People encounter data visualizations daily, yet visualization literacy, the ability to read, construct, and critically assess charts, remains rarely taught in formal education. Games offer engaging, feedback-rich environments for practicing these skills. This paper presents a two-phase systematic review that connects general educational game research with visualization literacy games. Phase 1 synthesizes 97 reviews of educational and serious games, mapping dominant design and evaluation practices across educational game research, while Phase 2 analyses 15 studies, examining how patterns from Phase 1 appear in visualization literacy games. Across both phases, we find a strong reliance on simulation genres, feedback-driven interaction, and short-term pre/post testing, along with underused behavioral logs, standardized engagement scales, and almost no delayed or transfer measures. Visualization literacy games also overemphasize interpretation tasks, neglecting construction and bias detection, and rarely use validated visualization assessments such as VLAT, CALVI, or AVEC. Based on these findings, we propose design-evaluation recommendations that link task focus, genre choice, and a lightweight evaluation bundle, which include validated self-report, interaction logs, and delayed transfer tests. These recommendations offer a structured starting point for designing and studying visualization literacy games.

Interactions with non-player characters (NPCs) are ubiquitous in video games but traditionally rely on scripted dialogue. The advent of large language models (LLMs) has opened up new opportunities to converse with NPCs and, in turn, contribute to player experience. However, integrating LLM-driven dialogue in games is not necessarily straightforward and needs an understanding of how this new technique is perceived by players and shapes their game experience. In this paper we contribute to this emerging line of inquiry and report on a study investigating players’ perceptions on LLM-generated dialogues in a bespoke game. Towards this end, we have conducted an online survey, containing both quantitative measures and qualitative open-ended questions, with 62 participants. Our results indicate that LLM-generated dialogues have several benefits such as enhanced input flexibility or leading to more natural conversations but can create a variety of undesired side-effects that might be hard to anticipate beforehand or control for.

Interpreting data visualizations is an essential skill in today's education, yet students often struggle with understanding unfamiliar formats. This study investigates how four learning materials - textbook, comic, video, and game - affect middle- and high school students' ability to interpret line charts, area charts, stacked area charts, and stream graphs. We conducted a comparative classroom study with 68 students, using pre- and post-tests, worksheet activities, and group discussions to assess learning outcomes and understanding. Our results show statistically significant improvement in students' understanding of stacked area charts and stream graphs, while no significant differences between the learning materials were found. This suggests that more factors than initially anticipated - such as engagement, motivation and active learning strategies - influence the learning outcome. The analysis of the worksheets revealed that while students could infer surface-level insights from charts, over 70% struggled to identify underlying patterns or relationships. Additionally, a common challenge across all learning materials was reading fatigue, which often led students to skim content, disengage, or misinterpret key information. These findings highlight the need for educational tools and approaches that foster deeper understanding of unfamiliar visualizations, reduce cognitive load, and encourage active engagement.

Augmented Reality (AR) technology has transformed the gaming experience, providing players with distinctive and immersive experiences that integrate virtual elements with the physical world.Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR) has reshaped the use of AR technology by making it easily accessible to the general public through smartphones, significantly increasing user engagement and adoption that transcend traditional gaming paradigms.To evaluate the current state of mobile AR games research, we conducted a systematic literature review to analyse the landscape of mobile AR gaming.Our review identified three recurring themes: (1) recent advancements in mobile AR technology, (2) the effectiveness of marker-based games, and (3) the potential applications and innovations involving 3D interactive markers as the future direction for mobile AR.By highlighting these themes, we aim to bridge the gap between mobile AR games' potential and practical applications, setting the stage for future innovations and enhanced user experiences.Our findings underscore the necessity for ongoing research to uncover new opportunities with interactive markers in the mobile AR gaming domain. CCS Concepts• Human

Students often struggle to interpret data visualizations, yet these skills are increasingly important nowadays. This paper explores how high school students interact with an educational game designed to teach data visualization skills. Eighteen students (ages 13–17) played through four levels focused on different data visualization types: line chart, area chart, stacked area chart, and stream graph. By analyzing detailed gameplay logs and observational notes, we found that students performed well on familiar charts but struggled more with complex ones. The results highlight the value of clear feedback, gradual difficulty, and motivational features in helping students better understand visual data.

