Game System Reimagination (GSR) is an instructional approach designed to make commercial games viable in games engineering education, despite their complexity. GSR addresses the challenge of staying relevant in a rapidly advancing field with students who are often avid gamers. Modern games comprise a wide range of systems, from common ones like movement, combat, and inventory management to unique, game-specific variants. By engaging students with these systems, GSR aims to enhance their motivation, technical skills, and understanding of complex games while bridging the gap between academic learning and real-world game development. Grounded in constructivist learning theory, GSR leads students through hands-on projects, where they play commercial games, identify systems to investigate, and deconstruct them to understand the underlying mechanics and challenges. Instead of merely replicating game systems, students reimagine them by removing, adding, combining, or altering functionality. Using a predefined technical framework with a modern game engine, they develop prototypes that showcase their understanding and ability to create complex systems. GSR supports a wide range of student abilities and has been applied to numerous undergraduate projects and bachelor's theses, primarily using the Unity game engine. We validated its educational impact through a survey assessing technical skills, practical relevance, creative engagement, motivation, and selfconfidence. The results confirm that GSR fosters key competencies, with participants acknowledging its technical and practical benefits for games engineering.

The number of women in IT is still low and companies struggle to integrate female professionals. The aim of our research is to provide methodological support for understanding and sharing experiences of gendered practices in the IT industry and encouraging sustained reflection about these matters over time. We established a Living Lab with that end in view, aiming to enhance female participation in the IT workforce and committing ourselves to a participatory approach to the sharing of women's experiences. Here, using the case of a German video game company which participated in our Lab, we detail our lessons learned. We show that this kind of long-term participation involves challenges over the lifetime of the project but can lead to substantial benefits for organizations. Our findings demonstrate that Living Labs are suitable for giving voice to marginalized groups, addressing their concerns and evoking change possibilities. Nevertheless, uncertainties about long-term sustainability remain.

Participation of women in IT is still low and companies wonder which external communication measures are necessary to attract more female personnel. To gain a richer understanding of adequate gender sensitive ways of communicating towards girls and women, one needs to take into account contextual challenges. Following a Participatory Action Research approach, we conducted a qualitative field study in a video game company in a large city in Germany, identified areas of concern, and sketched out implications for gender-sensitive communication measures together with our participants. Findings show that addressing gender stereotypes, making role models visible, and using adequate channels is relevant. Some problems might be solved via short-term solutions, but the majority require a long-term perspective. Our lessons learned leave implications for companies in the IT sector who want to foster gender sensitive external communication measures and can contribute to the realization of more gender balanced working environments.

Personas are valuable tools to help designers get to know their users and adopt their perspectives. Yet people are complex and multiple identities have to be considered in their interplay to account for a comprehensive representation otherwise, personas might be superficial and prone to activate stereotypes. Therefore, the way users' identities are presented in a limited set of personas is crucial to account for diversity and highlight facets which otherwise would go unnoticed. In this paper, we introduce an approach to the development of personas informed by social identity theory. The effectiveness of this approach is investigated in a qualitative study in the context of the design process for an e-learning platform for women in tech. The results suggest that considering multiple identities in the construction of personas adds value when designing technologies.

Personas often aim to improve product designers' ability to "see through the eyes of" target users through the empathy personas can inspire - but personas are also known to promote stereotyping. This tension can be particularly problematic when personas (who, of course as "people" have genders) are used to promote gender inclusiveness - because reinforcing stereotypical perceptions can run counter to gender inclusiveness. In this paper we explicitly investigate this tension through a new approach to personas: one that includes multiple photos (of males and females) for a single persona. We compared this approach to an identical persona with only one photo using a controlled laboratory study and an eye-tracking study. Our goal was to answer the following question: is it possible for personas to encourage product designers to engage with personas while at the same avoiding promoting gender stereotyping? Our results are encouraging about the use of personas with multiple pictures as a way to expand participants' consideration of multiple genders without reducing their engagement with the persona.

Using personas in requirement analysis and software development is becoming more and more common. The potential and problems with this method of user representation are discussed controversially in HCI research. While personas might help focus on the audience, prioritize, challenge assumptions, and prevent self-referential design, the success of the method depends on how and on what basis the persona descriptions are developed, perceived, and employed. Personas run the risk of reinscribing existing stereotypes and following more of an I-methodological than a user-centered approach. This paper gives an overview of the academic discourse regarding benefits and downfalls of the persona method. A semi-structured interview study researched how usability experts perceive and navigate the controversies of this discourse. The qualitative analysis showed that conflicting paradigms are embedded in the legitimization practices of HCI in the political realities of computer science and corporate settings leading to contradictions and compromises.