``Red [Redacted] Theatre” is a tangible puzzle-based experience exploring queer history. We used queer methods to design puzzles with archival materials, guiding participants from a more normative “surface” understanding of history into exploring queer histories, breaking familiar language and constructs through play and tangible interaction. Our reflections contribute design considerations for queering tangible interaction through puzzles: (1) designing and deconstructing layers of queer understanding, (2) attending to situatedness in designing tangible puzzle artifacts, and (3) designing puzzles that solve to complexity. We also offer insights on how facilitation and debrief of the experience can prompt reflection on queer history and ways of understanding. Overall, this pictorial contributes to Queer HCI by deepening queer tangible interaction, particularly for exploring queer history.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) has witnessed unprecedented growth in text-to-image AI tools. Yet, much remains unknown about users’ prompt journey with such tools in the wild. In this paper, we posit that designing human-centered text-to-image AI tools requires a clear understanding of how individuals intuitively approach crafting prompts, and what challenges they may encounter. To address this, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 19 existing users of a text-to-image AI tool. Our findings (1) offer insights into users’ prompt journey including structures and processes for writing, evaluating, and refining prompts in text-to-image AI tools and (2) indicate that users must overcome barriers to aligning AI to their intents, and mastering prompt crafting knowledge. From the findings, we discuss the prompt journey as an individual yet a social experience and highlight opportunities for aligning text-to-image AI tools and users’ intents.

How can tangible, wearable design encourage affective, embodied reflections on queer history? We expand Queer HCI scholarship, using queer theory to inform the design of wearable experiences that explore archives of gender and sexuality. Our project, “Button Portraits,” invites individuals to listen to oral histories from prominent queer activists by pinning archival buttons to a wearable audio player, eliciting moving personal impressions. We observed 17 participants’ experiences with “Button Portraits,” and with semi-structured interviews, surfaced reflections on how our design evoked personal connections to history, queer self-identification, and relatability to archival materials. We offer the following design directions: (1) designing tangible archives of feeling; (2) queering tangible, wearable interactions in design; (3) designing for personal, archival experiences; and (4) designing within difference. Through this work, we foreground queer stories to affect emotional reflections on marginalized histories, entangling the complex connections between bodies, feelings, histories, and shared queer experiences.

In 2023, three major games introduced they/them pronouns into their character creation options: Baldur's Gate 3 (Larian Studios), Starfield (Bethesda); and Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life (Marvelous). Each of these games comes from companies or series with a history of enforcing binary gender. Making such shifts to include both gender equity and same-sex romance sparked backlash, particularly at a moment when “woke” cultural production is under intense cultural scrutiny. By examining the responses to these three very different, but culturally significant, games, we contextualize the importance of meaningful gender and sexuality inclusivity in gaming given a history of reactionary movements in gaming culture (most notoriously Gamergate). Critically, all of these games became bestsellers, suggesting that while “go woke, go broke” might remain a rallying cry in small portions of gaming subculture, the move towards inclusivity is ultimately not harming the commercial success of these games.

Sensing Bodies is an interactive installation that integrates plants, biosensors, and data displays in a series of tangible embodied encounters to facilitate reflection on the complex sociopolitical entanglements of plants. The triptych installation incorporates different forms of biodata and three plantation plants of the U.S. South to highlight reciprocal people-plant relationships while fostering a deeper sensibility toward colonial histories of local landscapes. In this paper, we put forth three design provocations for engaging with postcolonial perspectives in more-than-human interactions: materializing tensions to trouble multi-species relationships, embracing ambiguities and multiple relationalities, and highlighting geographic and cultural situatedness. In doing so, we contribute to how TEI might facilitate postcolonial understandings and sensibilities.