Augmented reality (AR) has traditionally relied on predefined visual markers or spatial tracking to anchor virtual content, limiting user agency in shaping the interaction space. This constraint presents challenges for creative tasks where expressive, tangible input is desired. To address this gap, this paper explores the potential of hand-drawn sketches as interactive AR markers that allow users to organically embed meaning and function into physical drawings. While prior work separates the physical act of drawing from digital augmentation, few approaches unify the two into a cohesive, real-time experience, especially on mobile platforms. This paper introduces Augmented Sketching, a mobile AR approach that transforms freehand sketches into 3D heightmaps. By mapping contrast to elevation, the approach creates manipulable spatial structures that respond to user input. This approach repositions analogue drawing as an active interface, enabling a more seamless blend between physical creativity and virtual feedback. Applications range from interactive art to educational tools and game mechanics, supporting new forms of spatial storytelling and tangible interaction in mobile AR applications.

Participatory Design (PD) aims to create technological solutions that improve users’ lives and to foster users’ empowerment. While PD has received extensive attention regarding its processes and methods, less research exists on the effects of PD. With the increasing inclusion of Extended Reality (XR) into PD, this gap necessitates a critical analysis of how and to which end XR can be best used in PD activities to achieve the desired effects. Through the analysis of 16 XR prototyping workshops, we explore the impact of immersive and non-immersive XR prototyping on PD effects. Furthermore, we delineate differences between the immersive and non-immersive approaches. Our work contributes to a comprehensive understanding of the effects of XR prototyping for PD, rooted in theoretical and empirical insights. It further illustrates what each approach offers and presents design considerations to assist practitioners in successfully integrating XR prototyping into their design practice.

Creating Virtual Reality (VR) systems with high scenario fidelity is crucial, especially for scenario-based VR training. However, participatory VR design processes often require participants to have design knowledge, technical skills, or access to high-fidelity prototyping tools. Here, we present the development and evaluation of the co-design method CoLEBricks which uses building blocks for the co-creation of VR training scenarios for first responders. From the exploratory findings, we conclude that CoLEBricks supports end users in sharing needs and wishes regarding complex VR training scenarios, thereby ensuring the integration of relevant and realistic scenarios.

Effective communication through data visualizations faces challenges due to low visualization literacy among the general audience. Data visualizations are increasingly used to communicate various information, which creates a need to support people in learning how to interpret them. One way to address this issue is game-based learning. However, the design and development of an educational game can be an expensive and time-consuming process. To explore solutions to this issue, this paper investigates the potential of existing entertainment games as platforms for interactive data visualizations in a serious gaming scenario. As use case, the games Townscaper and Stardew Valley were selected. A user study was conducted to assess the usability of these visualizations, and the impact of playfulness and interactivity in enhancing the understanding and possible uses in education. The study demonstrates the effectiveness of using existing entertainment games as platforms for interactive data visualizations in a serious gaming context. The study outcomes revealed that participants perceived an improvement in their understanding, and expressed a belief in their potential for educational purposes.

Achieving the feeling of enjoyment from a reading activity might be harder for consumers due to their gradual adaptation to digital media that provide fast and intense experiences.To preserve the reading tradition with the help of digital technologies, we focus on adapting fiction to virtual reality (VR).This study investigates how VR readers perceive differences between narrative absorption and presence, how their individual ability to get absorbed by narratives affects their VR reading experience, and how a visually saturated VR space influences their imagination.We conducted a mixed methods study (n = 42) using our VR reading prototype.The results show that the VR reading experience was perceived as symbiotic between the text and visuals and that the mental imagery of individual readers adapted to the visual style of the VR scene.

ProjectAnatomy combines tangible objects with video projections that show the anatomy of the human forearm intended for learning through its eye-catching appearance. The prototype was shown to three target groups: non-experts, trainee medical students, and anatomy experts to provide qualitative and quantitative feedback. The study and observation of the users in the first two groups were carried out ‘in the wild’ where the users would come in contact with this type of visualisation to collect data on how it should be adjusted to their needs. The results have shown that the non-experts find it most helpful in learning anatomy, contrary to the experts who find it less useful yet very interesting and see its educational potential. The trainee medical students scored it the lowest; however, they would find it helpful to complement dissection classes. We conclude that this visual installation could be used in science centres and, when enriched with more details, for beginning medical students. Our study contributes specifically to the field of physical visualisation using 3D printed objects combined with projections that can be adjusted to the level of detail suitable for the target audience.

