Physical inactivity remains a critical global health issue, yet scalable strategies for sustained motivation are scarce. Conversational agents designed as simulated exercising peers (SEPs) represent a promising alternative, but their long-term impact is unclear. We report a six-month randomized controlled trial (N=280) comparing individuals exercising alone, with a human peer, or with a large language model-driven SEP. Results revealed a partnership paradox: human peers evoked stronger social presence, while AI peers provided steadier encouragement and more reliable working alliances. Humans motivated through authentic comparison and accountability, whereas AI peers fostered consistent, low-stakes support. These complementary strengths suggest that AI agents should not mimic human authenticity but augment it with reliability. Our findings advance human-agent interaction research and point to hybrid designs where human presence and AI consistency jointly sustain physical activity.

Information representation is a key concept in informatics, that involves representing real-world problems through symbolic encoding of data that can be automatically processed. Despite that, the presence and role of this concept in curricula, learning materials, and activities, is much less significant w.r.t. other informatics areas, as programming (coding) or algorithms. In this experience report we present a learning unit we designed, consisting of five two-hour lessons, that aims at introducing pupils to the fundamental concepts around information representation, and that we piloted in five fourth-grade classes. We also present and reflect upon the feedback asked of teachers, after the learning unit was concluded in their classes.

Possible side effects of using web job boards in the e-recruitment context, such as candidates dropping out from the hiring process, may emerge if these tools are not transparent about data usage, collection, and processing. In response, we developed a novel web job board designed to enhance transparency, simulating a job-matching recommender system. A qualitative study with 20 Italian participants, combining direct observation of the job board use with the Thinking Aloud protocol and interviews, examines participants’ privacy behaviours in terms of data disclosure and seclusion. Findings indicate a general willingness among participants to share personal data, except for information related to their identity. We found that both the design of the job board and the meanings ascribed by participants to data shaped their privacy behaviours. Features enhancing user understanding of data usage and control of privacy settings were positively received, underscoring the importance of design in fostering thoughtful engagement with job board technologies. We contribute to research on privacy behaviours in the context of job search and we draw suggestions from the study findings on how to design platforms that support data protection and allow safe and purposeful disclosure of personal data, sustaining job seekers throughout the recruitment process.

Video games are designed for enjoyment and can benefit players, but in competitive settings such as esports they may lead to stress, a significant concern for players and coaches in competitive play due to potential negative psychological, social, and physical impacts. Since esports players are mostly adolescents and young adults, the vulnerability of their age underscores the need to investigate their stress experience. To this aim, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 16 First-Person Shooter (FPS) players and coaches (mean age 22.2) across A- to C-tiers. We examined players’ subjective stress experiences, team dynamics, and the broader esports organizational context. Findings reveal the players’ ability to recognize their stress signals and to make sense of stressful events, along with a stronger reliance on individual coping strategies over team-based or organizational resources, which remain largely inaccessible. Finally, we propose design strategies to strengthen esports players’ resilience and coping capacity in stressful environments.

The COVID-19 pandemic led to dramatic changes in people’s lives. The Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community widely investigated technology use during crises. However, commercial video games received minor attention. In this article, we describe how video game play impacted the life transformations engendered by the pandemic. We administered a qualitative online survey to 330 video game players who were living in Italy during the lockdown measures. We found that the COVID-19 pandemic altered the participants’ sense of time and space, reshaped both their intimate and wider social interactions, and elicited a wide spectrum of disturbing emotions. Players escaped from this unsatisfying reality into video game worlds, searching for a new normality that could compensate for the unpredictability and dangerousness of the pandemic life, as well as seeking uncertainty in the game environments to balance the flatness of the lockdown everydayness. In doing so, they “appropriated” the gaming technologies, which also led to several unexpected outcomes. Starting from these findings, we propose a model of escapism that points out four ways to escape from reality into video game worlds. Moreover, we outline some design implications that might inspire future strands of research in the field of crisis technologies.

Cheating is a major concern for any gaming environment, but effective solutions are still far from being found. Previous research has overlooked the social complexity of current video games and the role that technology may have in determining the cheating practices. In this article, we explore how cheating unfolds within Call of Duty: Warzone through a digital ethnography, analyzing the perspectives of both amateur players and video game streamers and how technology shapes the cheating phenomenon. We highlight that players’ perception of cheating depends on the “social role” of the cheater. Moreover, the technological sophistication of cheats makes them uncertain in the players’ eyes, contributing to the spreading of mutual suspicion and surveillance practices. Based on these findings, we offer a novel understanding of cheating as a sort of black box that only a few individuals are able to decipher, and several design considerations addressing the cheating practices in contemporary games.

