Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is currently reshaping game development practices, production pipelines, and value networks in an unprecedentedly pervasive manner with cascading consequences remaining unclear. In the last five years since GenAI’s inception, a growing body of qualitative research has explored these early transformations from different settings and demographic angles. However, these studies often contextualise and consolidate their findings weakly with related work; for research to keep up with and support stakeholders in this development, the current moment calls for a synthesis of the findings emerged thus far. Here, we address this need through a qualitative research synthesis via meta-ethnography. We followed PRISMA-S to systematically search the relevant literature from 2020-2025, including major HCI and games research databases. We then synthesised the ten eligible studies, conducting reciprocal translation and line-of-argument synthesis guided by eMERGe, informed by CASP quality appraisal. We identified nine overarching themes, provide recommendations, and contextualise our insights in wider game production trajectories. With this work, we seek to provide practitioners, researchers and policy-makers with grounded insights to guide practice, research and governance.

Older adults often struggle to meet their psychological needs due to retirement and living alone. Recent studies suggest that games featuring emotional challenge (EC) can help fulfill basic psychological needs such as autonomy, competence, and relatedness by facilitating emotional exploration. However, it remains unclear whether older adults can benefit from EC games, whether they find this genre enjoyable, and how these games should be designed to better meet their needs. This work explores older adults' experiences and perceptions of playing EC games through two studies. The first study involved playing Detroit: Become Human, revealing that older adults derived multifaceted psychological experiences from playing the game. The second study involved a custom-designed game scenario tailored to older adults, demonstrating that meaningful choices significantly influenced autonomy need satisfaction. Based on these findings, we offer five design guidelines for developing EC games that satisfy psychological needs of older adults.

Realistic sound propagation is important for immersive game audio, yet its implementation remains a balance between physics-based accuracy and creative design. This paper presents a survey on physics-based techniques for sound propagation rendering in video games. It explores the perspectives of professional sound designers working in the video games industry, examining their approaches and prioritization in implementation. The key findings reveal a complex relationship between physicsbased calculation and creative design preferences, highlighting a significant gap between academic theory and practical solution design. The study offers a practical discussion and insights for implementing sound propagation effects in industry projects.

This paper examines the impact of AI-generated versus human-written dialogue in a murder-mystery game on player experience. We manipulated both the game dialogue type (AI-generated vs. human-written dialogue) and the game type description (AI-labelled vs human-written-labelled) to assess effects on overall player experience (PX), immersion, and perceived autonomy. Results show that player expectations, modulated by the game type description, had a greater impact on overall PX than the actual game type. Players who thought that they played a game with a human-written narrative reported more positive overall PX, higher immersion and perceived autonomy regardless of which version they actually played. However, interacting with the AI-generated dialogue version led to higher perceived autonomy, suggesting that AI-driven dialogue can enhance perceived freedom without necessarily improving the overall PX. These findings show that player expectations, in response to game descriptions, play a central role in the experiences of players. This work contributes to understanding the influence of narratives and the extent to which AI features increase player engagement.

Non-Euclidean geometry has the potential to be used for novel interactions in video games and create virtual spaces that are not physically possible in the real world. To explore how players perceive and experience them in video games, we have adapted two well-known 2D games, Snake and Asteroids to create two versions in addition to the conventional virtual space – with hyperbolic and spherical environments – and conducted a within-subject design user study on all three versions of these games. The results show that experienced Mastery and Control are lower when playing the two non-Euclidean versions while perceived Immersion and Challenge do not differ significantly between these three conditions. We also report on the qualitative findings from our participants, which provide further insights into the perception and experiences of these environments.

Players’ basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness are among the most commonly used constructs used in research on what makes video games so engaging, and how they might support or undermine user wellbeing. However, existing measures of basic psychological needs in games have important limitations—they either do not measure need frustration, or measure it in a way that may not be appropriate for the video games domain, they struggle to capture feelings of relatedness in both single- and multiplayer contexts, and they often lack validity evidence for certain contexts (e.g., playtesting vs experience with games as a whole). In this paper, we report on the design and validation of a new measure, the Basic Needs in Games Scale (BANGS), whose 6 subscales cover satisfaction and frustration of each basic psychological need in gaming contexts. The scale was validated and evaluated over five studies with a total of 1246 unique participants. Results supported the theorized structure of the scale and provided evidence for discriminant, convergent and criterion validity. Results also show that the scale performs well over different contexts (including evaluating experiences in a single game session or across various sessions) and over time, supporting measurement invariance. Further improvements to the scale are warranted, as results indicated lower reliability in the autonomy frustration subscale, and a surprising non-significant correlation between relatedness satisfaction and frustration. Despite these minor limitations, BANGS is a reliable and theoretically sound tool for researchers to measure basic needs satisfaction and frustration with a degree of domain validity not previously available.