Research in multiple fields have examined how video games shape behavior. Specifically, one area of research indicates that prosocial video game play (game play that features helping as a core mechanic) impacts subsequent prosocial behaviors, affect, and accessibility of prosocial thoughts relative to neutral game play with no helping behavior. Exposure time in this past research has varied, so we executed an experiment that both replicates this existing line of research in terms of comparing different games and adds the dimension of exposure time. Differences between the prosocial gaming and control groups were assessed, while correcting for trait altruism and aggression. There were no significant differences between participants in control conditions and those that played the prosocial game, though some variables trended in expected directions. Additionally, exposure time had little impact on participant behavior. Therefore, researchers may not need to be concerned about short-term exposure time variance.

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.

Extended reality (XR) has emerged as new cutting-edge technology, encompassing augmented, virtual and mixed reality. Extended reality redefines and elevates the game user experience within immersive and blended environments and opens new horizons, not just for gaming but also for enhancing pro-social connections through collaborative play. This workshop is dedicated to charting the course of trends, identifying and dissecting challenges, and probing the potential inherent in pro-social collaborative play within extended realities. We invite researchers, designers, and practitioners to come together, offering a platform to showcase different approaches. The core objective is to foster the exchange of knowledge and rigorous research findings within this emerging field. By doing so, we aim to build a network and lay a robust foundation for the future implementation of collaborative play in extended reality, paving the way for its seamless integration into the scientific discourse and practice.

Immersive virtual training environments are used in various domains. In this work we focus on role-play training in virtual reality. In virtual role-play training conversations and interactions with virtual agents are often fundamental to the training. Therefore, the appearance and behavior of the agents plays an important role when designing role-play training. We focus on the gender appearance of agents, as gender is an important aspect for differentiation between characters. We conducted a study with 40 participants in which we investigated how agents gender appearance influences the perception of the agents´ personality traits and the self-perception of a participants’ assumed role in a training for social skills. This work contributes towards understanding the design-space of virtual agent design, virtual agent gender identity, and the design and development of immersive virtual reality role-play training.

With the rise of competitive online gaming and esports, players’ ability to review, reflect upon, and improve their in-game performance has become important. Post-play visualizations are key for such improvements. Despite the increased interest in visualizations of gameplay, research specifically informing the design of player-centric visualizations is currently limited. As with all visualizations, their design should, however, be guided by a thorough understanding of the goals to be achieved and which information is important and why.

Playtesting of games often relies on a mixed-methods approach to obtain more holistic insights about and, in turn, improve the player experience. However, triangulating the different data sources and visualizing them in an integrated manner such that they contextualize each other still proves challenging. Despite its potential value for gauging player behaviour, this area of research continues to be underexplored. In this paper, we propose a visualization approach that combines commonly tracked movement data with - from a visualization perspective rarely considered - gaze behaviour and emotional responses. We evaluated our approach through a qualitative expert study with five professional game developers. Our results show that both the individual visualization of gaze, emotions, and movement but especially their combination are valuable to understand and form hypotheses about player behaviour. At the same time, our results stress that careful attention needs to be paid to ensure that the visualization remains legible and does not obfuscate information.

Not only have virtual currencies in digital games from the pre-Blockchain era helped to understand digital currency systems, but the idea that digital objects can have monetary value is a question of faith that has been expressed primarily through the gaming industry. In the world of business this is now called the ’token economy’. Blockchain as a technology can do much more, besides payment processing with cryptocurrencies, utility tokens can be created to secure in-game currencies and items, gamification systems can be made more transparent while strengthening the privacy of the players and even whole game ecosystems can be secured by Blockchain. However, this is still a very young technology and that there is a certain technological war of faith as well as a big area of scams around and with Blockchain-based systems and tokens. In this paper we will present a bird’s eye view, based on results of the expert interviews, of how Blockchain as technology is connected to the different aspects of games and play.

