Virtual reality (VR) roleplaying games designed to promote perspective taking typically involve players assuming the perspective of others from different backgrounds and experiencing a simulated scenario from their everyday life, with the goal of facilitating and enhancing empathy and social acceptance toward marginalized groups.One key question pertains to the extent to which players' perspective during VR roleplaying games affects their social acceptance of the other.To address this question, we examined the effect of first-person vs. third-person perspective on presence, co-presence, and social acceptance during a VR roleplaying game.Two groups of participants played the same VR roleplaying game from either a first-person perspective or a third-person perspective.Results showed that compared to third-person perspective, firstperson perspective led to greater co-presence during the game and engendered higher levels of social acceptance toward the character whose role participants played.These results highlight the importance of using first-person perspective in VR roleplaying games focusing on facilitating and enhancing social acceptance. CCS Concepts• Human

In this study, we explored the effect of seeing one’s avatar in a virtual mirror during a virtual reality (VR) perspective taking experience. Participants were divided into two groups, with one experiencing the VR environment with the presence of a mirror showcasing their avatar and the other without. Results revealed that the sense of presence was comparable across both groups. However, a notable difference emerged in terms of empathy; participants who viewed their avatars in the mirror exhibited reduced empathic responses. These findings illuminate the nuanced dynamics of self-representation in virtual environments, suggesting that inducing self-awareness through a virtual mirror in VR might have unintended emotional consequences.

Games are now ubiquitous, and educational games are becoming increasingly prevalent. Like other games, educational video games attract participants from different ethnicities and with different gender expressions. As such, educational game designers face a necessity to develop inclusive games. In this paper, we focus on inclusivity, diversity, and equity (DEI) issues by investigating if the computer programming game Mazzy benefited participants from broad demographic backgrounds. We highlight inclusive features present in Mazzy, and, focusing on the participants’ self-reported gender and race/ethnicity, reflect on their play experience and learning outcomes. We found evidence that the game supported learning outcomes and facilitated an engaging play experience for participants from diverse demographic backgrounds. We discuss challenges and implications for the broader literature.

Videogames and learning/training applications that address racial discrimination have risen in popularity recently, coinciding with the rapid development of the field of serious (or impact) games [1, 2]. While there has been much focus on understanding the efficacy of these systems as interventions to reduce racial bias, there has been less attention paid to how individuals’ prior physical-world racial attitudes influence their experiences of such games about racial issues. Toward addressing this gap, the study presented here examines the relationships between PreK-12 educators’ colorblind racial attitudes and their game experience and narrative interpretations in narrative videogame modeling racial and ethnic socialization called Passage Home. Passage Home embeds a novel computational model and simulation informed by the Racial Encounter Coping Appraisal and Socialization Theory (RECAST) [3] to simulate a discriminatory racial encounter in a classroom setting. The system serves as a tool for assessing players’ racial and ethnic socialization (RES) experiences to support interventions for learning about racial bias. This paper presents the results of a user study deploying Passage Home with PreK-12 educators. Analysis revealed that players’ colorblind racial attitudes and ethnic identity were related to their in-game racial appraisal and feelings of competence, negative affect, and empathy in the game. Given the prevalence of colorblind racial ideology across racial and ethnic groups in the United States [4, 5], we propose an initial typology of players’ colorblind racial attitudes emerging from this analysis to aid in the future development of serious game interventions addressing racial discrimination.

Contemporary online learning systems are increasingly common elements of post-secondary, workplace, and lifelong education. These systems typically employ the transmission model of education to teach students, an approach ill-suited for fostering deeper learning. This paper presents our latest findings related to ongoing research developing a generalizable framework for supporting deeper learning in online learning systems. In this work, we focus on the self-debriefing component of our framework and its impact on deeper learning in online learning systems. To pursue this line of inquiry, we conducted an exploratory study evaluating the Chimeria:Grayscale MOOC, an online learning system that implements our framework. Our results suggest that self-debriefing is crucial for effectively supporting students' reflections.

Since virtual identities such as social media profiles and avatars have become a common venue for self-expression, it has become important to consider the ways in which existing systems embed the values of their designers. In order to design virtual identity systems that reflect the needs and preferences of diverse users, understanding how the virtual identity construction differs between groups is important. This paper presents a new methodology that leverages deep learning and differential clustering for comparative analysis of profile images, with a case study of almost 100 000 avatars from a large online community using a popular avatar creation platform. We use novelty discovery to segment the avatars, then cluster avatars by region to identify visual trends among low-and high-novelty avatars. We find that avatar customization correlates with increased social activity, and we are able to identify distinct visual trends among the U.S.-region and Japan-region profiles. Among these trends, realistic, idealistic, and creative self-representation can be distinguished. We observe that the realistic self-expression mirrors regional demographics, idealistic self-expression reflects shared mass-media tropes, and creative self-expression propagates within the communities.

