Teenagers are avid users of Discord, a fast-growing platform for synchronous communication where they often interact with strangers. Because Discord combines private DMs, semi-private voice channels, and public servers in one place, it creates a hybrid environment that can produce complex—and underexplored—safety risks for teenagers. Drawing on 16 interviews with teenage Discord users, this study examines their strategies for navigating risky social interactions in the platform. Our findings reveal that when teenagers encounter risks during social interactions, they exercise vigilance by evaluating suspicious interactions before forming friendships, using safety tools, and engaging in controlled risk-taking to safeguard their privacy and security. At the community level, they mitigate risks through selective participation in servers, a practice supported by vigilant governance structures. We discuss how vigilance enables teenagers to act during risky encounters to protect themselves, advancing understanding of teenagers’ agency in risk navigation and informing teen-centered designs for safer online environments.

With the development of consumer surveillance technologies, monitoring has become increasingly accessible and woven into family life. Prior work has examined parents’ attitudes, privacy concerns, and selected uses of surveillance technologies like smart cameras and location-tracking apps, but offers limited accounts of how parents, as surveillants, configure and experience these technologies themselves in daily parenting. We address this gap by focusing on baby monitoring technologies (BMTs) as a high-salience context during a sensitive stage of family life. Using inductive thematic analysis of Reddit discussions, we examine how parents engage with BMTs in practice. Our findings revealed how parents actively assemble and configure BMTs, navigate and manage their emotions through them, negotiate privacy frictions and boundaries, and safeguard security in their use of such technologies within parenting and caregiving. We conclude by discussing implications for surveillance research and design for monitoring technologies in care.

Gaming is a meaningful part of children’s lives, yet its safety has drawn increasing concerns from scholars and the public. On platforms like Roblox, children may encounter extremist roleplay, scams, or virtual rape. Prior research has emphasized technical interventions that address risks after they occur and ethical frameworks for game design, but children’s perspectives on safety design remain missing. To address this gap, we conducted a cooperative inquiry study to co-design safety mechanisms with 22 children aged 7–12. Children proposed designs emphasizing transparent information about games and purchases, community accountability through reporting and reviews, player empowerment to manage social boundaries and engagement, and age-appropriate game navigation. Our findings extend safety-by-design research by foregrounding children’s perspectives, showing how they envision safety mechanisms across both game and platform design, while enjoying safe play through risk exposure, allocating trust, and balancing platform support with agency.

User-generated game (UGG) platforms such as Roblox have become increasingly popular among children but are also criticized for hosting rampant online risks, such as virtual gang rape and spread of extremist ideologies. However, limited research has explored the risks from child players’ perspectives. Through an interview study with 26 child players, we found three categories of risks: varied scams, the normalization of anti-social behaviors, and adult roleplays. We also identified three types of safety practices child players employed on UGG platforms: adaptive safety practices across different social relationships, applying heuristics to safeguard their safety, and tinkering with safety features. We discuss design-mediated risks in UGGs targeting vulnerable child players and challenges and opportunities for risk mitigation strategies in UGGs. Lastly, we provide design implications for UGG platforms to support child players and provide a safe place for them to play.

Abstract Video games have been a unique study context for computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) researchers for decades. However, despite their collaborative richness, CSCW has not yet developed a systematic understanding of video games as a site for studying cooperation and social interaction—limiting its ability to engage with the increasingly social, digital, and playful nature of work. Particularly, what are the academic characteristics of video game studies? What topics are studied in the context of video games? And what are the unique facets of the video game context? To answer these questions, we conducted a systematic literature review by analyzing 67 studies of video games published in CSCW outlets between 1998 and 2023. We describe these studies’ academic characteristics and the topics studied in the context of video games through seven themes. We further identify six unique facets of collaborative work that scholars gain through game studies. We conclude that video games not only serve as an empirically rich site for examining and enriching existing CSCW theories and frameworks, but also constitute unique and oftentimes novel sociotechnical configurations that recontextualize CSCW. We further point to gaps, opportunities, and future directions for CSCW researchers interested in exploring the diverse social and collaborative dynamics in games, thus contributing to a more inclusive and expansive understanding of collaboration in digitally mediated environments.

Women’s participation in competitive gaming continues to grow. Despite growing attention to women’s presence and challenges in gaming, research has largely overlooked their unique experiences with toxicity in competitive environments. Our study addresses this gap by examining the perspectives of 28 women who play competitive games at varying levels. Through reflexive thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews, we discovered how women are being harmed by gendered toxicity and desire for justice. We present two key findings: 1) the forms of gendered toxicity women perceive in competitive gaming and 2) how women respond to their experiences with gendered toxicity. Using women-centered perspectives, our research deepens the understanding of how gendered toxicity marginalizes women and highlights confrontational strategies that seek justice and drive change. We demonstrate that gendered toxicity sustains a sexist meritocracy and exposes the limitations of existing interventions and mitigation strategies. Our findings encourage game developers and industry practitioners to design more inclusive moderation systems and competitive gaming events.