Regular physical exercise is an essential factor for preventing chronic diseases. Activities to support physical education in schools have been increasingly used in recent years as a target to get young people interested in sports. However, for visually impaired students it is difficult to participate in traditional team sports which are widely played in physical education. To overcome this issue, we developed a design toolkit consisting of building blocks that enable visually impaired students to create and play their own movement-based games. To investigate different types of building blocks and their potential to create accessible movement-based games, we conducted two game design workshops with visually impaired students. The results show that our building blocks can successfully be used by visually impaired students to empower them to become creators of movement-based games that are both accessible and engaging. By making our design-process transparent, we further provide insights on how to implement a co-creation process in a school for visually impaired students.

Social media has become a major communication channel for communities centered around video games. Consequently, social media offers a rich data source to study online communities and the discussions evolving around games. Towards this end, we explore a large-scale dataset consisting of over 1 million tweets related to the online multiplayer shooter Destiny and spanning a time period of about 14 months using unsupervised clustering and topic modelling. Furthermore, we correlate Twitter activity of over 3,000 players with their playtime. Our results contribute to the understanding of online player communities by identifying distinct player groups with respect to their Twitter characteristics, describing subgroups within the Destiny community, and uncovering broad topics of community interest.

In recent years, microblogging platforms have not only become an important communication channel for the game industry to generate and uphold audience interest but also a rich resource for gauging player opinion. In this paper we use data gathered from Twitter to examine which topics matter to players and to identify influential members of a game's community. By triangulating in-game data with Twitter activity we explore how tweets can provide contextual information for understanding fluctuations in in-game activity. To facilitate analysis of the data we introduce a visual data exploration tool and use it to analyze tweets related to the game Destiny. In total, we collected over one million tweets from about 250,000 users over a 14-month period and gameplay data from roughly 3,500 players over a six-month period.

Online gaming has taken on an indispensable role in popular culture and with it interest in understanding all types of player communities - be it directly within or around a game - shifted into the focus of attention of game developers. While research on player networks has proliferated, visualization of these communities and networks has received little consideration. In this paper we introduce PlaNet, a tool specifically targeted toward visualizing Player Networks. We reflect on the present state of development and utilize a social network derived from data from the matchmaking website the 100.io to demonstrate its current visualization capabilities.

Playful activities are regarded to be a promising way for fostering children's geometric thinking and understanding. In this paper we introduce Lost My Way, an educational game about geometric transformations targeted at middle school children of about 10 years of age. We describe the design of the game and report preliminary results and experiences gained from the first two stages of our iterative development process which included a playtesting session and an on-site evaluation at a local middle school.

Financial institutions are interested in ensuring security and quality for their customers. Banks, for instance, need to identify and stop harmful transactions in a timely manner. In order to detect fraudulent operations, data mining techniques and customer profile analysis are commonly used. However, these approaches are not supported by Visual Analytics techniques yet. Visual Analytics techniques have potential to considerably enhance the knowledge discovery process and increase the detection and prediction accuracy of financial fraud detection systems. Thus, we propose EVA, a Visual Analytics approach for supporting fraud investigation, fine-tuning fraud detection algorithms, and thus, reducing false positive alarms.

Due to the high potential of digital media to support learning processes and outcomes, educational games have gained wide acceptance over the years. The combination of mobile devices with location-based technologies offers new options and possibilities for the development of educational games in consideration of learners' environment with the positive side effect to promote learner's physical activities. This paper introduces a mobile educational game for promoting a better understanding of concepts related to route problems and route optimization on the basis of real world examples in a playful manner. The game combines problem-solving tasks with a quiz to teach concepts related to the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) by using the Global Positioning System (GPS) technology.

In the last years, a large number of sport and fitness applications for smartphones were developed for supporting a healthy lifestyle by not only encouraging people to follow a balanced diet but also to motivate them to engage in physical activities. In particular running applications received increasing attention in research in recent years. In this paper, we analyze fourteen commercial running tracking applications concerning their functionalities to identify which motivation strategies are supported and also to identify possible directions for future research. For this purpose we concentrate on the three most popular motivation strategies that are usually used for sport and fitness applications: music and audio feedback, visualization, as well as competition and comparison with others.

User research has become an important aspect in game development. Especially, user telemetry, i.e., the remote tracking of in-game behavioral data and its subsequent analysis has attracted increased attention in game development and research in the last years. Unfortunately, case studies of game industry-academic relationships concerning the application of user telemetry methods in practice are still sparse. In this case study we report our experiences from employing gameplay visualizations during the development of a commercial mobile game. In particular, we describe the process of the collaboration and discuss developer feedback regarding the visualization itself as well as issues regarding user telemetry integration into the development process.