Playtesting is a games user research (GUR) method used to evaluate design decisions based on feedback gathered from players with the goal to improve player experience. HCI games research has been actively working on and promoting best practices in GUR. However, these practices often require resources, knowledge and expertise, which are not readily available for indie video games developers. Thus, to better understand how GUR can support these developers, we conducted an interview study with 13 indie games professionals to learn about their practices and the challenges they face when doing playtesting. We report on the key findings from this study, including challenges with finding appropriate participants and handling the data from playtests. We provide a discussion of how existing GUR practices can be adapted and what HCI games research can do to help mitigate these challenges to make playtesting more accessible and impactful to indie video games developers.

We are excited to present PACM HCI's 2024 issue on games and play research, which contains 63 original and highly relevant articles covering the entire spectrum of HCI games research. As in the previous year, we used three recommendations ' 'Accept with Minor Revisions', 'Revise and Resubmit', and 'Reject.' For papers that were accepted with minor revisions, the second round of reviews was a 'light-touch' process in which the editorial board members checked the revisions, whereas papers that received Revise and Resubmit received another full round of external reviews with the same reviewers in most cases, and were also subjected to a final selection process. This second revision was treated as a real resubmission, which meant that it was given full consideration, but no guarantee or preferential treatment towards acceptance; a share of the revised papers was ultimately rejected. We would like to acknowledge the efforts that our community has made in adapting to this new process, working together with the submitting authors to achieve high-quality scholarship. The track editorial board consisted of 32 members and a total of 230 external reviewers from around the world ensured a high-quality review process. After the first round of submissions, each paper was handled by a primary track editorial board member who received reviews from a second track editorial board member and two external reviewers so that each submission received at least three high-quality reviews. After reviews were completed and checked for quality, the primary initiated discussion amongst the reviewers and came up with a preliminary recommendation (accept, between accept and revise and resubmit, revise and resubmit, between revise and resubmit and reject, reject). Papers that were in the middle three categories were then discussed in two synchronous virtual track editorial board meetings that took place over two consecutive days. The inclusion of the board meeting at this stage was a new addition to the review process last year. We included it to better calibrate decision making across the committee at this critical point in the review process, ensure consistency in outcomes, promote reflection and consideration at this stage in the process, and mentor newer editorial board members in the review process. We strove for a diverse program approaching games research from a variety of perspectives, including design, engineering, psychology, computer and data science while at the same time only accepting high-quality pieces of work. In this issue, we observe the following distribution of primary contributions: 42.9% of papers self-classify as using qualitative methods, 11.1% use quantitative methods, and 20.6% use mixed methods. Additionally, 3.2% of papers present design artifacts and 6.3% present technical artifacts. Finally, 4.8% of papers employ meta-research methods, 6.3% of papers present a new methodological approach, and 4.8% of papers contribute to the development and validation of theory. All articles in this issue were invited to present at the ACM CHI PLAY 2024 conference. We thank our dedicated team of track editorial board members, external reviewers, and paper authors, who continue to support the new review process and timeline, contributing to the maturation and growth of the PACM HCI games and play research community, and resulting in this issue of 63 exciting and highly relevant articles. This issue's 63 papers reflect the importance of play in our everyday lives, comment on recent trends and technical developments relevant to games and play, and also represent a significant effort of our community in coming together to produce a collection of research that highlights the multifaceted value of play.

The potential benefits of playing video games during times of difficulty have been increasingly recognised by researchers yet little is known about how particular aspects of games may relate to different forms of coping. An exploratory survey of 130 participants and content analysis identified 31 game aspects, across 6 categories, that were beneficial or detrimental to players. Our findings illustrate that games can support a range of coping strategies, including emotion-focused, avoidance, and meaning-focused coping. We also identify how specific aspects of games relate to different coping strategies during times of personal difficulty. For instance, emotion-focused coping was most commonly linked to challenge game aspects, where overcoming difficulties allowed players to experience positive emotions such as competence. The findings of this study provide valuable insights into how games may be able to facilitate a range of coping strategies during tough times.