A central problem in text-based chatbot research revolves around humanness: not only chatbots may reproduce fundamental aspects of being human, but also users may attribute humanlike features to chatbots. Humanness is paramount in human-chatbot conversations because it may profoundly impact the quality of the interaction: for example, when users expect that interactions with chatbots are similar to human conversations and these expectations are not met by the agent, they may easily become frustrated. This is particularly relevant in customer care, where efficient support is essential: here, unmet expectations about the chatbot’s humanlike capabilities can undermine customer satisfaction. In this article, we qualitatively analyzed 12,477 real-world exchanges with a task-based chatbot in the customer care domain, involving a total of 1,060 conversations. We conducted a single case study to define a preliminary theoretical model of humanness for chatbot technology. The study findings point to a novel conceptualization of humanness in customer-chatbot interaction, highlighting that it is multiple, contextual, modular, and dynamic. Moreover, the theoretical model that we propose explains that the kind of humanness attributed to a chatbot depends on the context in which people expect to interact, the objectives and needs that they aim to fulfill, and the cues that the chatbot exhibits: all these factors may change as the interaction evolves over time, and such changes may further affect the users’ ascriptions of humanness. Finally, we propose design implications of the model, like the need to create “context” and account for the plurality of humanness.

A central problem for chatbots in the customer care domain revolves around how people collaborate with the agent to achieve their own situated goals. The majority of the previous research, however, relied on experiments within artificial settings, rather than on observation of real-world interactions. Moreover, such research mostly analyzed users’ responses to communication breakdowns, rather than the wider collaboration strategies utilized during a conversation. In this paper, we qualitatively analyzed 12,477 real-world exchanges with a task-based chatbot using a Grounded Theory approach as a rigorous coding method to analyze the data. We identified two main aspects of collaboration, behavioral and conversational, and for each aspect we highlighted the different strategies that users perform to “work together” with the agent. These strategies may be utilized from the very beginning of the conversation or in response to misunderstandings in the course of ongoing interactions and may show different evolving dynamics.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 has made apparent the importance of gaming technologies during crises and difficult life moments. However, studies exploring the role of commercial off-the-shelf video games during the pandemic are still limited. Moreover, research often focuses on a specific moment of the crisis. In this article, we investigate how playing commercial video games impacts on how players manage and understand the COVID-19 pandemic considered in its temporal evolution. We conducted a one-year-and-a-half longitudinal qualitative study by interviewing 16 participants who were living in Italy during the first pandemic lockdown, then involving a subgroup of them (N=10) in a follow-up interview. Study findings show that playing not only supported escapism from a difficult reality, but also helped individuals counteract the sense of detachment from the “pandemic world”, encouraging reflection and supporting sense-making. These functions of video games varied as the pandemic unfolded. Based on these findings, we present a preliminary model of the role of video game technologies during moments of crisis and suggest design considerations on how video games could support people experiencing extremely difficult life moments.

The majority of behavior change and persuasive technologies are exclusively addressed to modify a specific behavior. However, the focus on behavior may cloud the “existential aspects” of the process of change. To explore the lived and meaning-laden experience of behavior change, we interviewed 23 individuals who have used behavior change technology in their everyday life. The study findings highlight that behavior change is tied to meanings that point to existential matters, relates to a nexus of life circumstances, and unfolds over long periods of time. By contrast, the technology used by the participants appears mostly to focus on the present target behavior, ignoring its links to the participants’ life “context” and “time,” also providing scarce help for sense-making. Based on these findings, we surface a preliminary “existential model of behavior change,” identify several barriers that may prevent the modification of behavior and propose some design suggestions to overcome them.

Game-based interventions have been gradually and successfully implemented in the mental health domain given the games’ ability to positively affect a variety of mental health conditions. To this aim, scholars have recently discovered the usefulness of Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) video games, due to their increasing popularity, availability, and cost effectiveness. Nevertheless, key aspects of this line of research have not emerged yet, since a comprehensive overview of how commercial video games impact on different mental disorders is still missing. In this article, we present a systematic literature review of recent research that focuses on the usage of commercial video games in mental health. We analyse 39 papers and map the relevant themes that are recurrent in the last ten years of research, offering a detailed understanding of the methodological approaches that were used, the results obtained, the main disorders addressed, and the video game genres exploited. On the basis of these findings, we highlight open issues in current work and point out a variety of research opportunities that could be tackled in future years, like the need of conducting more field and longitudinal studies, the necessity of developing the design knowledge, and the possibility of connecting research with clinical practice.