With the rising interest in multiplayer gaming, gameplay statistics have become an increasingly important aspect of the overall game experience for many players. As a part of this trend, visualizations have gained great popularity among players, in particular heatmaps since they allow them to reenact the course of a game and to develop new strategies. In this paper we report results of a user study conducted with 29 players (i) to investigate how players use heatmaps and two further graphical representations that use clustering algorithms to interpret gameplay and (ii) to assess the three representations in regard to time efficiency, correctness, suitability, and player preference. Our results show that heatmaps were mainly used to detect hot spots while the cluster representations proved useful to compare variables, allowing the players to uncover relationships between them and in turn allowing a deeper insight into the gameplay data.

Contemporary video games are highly complex systems with many interacting variables. To make sure that a game provides a satisfying experience, a meaningful analysis of gameplay data is crucial, particularly because the quality of a game directly relates to the experience a user gains from playing it. Automatic instrumentation techniques are increasingly used to record data during playtests. However, the evaluation of the data requires strong analytical skills and experience. The visualization of such gameplay data is essentially an information visualization problem, where a large number of variables have to be displayed in a comprehensible way in order to be able to make global judgments. This paper presents a visualization tool to assist the analytical process. It visualizes the game space as a set of nodes which players visit over the course of a game and is also suitable to observe time-dependent information, such as player distribution. Our tool is not tailored to a specific type of genre. To show the flexibility of our approach we use two different kinds of games as case studies.

Access control constitutes a key technology to fulfill security requirements in Collaborative Systems (CS) by specifying access rules/rights based on organizational models that capture the structure of the participating organizations. Organizational structures and consequently the describing organiz

The usage of visualizations to aid the analysis of time oriented data plays an important role in various fields of applications. The need to visualize such data was decisive for the development of different visualization techniques over the last years. One of the frequently applied techniques is animation in order to illustrate the movements in such a way to make changes in the data transparent. However, evaluation studies of such animated interfaces for time-oriented data with potential users are still difficult to find. In this paper, we present our observations based on a systematic literature review with the motivation to support researchers and designers to identify future directions for their research. The literature review is split in two parts: (1) research on animation from the field of psychology, and (2) evaluation studies with the focus on animation of time-oriented data.

With increasing popularity of ontologies in various communities, visualizations of their content and structure became more and more important. In the past few years a number of visualization approaches were developed with the focus either on the representation of the relationships between classes or on the hierarchical structure and instances. However for several applications, a visualization which combines information about instances, classes and hierarchical as well as non-hierarchical relationships is from interest. In this paper we present Knoocks (Knowledge Blocks), which is a visualization approach with focus on both the interconnections within the ontology and the instances in conjunction with their hierarchical structure.

For several ontology applications, a combination of classes with their instances, their properties on the class level and on the instance level are from interest. However, the focus of most visualization approaches is on the hierarchical and non-hierarchical relationships on the class level. This paper presents an approach to visualizing datatype properties and object properties on the instance level. For this purpose, three different layouts were developed for the ontology visualization tool Knoocks. Furthermore, the paper discusses results of an evaluation that was motivated to identify which one of these layout versions was preferred by the users. The evaluation should also reveal if the concept of the representation of the properties was understandable for them.

The variety of forms and applications of ontologies reflect the different needs and tasks for users. Visualizations can support users in their work with ontologies. The numbers of different visualization methods and tools also point to the varied kinds of ontologies and contexts in which they are used. However, research on users' attitudes and their expectations on such ontology visualizations is rare. Therefore, we conducted interviews and an online survey to find out more about users' needs. The paper discusses the design and the result of the survey. In particular, it shows several requirements that were discovered and can lay the foundation for further visualization methods.

Ontologies are becoming popular in various communities. They give users the possibilities to understand, exchange, analyze or share knowledge of a specific domain. However ontologies can be very large and complex and therefore visualizations should help the user to understand and manipulate ontologies easily. Most visualizations concentrate on the structure of ontologies. For users, instances are often more interesting, because they represent the real world objects. This paper presents Knoocks (knowledge blocks) as a visualization approach which focuses on instances related to their structure. An evaluation which compared Knoocks with Jambalaya and CropCircles showed its benefits in visualizing instances.