Measuring perceived challenge and demand in video games is crucial as these player experiences are essential to creating enjoyable games. Two recent measures that identified seemingly distinct structures of challenge (Challenge Originating from Recent Gameplay Interaction Scale (CORGIS) - cognitive, emotional, performative, decision-making) and demand (Video Game Demand Scale (VGDS) - cognitive, emotional, controller, exertional, social) have been theorised to overlap, reflecting the five-factor demand structure. To investigate the overlap between these two scales we compared a five (complete overlap) and nine-factor (no overlap) model by surveying 1,101 players asking them to recall their last gaming experience before completing CORGIS and VGDS. After failing to confirm both models, we conducted an exploratory factor analysis. Our findings reveal seven dimensions, where the five-factor VGDS model holds alongside two additional CORGIS dimensions of performative and decision-making, ultimately providing a more holistic understanding of the concepts whilst highlighting unique aspects of each approach.

Challenge is the core element of digital games. The wide spectrum of physical, cognitive, and emotional challenge experiences provided by modern digital games can be evaluated subjectively using a questionnaire, the CORGIS, which allows for a post hoc evaluation of the overall experience that occurred during game play. Measuring this experience dynamically and objectively, however, would allow for a more holistic view of the moment-to-moment experiences of players. This study, therefore, explored the potential of detecting perceived challenge from physiological signals. For this, we collected physiological responses from 32 players who engaged in three typical game scenarios. Using perceived challenge ratings from players and extracted physiological features, we applied multiple machine learning methods and metrics to detect challenge experiences. Results show that most methods achieved a detection accuracy of around 80%. We discuss in-game challenge perception, challenge-related physiological indicators and AI-supported challenge detection to inform future work on challenge evaluation.

Tabletop Role-Playing Games (TTRPGs) offer players the opportunity to form imaginary gameworlds and stories within them, create community, solve problems, and explore identity. Designers and researchers have tried to identify how aspects of TTRPGs facilitate collaboration, immersion, creativity, and more. However, there has been no attempt to develop a formal assessment methodology for player experience during TTRPG play. This paper argues that evaluating TTRPG players’ experience can provide vital data for Game Masters to improve on their future games, for players to reflect on their experience, and for TTRPG designers or event organizers to collect and compare data. As a first step towards developing such an evaluation method, we identify important dimensions of TTRPG play that can be meaningful to track and actionable to improve upon. Moreover, we review player experience dimensions and evaluation methods in digital games, and explore similarities and differences with TTRPGs.

Many human-AI authoring tools are used in a playful way, while being primarily designed for task-achievement—not playfulness. We argue that playfulness is an important yet overlooked factor of user behaviour and experience when interacting with such tools. Motivating and rewarding playfulness as an exploratory, task-agnostic, open, and subversive attitude can support the satisfaction of more diverse user goals, and have a strong, positive effect on the user experience, the emerging human-AI interaction, and the resulting artefact. In this paper, we motivate the importance of playfulness as user experience in human-AI authoring tools, and propose concrete strategies to design for playfulness in the human user through UI design, in the AI through algorithms, or through interventions to their dialog. We conclude with an outlook of the research agenda.

Who said that violent video games cannot promote calm behavior? Could we reverse engineer the difficulty system of a horror game to encourage the player to stay calm as opposed to feeling under constant pressure? To explore the feasibility of the approach and its effectiveness, we created a horror game,Caroline, which uses the player’s biometric data to adapt the difficulty of the game: if the player is too stressed, the difficulty increases, and the opposite happens if the player is relaxed. We explored the effect of such an approach on players’ cognitive, emotional, performative, and decision-making challenge as well as their intrinsic motivation by comparing it to the base game without any dynamic difficulty adjustment (DDA). Our results showed that players felt more motivated when the gameplay was adjusted according to their heart rate. However, out of the four types of challenge, the only one affected by the DDA was the decision-making challenge. We discuss what these findings mean for video game design and research into affective computing and provide suggestions for future research.