Predatory monetization in video games refers to purchasing systems that hide or postpone the complete financial consequences until players are already deeply committed, both financially and emotionally. These systems manipulate players into spending against their genuine interests, benefiting game companies while causing potential financial harm. This issue has drawn increasing scholarly and societal attention, but little research has explored how players perceive the influence of predatory monetization on their gaming experiences. Through an interview study with 23 players of popular user-generated games hosted on platforms such as Roblox and Minecraft and a reflexive thematic analysis, we identified three key influences of predatory monetization: felt manipulation, monetized interpersonal relationships, and risks with mitigation strategies. We further describe social monetization, where monetization and players’ social experiences are closely intertwined, as well as the ecosystem of predatory monetization, where multiple stakeholders play interconnected roles in enabling and sustaining predatory monetization practices. Finally, we offer design implications for mitigating the negative influences of predatory monetization.

Metaverse platforms have been on the rise in recent years, offering three-dimensional (3D), immersive virtual worlds while encouraging user-generated content (UGC) in various forms. Roblox, a popular metaverse platform, enables its users to create a holistic virtual world (i.e., develop a 3D game) for other users to interact with. However, complex UGC is also challenging to moderate. Roblox has been notorious for its users’ harmful designs, such as Nazi or terrorist role-playing mechanisms. In this study, we explore how harmful design takes place on Roblox. Through a grounded theory analysis of the ‘r/Robloxgamedev’ subreddit, we conceptualize an ecological view of harmful design, foregrounding three interconnected circumstances, namely sociotechnical risks, socioeconomic precarities, and normative (in)sensitivities, which work together to condition and give rise to harmful designs and bring about unique governance challenges to metaverse platforms. We conclude by laying out implications for design moderation.

Protecting children’s online privacy is paramount. Online platforms seek to enhance child privacy protection by implementing new classification systems into their content moderation practices. One prominent example is YouTube’s “made for kids” (MFK) classification. However, traditional content moderation focuses on managing content rather than users’ privacy; little is known about how users experience these classification systems. Thematically analyzing online discussions about YouTube’s MFK classification system, we present a case study on content creators’ and consumers’ experiences. We found that creators and consumers perceived MFK classification as misaligned with their actual practices, creators encountered unexpected consequences of practicing labeling, and creators and consumers identified MFK classification’s intersections with other platform designs. Our findings shed light on an interwoven network of multiple classification systems that extends the original focus on child privacy to encompass broader child safety issues; these insights contribute to the design principles of child-centered safety within this intricate network.

Moderation systems of online games often follow a retributive model inspired by real-world criminal justice, expecting that punishments can help users to reform behavior. However, decades of criminological research show that punishments alone do not work and call for a rehabilitative approach, such as community-based rehabilitation (CBR), to help offenders transform their minds and behavioral patterns. Motivated by this call, we explore how moderated users view punishments in a community context and how other community members respond in League of Legends (LoL), one of the largest online games. Specifically, we focus on how peer support is sought and provided on the /r/LeagueOfLegends subreddit, the largest LoL-related online community. Our content analysis of player discussions characterized the communication between moderated users and peers as informative, constructive, and reflexive. We highlight the importance of involving community in moderation systems and discuss implications for designing CBR mechanisms that could enhance moderation systems.

Competitive gaming, a long-standing study context for CSCW, has recently faced criticism due to its design emphasis on competition and achievement, which is associated with adverse phenomena such as player toxicity and anxiety. Recognizing this limit, game designers have proactively made design attempts to ameliorate these unintended consequences of competitive gaming. A notable example is the All Random All Mid (ARAM) mode in League of Legends (LoL), designed to introduce casualness into competitive gaming. To understand how players experience both casualness and competitiveness, a seemingly contradictory pair, we conducted an interview study with ARAM players, finding that ARAM supports 'casual competition' through decentering competition, diversifying interpersonal dynamics, and filling gaps in player needs. We further discuss how game design and player agency co-constitute casual competition, reflect on key aspects of competitive gaming design such as diversity and fairness, and provide implications for competitive gaming design, which may help combat toxicity.

An increasing number of game platforms, such as Roblox, enable game creators to develop user-generated games (UGGs). Yet, these platforms often come under scrutiny for hosting UGGs that contain harmful content, ranging from sexually explicit material to Nazi-themed roleplay. Limited attention has been paid to how harmful UGGs are ideated by game creators. To address this question, we studied an online Roblox creator community, where Roblox creators collectively engage in design ideation to brainstorm design ideas for UGGs. Through an inductive thematic analysis, we found three primary ways where Roblox creators' design ideation becomes risky, including how Roblox creators generate risky game design ideas, navigate through policy boundaries to develop these ideas, and share strategies of bypassing moderation. Based on our findings, we discuss ethical and governance challenges facing user-generated games. We propose design implications to support game creators in developing ethical game design ideas and safe game designs.

Toxicity in online games refers to behaviors where players disrupt the gaming experience of others, leading to adverse outcomes such as depression and low self-esteem. Although scholars have identified various factors contributing to toxicity, ranging from individual motivations to team dynamics to cultural backgrounds, the role of game design has been less frequently discussed. To bridge this gap, we conducted an interview study to explore players' perceptions of how game design influences toxicity. Our research identified four game design elements that participants perceived as contributing factors to the emergency of toxicity in their experiences: team interdependency, fairness, interaction design, and privacy. These findings help us shed light on how game design unintendedly triggers toxic intentions, exposes players to vulnerability, making them potential victims, and affects player interactions which lead to toxicity. We further propose design implications that can mitigate toxicity in online games.