In our study (N=2189), we divided participants into 6 badge conditions: 1) Role model badges (e.g., Einstein), 2) Personal interest badges (e.g., Movies), 3) Achievement badges (e.g., "Code King"), 4) Choice, 5) Choice with badges always visible, and 6) No badges. Participants played a CS programming game, then used an editor to create their own level. Badges promoted avatar identification (personal interest, role model), player experience (achievement, role model), intrinsic motivation (achievement, role model), and self-efficacy (role model) during both the game and the editor. Independent of badges, avatar identification promoted player experience, intrinsic motivation, and self-efficacy. Additionally, avatar identification promoted greater overall time spent in both the game and the editor, and led to significantly higher overall quality of the completed game levels (as rated by 3 independent externally trained QA testers). Our study has implications for the design of badge systems and sheds new light on the effects of avatar identification on play and making.

In deploying social media and other information technologies often not designed with MENA (the Middle East and North Africa) cultures in mind, users generate creative approaches to self-representation using virtual identities while preserving their cultural values. To understand and further empower such approaches, we present a mixed-method of computational and qualitative study, focusing on Qatar as a case of such communities in the MENA region. We analyzed a dataset of over 42,000 publicly available social media profiles using computational approaches (archetypal analysis) and qualitatively analyzed a separate set of 255 profiles. We augmented our descriptions with semi-structured interviews. As a result, we delineate a set of five needs/values exhibited by Qatari users supporting their creativity in effectively using virtual identities: Khaleeji features, self-expression, social connections, social monitoring, and physical and virtual identity contrasts. Finally, we propose an initial set of guidelines to support developers of virtual identity systems in better serving these users while preserving their cultural values and creative agency.

This paper presents an overview of the MazeStar platform for Computer Science education. MazeStar is both a game (Mazzy) that teaches programming concepts like loops and conditionals, and a game editor which allows players to create and share their own game levels. By playing and creating, players are using computing concepts (e.g., block structuring, parallelism, etc.) and computing practices (e.g., debugging, iterative prototyping, etc.). To date the MazeStar platform has been used in controlled user studies involving > 10,000 participants. Here, our goal is to detail the different components of the MazeStar platform, and how we have/are leveraging these components to study the interplay of education, games/game-making, and virtual identity.

Grounded in cognitive semantics in cognitive science and the psychology of emotion, this paper first theoretically articulates the imaginative and affective user experiences of lively interactive artifacts. It then introduces an exemplar of lively interactive products, the mobile phone NEC FOMA N702iS with an intriguing water-level screen interface. Built upon the concept of a glass of water, the design of the phone can provoke users’ imagination and emotion regarding resource consumption and conservation, persuading one to take action. To collect empirical data as cross-references to the theoretical framework, user experience tests on an implementation of the interface have been conducted. The qualitative findings show how the interactions at different moments provoke participants via conceptual blends, desires, and appraisals. This demonstrates the application of the proposed framework for interpreting users’ meaning-making and emotion elicitation processes.

This paper provides an interdisciplinary reflection on the nature meaning-making involving users and animated gestural interfaces. In particular, we propose a new model for analysis of creative computing systems incorporating gestural input into dynamically animated interfaces. Our contributions are based on a theoretical framework synthesizing embodied cognition approaches in cognitive science, phenomenology in philosophy, and user interface design in computing. We introduce the term enduring interaction to refer to the phenomenon of bodily and conceptually engaging interaction within constantly changing computational environments. Our construct centralizes the issue of how users' motor-sensory experiences inform their construction of meaning in the design of interactive systems. We argue that creative computing systems, a class of artifacts including types of hobbyist websites, video games, and computer-based artworks, require a new design perspective quite distinct from user-centric interface design approaches focused on productivity-oriented applications. Using examples including outcomes of the Gestural Narrative and Interactive Expression (GeNIE) project (Harrell, PI; Chow and Erik Loyer collaborators) along with existing prevalent, exceptional, or historically significant artifacts, we articulate a continuum of various kinds of engagement, showing design implications of our perspective, enabling users to use gestural interaction (through multi-touch and gyroscope/accelerometer-based input devices) to result in narratively salient, evocative, and even intimate interaction mechanisms in interactive narrative environments.

Skeletons of Mare Incognitum (The Unkown Sea) is an interactive fiction (IF) work developed by Fox Harrell. This work was written using Curveship [1, 2], a platform for implementing works of IF that offers a range of affordances for narrative variation such as flashbacks, temporal movement of the narrator, and changes in voice.

Computing technologies such as games, social networking sites, and virtual environments often reproduce forms of social stigma encountered in everyday real life, as well as introducing new forms of stigma. When users represent themselves via avatars, characters, and profiles, norms for behavior and group affiliations are established that may introduce prejudices, stereotypes, and associated social ills found in the real world. To empower users against these effects, this paper presents technologies designed to: (1) provide dynamic means of identity representation while avoiding stigmatizing norms, and (2) provide for critical reflection on stigmatizing identity infrastructures found in other systems. The theory and technologies developed with these aims is encapsulated under the rubric of the Advanced Identity Representation (AIR) Project that initiated in the Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory (ICE Lab; D. Fox Harrell, Director) at the Georgia Institute of Technology. This work has a basis in the cognitive science foundations of categorization and metaphor-based bias, and study of social classification infrastructures from sociology of science. Using this theoretical framework, this paper provides a model to reveal a set of inadequacies of many current identity infrastructures in social computing and gaming systems for supporting the needs of people in marginalized categories. As results, several social networking systems and games developed in the ICE Lab to empower users in creating computational identities and/or critiquing the phenomenon of stigma in these applications are presented.