Social media platforms have become integral to everyday life and serve as the foundation for online communities. These platforms not only enable communication but also shape the ways in which online communities are formed and maintained. In this paper, we examine an online community, the BTS fandom ARMY, using Durkheim’s concept of solidarity, we show how ARMY’s symbolic commitments, collective labor, and boundary negotiations are simultaneously community practices and infrastructural labor that generate cultural and economic value. Using an online survey and ethnographic observations of BTS ARMY, we present the BTS Industrial Complex, an ecosystem of communities all related to BTS that rely on digital platforms to influence and interact with each other. Our contributions are threefold: (1) a conceptualization of the BTS Industrial Complex as a sociotechnical ecosystem, (2) empirical insights into how platforms shape collective action, and (3) implications for HCI in designing for and critically examining large-scale cultural economies.

Game sound, as a feedback mechanism, functions along a diegetic continuum that bridges the boundary between player, game systems, and narrative. In narrative-driven strategy games, this continuum becomes especially important, as audio must communicate diegetically relevant information about story and character, while also supporting complex decision making. This raises key questions about how transdiegetic sound relates to design, narrative, and player experience for this genre. Specifically, how transdiegetic sound is incorporated into feedback systems in narrative-driven strategy games, and what kind of information they are used to communicate. In this paper, we examine the use of transdiegetic sound as form of feedback by analyzing 11 commercial narrative-focused strategy game titles. We map how such audio cues are designed for both narrative and gameplay functions, the specifics of how they traverse the diegetic boundaries, and discuss how these designs may shape player experience. Building on related work on transdiegetic sound in games, this study documents recurring design patterns and cues, and explores their communicative role within the context of narrative-driven strategy games.

With advances in generative AI, game designers can delegate some of a game’s procedural logic to an AI model, potentially enabling new dynamic play experiences. But the inability for a designer to consistently control a model’s behavior means the biases of these models can manifest in the game in unexpected ways. In this paper, we analyze how LLMs and game rules intersect to produce gameplay that is shaped by the biases of the language model. We draw on data studies to trace the ways that language models take on specific ideological commitments through their training, including biases along lines of race, gender, language, religion, geography, and more. Using Soraya Murray’s framing of games as playable representations and Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model, we analyze how the play dynamics of language model interactions are shaped by these commitments. Through case studies of Infinite Craft and 1001 Nights, we argue that LLM-driven gameplay can produce implicit rhetoric encouraging players to accept the model’s underlying beliefs by rewarding the player for adopting them. We conclude by reflecting on the implications for future generative AI-based games, arguing for greater criticality in their design.

Modern video game development relies increasingly on live service models and storytelling, putting strain on developer-player interactions and community management, the success of which is key to the success of such games. In this paper we report on a 2.5-year ethnography study on the Destiny player community, specifically on how players and developers interact and communicate about the game, and how is this interaction is affected by and affects ongoing rituals and storytelling in that game.

The Magic Circle has been a subject of continuous debate and criticism, and declared obsolete several times. Despite this, it has endured and reappeared in discussions and comparisons of play and non-play, and the boundaries thereof. It has proven persistent despite all its criticism and yet the reason for its continued existence has not been clarified. Understanding why it has been persistent is crucial to help explain its power as a metaphor. In this paper, we draw on a literature review of the criticisms and defense of the Magic Circle, and argue that it should not be conceptualized as a hard boundary between play and non-play, but rather a social construction that is itself “played with” during play. We argue that the Magic Circle explains the magic (allure, enchantment) of play and thus should be reinterpreted to explain why people play games rather than when they do and do not. This allows us to define how games create a double-nature of seeming like they are frivolous yet are more meaningful, a construct we call "the masquerade of play". It is precisely through socially defining the Magic Circle that players maintain this illusion.

Curiosity is increasingly being looked at to develop interactive non-human agents capable of lifelong learning, particularly in the space of Ai driven agents. However, the way a non-human agent’s mental state is described could prime expectations in human counterparts as well as alter perceptions of an agent’s behavior. We conducted an online experiment examining people’s perceptions of four levels of curious behavior portrayed by a robot agent and whether this behavior matched people’s expectations when primed to anticipate a “curious” vs. “learning” vs. “autonomous” robot agent. As curiosity increased, the ratings of the robot agent’s thinking ability also increased. This was juxtaposed by a decrease in the robot’s ratings as an effective worker and social agent. Further, we captured a unique trajectory of expectation matching showing that agents’ internal mental states should be matched with analogous external behaviors. Our findings have implications for the design and development of non-human agents that engage in learning modeled on forms of human cognition.

Imposter syndrome (IS) is a mental state that can severely inhibit a person's productivity and well-being. Although IS is extremely common (especially in high achievers, e.g., academics), few studies offer effective modes of support and recovery. In response, we introduce the application of relatable narrative as a way to help people overcome IS. We present a randomized group comparison study exploring the impact of various design factors -- specifically, choice-based interactivity and character relatability -- on our story's capacity to engage and impact 107 STEM undergraduates. Almost all participants enthusiastically endorsed the story as a valuable learning experience, and a majority reported positive impacts to mood and feelings of relatedness to peers. We discuss 1) how our specific digital story design can support positive changes in mental health at both individual and institutional levels and 2) how our findings can inform efficient design of interactive narrative content for educational applications.

