling and owning the propagation of counter-discourse. We conclude by highlighting a number of areas for further work around the blurred distinctions between corporate advocacy, digilantism and grassroots activism.

There is growing interest in technology that quantifies aspects of our lives. This paper draws on critical practice and speculative design to explore, question and problematise the ultimate consequences of such technology using the quantification of companion animals (pets) as a case study. We apply the concept of "moving upstream" to study such technology and use a qualitative research approach in which both pet owners, and animal behavioural experts, were presented with, and asked to discuss, speculative designs for pet quantification applications, the design of which were extrapolated from contemporary trends. Our findings indicate a strong desire among pet owners for technology that has little scientific justification, whilst our experts caution that the use of technology to augment human-animal communication has the potential to disimprove animal welfare, undermine human-animal bonds, and create human-human conflicts. Our discussion informs wider debates regarding quantification technology.

There has recently been a great deal of interest in the potential of computer games to function as innovative educational tools. However, there is very little evidence of games fulfilling that potential. Indeed, the process of merging the disparate goals of education and games design appears problematic, and there are currently no practical guidelines for how to do so in a coherent manner. In this paper, we describe the successful, empirically validated teaching methods developed by behavioural psychologists and point out how they are uniquely suited to take advantage of the benefits that games offer to education. We conclude by proposing some practical steps for designing educational games, based on the techniques of Applied Behaviour Analysis. It is intended that this paper can both focus educational games designers on the features of games that are genuinely useful for education, and also introduce a successful form of teaching that this audience may not yet be familiar with.

In this paper we describe the results of a controlled study of a social game, Magpies, which was built on the Facebook Online Social Network (OSN) and enhanced with contextual social information in the form of a variety of social network indices. Through comparison with a concurrent control trial using an identical game without the enhanced social information, it was shown that the additional contextual data increased the frequency of social activity between players engaged in the game. Despite this increase in activity, there was little increase in growth of the player-base when compared to the control condition. These findings corroborate previous work that showed how socio-contextual enhancement can increase performance on task-driven games, whilst also suggesting that it can increase activity and engagement when provided as context for non task-driven game environments.