Board gaming is a popular hobby that increasingly features the inclusion of technology, yet little research has sought to understand how board game player experience is impacted by digital augmentation or to inform the design of new technology-enhanced games. We present a mixed-methods study exploring how the presence of music and sound effects impacts the player experience of a board game. We found that the soundtrack increased the enjoyment and tension experienced by players during game play. We also found that a soundtrack provided atmosphere surrounding the gaming experience, though players did not necessarily experience this as enhancing the world-building capabilities of the game. We discuss how our findings can inform the design of new games and soundtracks as well as future research into board game player experience.

Visualization literacy, the ability to interpret and comprehend visual designs, is recognized as an essential skill by the visualization community. We identify and investigate barriers to comprehending parallel coordinates plots (PCPs), one of the advanced graphical representations for the display of multivariate and high-dimensional data. We develop a parallel coordinates literacy test with diverse images generated using popular PCP software tools. The test improves PCP literacy and evaluates the user’s literacy skills. We introduce an interactive educational tool that assists the teaching and learning of parallel coordinates by offering a more active learning experience. Using this pedagogical tool, we aim to advance novice users’ parallel coordinates literacy skills. Based on the hypothesis that an interactive tool that links traditional Cartesian Coordinates with PCPs interactively will enhance PCP literacy further than static slides, we compare the learning experience using traditional slides with our novel software tool and investigate the efficiency of the educational software with an online, crowdsourced user-study. User-study results show that our pedagogical tool positively impacts a user’s PCP comprehension.

Emotionally impactful game experiences have garnered increasing interest within HCI games research. Yet the perspectives of designers have, to date, remained largely overlooked. We interviewed 14 indie game designers regarding their values and practices in designing emotionally impactful games. Counter to the focus of recent player experience (PX) studies, we find that while designers typically have a clear vision for the intended emotional impact, they aim for their games to provide a space for players to have their own personal experiences and interpretations. Despite this player-centric orientation, players were rarely involved before and during the production to evaluate the emotional experience. Based on these findings, we identify gaps between design practice and PX research, raise open questions around the design and evaluation of emotionally impactful game experiences, and outline opportunities for HCI games research to more productively support game designers.

Recent work introduced the notion of 'emotional challenge' promising for understanding more unique and diverse player experiences (PX). Although emotional challenge has immediately attracted HCI researchers' attention, the concept has not been experimentally explored, especially in virtual reality (VR), one of the latest gaming environments. We conducted two experiments to investigate how emotional challenge affects PX when separately from or jointly with conventional challenge in VR and PC conditions. We found that relatively exclusive emotional challenge induced a wider range of different emotions in both conditions, while the adding of emotional challenge broadened emotional responses only in VR. In both experiments, VR significantly enhanced the measured PX of emotional responses, appreciation, immersion and presence. Our findings indicate that VR may be an ideal medium to present emotional challenge and also extend the understanding of emotional (and conventional) challenge in video games.

Uncertainty has previously been identified as an important ingredient of engaging games. Design in games can create different levels of uncertainty in players that they can recognize and describe as being either attributable to external forces, such as chance or hidden information, or internal to their own understanding of what to do in relation to their own goals. While it appears that uncertainty can contribute both positive and negative play experiences, there is little work in trying to operationalize and measure this concept as a component of player experience. Reported in this article is an analysis of data from over 700 players using modern bi-factor analysis techniques resulting in a five factor psychometric scale which captures the broad feelings of players about uncertainty in games. Three of these specific factors appear to point toward a single generic factor of uncertainty that is internal to the players, one captures experiences relating to external uncertainty, with the final factor relating to player’s experience of exploring the game to resolve uncertainty. In order to further validate the scale, we conducted an experiment with a commercial puzzle game manipulating the duration of play with predicted outcomes on the different specific factors of the scale. Overall the scale shows promise with good statistical reliability and construct validity of the separate factors and so will be a useful tool for further investigating player experiences in digital games.

Contemporary digital game developers offer a variety of games for the diverse tastes of their customers. Although the gaming experience often depends on one's preferences, the same may not apply to the level of their immersion. It has been argued whether the player perspective can influence the level of player's involvement with the game. The aim of this study was to research whether interacting with a game in first person perspective is more immersive than playing in the third person point of view (POV). The set up to test the theory involved participants playing a role-playing game in either mode, naming their preferred perspective, and subjectively evaluating their immersive experience. The results showed that people were more immersed in the game play when viewing the game world through the eyes of the character, regardless of their preferred perspectives.