For geographically dispersed communities, including professional, academic, hobbyist, and fandom communities, in-person events and meetups play a crucial role in the function and health of the whole community. Building off prior literature, we take a nuanced look at large scale community events that blend online and offline interactions across digital and physical embodied experiences in order to build understanding of how this knowledge can be leveraged to build more accessible hybrid modalities for community events. Building on this foundation, this paper presents a comprehensive study using ethnographic methods to examine large scale community events, specifically stadium music concerts of varying modalities (e.g., in-person, live-streamed). Using a disability lens, we explore how such community events are experienced and technologically mediated, as well as how the community and individuals design and construct their own sociotechnical worlds across multiple modalities and embodied experiences. By centering the disabled embodied experience, we examine how community members navigate the concert environment, time, and the social experience of concert attendance. Based on our findings, we highlight the nuanced complexities of inclusive community-centered large scale, multi-modal events.

Emotion regulation and coping strategies are key to resilience, problem solving and eventually well-being in everyday life, but investigating or influencing these without adjustable and ecologically valid environments still poses a major challenge. With respect to video games, stressful events can frequently appear and, depending on the individual’s emotion regulation, lead to frustrating experiences, dissatisfied players or even churn – or to a sense of accomplishment, mastery or positive tension. In the greater endeavor of establishing games for studying, controlling and reinforcing resilience, we developed an alternate reality game that unifies the advantages of a fully customizable game environment with the close connection to real-life interactions. To estimate how emotion regulation strategies could be initiated as well as investigated, this work first induces different kinds of established stressors (time pressure, social encounters and being unchangeably stuck) into ordinary gameplay, quantifies the players’ physiological and psychological responses and addresses the participants’ strategies on dealing with these situations. In this paper we present results of the study showing that the induced stressors were effective in constituting stressful situations comparable to real-life experiences; and each of these conditions resulted in different types of physiological and perceived responses and behaviors, e.g. continuous stress in social encounters versus instantaneous stress when notified about time pressure; or frustrating experiences when being forcibly stuck versus stress that participants underwent but were able to work against. With this platform to study how people cope with stress, instituted within a multi-modal mixed-methods evaluation, we contribute to games beyond entertainment towards educating resilience.

The narrative experience of perennial games---ongoing, live games---revolves around the community that plays it. These games serve a fractured form of storytelling, which leaves it to the community to determine what counts as part of the story; or what is considered “canon”. What is canon is a question of who and what the story is allowed to be about, and what is allowed to be in it. Therefore, it is important to understand how players of perennial games understand what is canon and what is not. This paper presents a mixed methods study of an online survey (N=118) and interviews (N=15) of players of the game Destiny 2, with the goal of understanding what events players consider canon and why. The findings indicate that while authorship and conventional game story elements are considered canon, there is still disagreement, especially as the storytelling methods become non-conventional. Players can provide nuanced viewpoints on why an event is or is not canon, and they do not always agree. These results can help designers understand how their decisions influence the community discussions of canonicity, and how properties of their game can help create experiences that lets players see themselves in the work.

Player agency is central to interactive narrative and games. While previous work focuses on analyzing player perception of agency through various lenses and phenomena, like meaningful choice and expectations, it is largely theoretical. Few user studies within games explore how players reason about and judge their own agency within interactive narratives. We present an interview study where participants rated their agency experiences within narrative-focused games and described their reasoning. The analysis suggests that agency perception depends on multiple factors beyond meaningful choice, such as social investment and genre-conventions. Participants described varying preferences and value judgements for different factors, indicating that individual differences have a deep impact on agency perception in narrative-focused gameplay. We discuss the implications of these cognitive variables on design, how they can be leveraged with other factors, and how our findings can help future work enhance and measure player agency, within interactive narrative and beyond.

Visual Novel (VN) is a widely recognizable genre of narrative-focused games that has grown in popularity over the past decade. Surprisingly, despite being so widely recognizable, there is not a singular definition to help guide the design and analysis of such games---with academic definitions and implementations ranging from "interactive textbooks" to "adventure games with multi-ending stories". In this paper, we present a unified definition of VNs drawn from an analysis of 30 prior academic definitions. We also examined 54 existing VNs to further refine our definition and employ a deeper analysis of the interactivity within VNs. We highlight key features of VNs that arise in our definition, and discuss resulting implications for the design of VNs. This work is relevant for narrative game designers and researchers, affording a more unified structure and clearer guidelines to identify, analyze, and design future VN games.

Timelines are commonly represented on a horizontal line, which is not necessarily the most effective way to visualize temporal event sequences. However, few experiments have evaluated how timeline shape influences task performance. We present the design and results of a controlled experiment run on Amazon Mechanical Turk (n=192) in which we evaluate how timeline shape affects task completion time, correctness, and user preference. We tested 12 combinations of 4 shapes --- horizontal line, vertical line, circle, and spiral — and 3 data types — recurrent, non-recurrent, and mixed event sequences. We found good evidence that timeline shape meaningfully affects user task completion time but not correctness and that users have a strong shape preference. Building on our results, we present design guidelines for creating effective timeline visualizations based on user task and data types. A free copy of this paper, the evaluation stimuli and data, and code are available https://osf.io/qr5yu/

Interactive narratives are frequently designed for learning and training applications, such as social training. In these contexts, designers may be inexperienced in storytelling and interaction design, and it may be difficult to quickly build an effective experience, even for experienced designers. Designers often approach this problem through iterative design. To augment and reduce iteration, we argue for the utility of employing models to reason about, evaluate, and improve designs. While there has been much previous work on interactive narrative models, none of them capture aspects of the interaction design necessary for testing and evaluation. In this paper we propose a new computational model called Progression Maps, which abstracts interaction design elements of the narrative's structure and visualizes its interaction properties. We report on the model, its implementation, and two studies evaluating its use. Our results demonstrate Progression Maps' effectiveness in communicating the underlying design through an easily understandable visualization.

Interactive narratives are widely used to frame and contextualize education in games. However, the specifics of how their designs aid the learning process and outcomes remains relatively unexplored. To better understand this space, a study was conducted that focused on one sub-genre of interactive narrative, Visual Novels. Specifically, in this paper we conducted a survey of thirty-one existing educational Visual Novels, analyzing design elements that fostered learning and delivered educational content. The resulting taxonomy consists of five key dimensions for educational design and teaching strategies within Visual Novels: 1) Teaching Through Choice, 2) Teaching Through Scripted Sequences, 3) Teaching Through Mini-games, 4) Teaching Through Exploration and 5) Non-interactive Teaching. These dimensions demonstrate that there are a number of design considerations for supporting learning through Visual Novels. This work has implications for designers of educational games by classifying the different designs a Visual Novel can employ to teach—ultimately informing how to better present educational subject matter in interactive narrative games.

When studying the impact of interactive narratives, especially in high impact, sensitive domains such as education and health, it is important that the narrative design as a whole is reported in sufficient detail to allow for analysis and replication. However, the design of interactive narrative applications is often insufficiently documented and reported, despite being a central component and, often, a focus of study. This is due, in part, to a lack of a common lexicon that allows designers and practitioners to describe and compare their designs. This paper examines interaction design in interactive narrative games, specifically structure and progression mechanics, from the perspective of establishing common ground between designer and player. Using the interaction model for interactive narratives to guide our analysis, we found patterns of structure and narrative progression mechanics that offer insight into commercial design practices, which can inform and guide interaction design choices for narrative games.

Interactivity and player experience are inextricably entwined with the creation of compelling narratives for interactive digital media. Narrative shapes and buttresses many such experiences, and therefore designers must construct compelling narrative arcs while carefully considering the effects of interaction on both the story and the player. As the narrative becomes more structurally complex, due to choice-based branching and other player actions, designers need to employ commensurately capable models and visualizations to keep track of that growing complexity. However, previous models of interactive narrative have failed to fully capture interactive elements with automated, operationalized visualizations. In this paper, we describe an algorithm for automated construction of a framework-driven, graph-based representation of interactive narrative. This representation more fully and transparently models structural and interactive features of the narrative than did prior approaches. We present an initial evaluation of this representation, based on modified cognitive walkthroughs performed by interactive narrative design and research experts from our research team, and we describe the takeaways for future improvement on interactive narrative modeling and analysis.

A growing number of new games utilize rewind as a narrative mechanic and there is an increasing need for a reliable way to understand and evaluate storytelling in such games. This paper builds on previous work by conducting narrative interaction focused analysis on rewind mechanics in commercial video games, and focuses on rewind as a form of narrative progression. The analysis resulted in updated definitions of rewind mechanic types originally defined by Kleinman et al. [13]. An updated framework is proposed where rewind is described in terms of control, scope, initiation, presentation, story structure, and structure traversal. Common design patterns associated with rewind, such as narrative justification and feedback, are also discussed. This expanded framework can be used to better understand rewind mechanics, and evaluate storytelling and user experience in the video games that utilize them.

The development of agents that can engage in human social interaction has become critical in an increasingly wide range of applications. The focus of this work is modeling agents for social skills training where learners can interact with the autonomous characters in social scenarios and thereby acquire skills that can be applied in the real world. A key goal in the design of these systems is to allow users to explore various actions and tactics while still having the agents generate consistent and diverse responses. Providing the ability to explore different tactics raises a significant content challenge for the design of agents. To tackle the creative content creation problem, this paper introduces a humans-in-the-loop iterative process to automatically generate rich, varied content from a small amount of vignettes provided by online crowd workers. Specifically, this process uses the crowd to iteratively refine and improve an ensemble of generative models. The results show that the iterative, ensemble based approach generates more coherent and novel interactions than alternative non-ensemble, non-iterative approaches. The results presented in this paper can potentially provide the basis for flexible agent-based training systems.