Following a successful Kickstarter campaign, hybrid dating simulator and dungeon crawler Boyfriend Dungeon was released in August 2021 and was quickly met with significant fan critique. The game's advertised promise of cozy or “wholesome” play was contradicted by the presence of a content warning and an antagonist character exhibiting threatening, stalker-like behavior. The strength of the fan reactions caused the developers, Kitfox Games, to revise the content warning while simultaneously resisting requests to fundamentally remove or sideline the game's central conflict. Contextualizing this response through news coverage and Twitter discussion demonstrates the challenges of the fan-developer relationship, augmented by the disproportionate responsibilities and expectations placed on queer creators and the power dynamics of fan-supported indie development. This incident stands as a warning of the consequences of centering a constraining mode of “consent” and aesthetic demands of “coziness” on genres associated with relationships and queer romantic play.

In this paper, we describe the results of interviews we conducted with experienced game masters (GMs) of tabletop role-playing games. In these interviews they discussed the challenges they face preparing and running game sessions, as well as the tools they use. From these interviews, we used qualitative analysis to discover three guidelines for designing generative tools for GMs: 1. provide inspiration, not answers; 2. allow for customization of the generative possibilities; 3. prioritize ease of use (speed, portability, and online accessibility) in design. While there are some limitations to our approach which we describe in this paper, we found these rules summarized the needs of the GMs we interviewed and provide useful advice for those interested in designing generative tools for GMs.

The systemic, mathematical, and procedural underpinnings of quilting make the domain a useful metaphor for introductory Computer Science (CS) education, although it is currently used primarily in K-16 educational settings. Considering informal CS education for adult women, we examine the potential depth of this metaphor by exploring how skilled craftspeople engage with and understand quilting-as-metaphor in the context of CS education. In this paper we report the findings of our first focus group with quilters to compare their perceptions and experiences related to quilting and CS. We identified six common themes in how quilters relate the two domains: innate versus learned skills, computing skills as an aid to personal expression, avoiding computing, time investment and tangible rewards, community influence on motivation and learning, and systematic prejudice and its effects. We elaborate upon our findings and discuss potential applications to the design of educational technologies that integrate craft and computation.

We are developing quilt design generation software for Code Crafters workshops, which aim to broaden public awareness of computational thinking and build links between computer science and quilting. The software generates quilt designs, which will be manipulated and modified by workshop participants. Due to COVID, our workshops will be conducted remotely, so the software has been designed to increase the sense of community by providing opportunities for the types of social interactions that take place in colocated quilting workshops.

Initially released in 2018 to minimal attention, Among Us (InnerSloth) is a retro-style multiplayer game that employs both cooperative play and betrayal. In 2020, the game was catapulted into the popular culture spotlight thanks to a combination of pandemic play conditions, Twitch streamer attention, and political resonance. In this critical examination of the game and its reception, we consider how Among Us demonstrates both the importance of situated play and the potential for impact of minimalist indie games. The language of the game and its players (including the particularly notorious use of “sus”) has spread to play a significant role in culture more broadly. Transformed by its contextual moment into a force for memes and broader cultural conversation, the game transcends gaming and gamer identity to intertwine with how we understand the 2020 US election and American political polarization.

Tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) and procedural content generators can both be understood as systems of rules for producing content. In this paper, we argue that TTRPG design can usefully be viewed as procedural content generator design. We present several case studies linking key concepts from PCG research – including possibility spaces, expressive range analysis, and generative pipelines – to key concepts in TTRPG design. We then discuss the implications of these relationships and suggest directions for future work uniting research in TTRPGs and PCG.

In this paper we examine the representation of crafts in video games, particularly in “crafting systems” – collections of mechanics that are described as crafting within a game's narrative. Real world crafting practitioners value creativity, expression, and mastery of material, but the act of crafting itself is often viewed by society as reproductive, feminized labor and therefore devalued. Because of this, crafting systems in games have been designed to more closely resemble masculinized, productive labor in the form of repetitive, manufacturing-like mechanics. These representational choices persist even across games lauded for their crafting systems, as our analysis demonstrates. Through an examination of both user-generated tutorials and game mechanics for three games that frequently appear on “best crafting games” lists, we show that games persist in devaluing the reproductive labor of crafting, reducing creative expression and material mastery to marginal and repetitive tasks while catering to the palates of masculine gamers by emphasizing stats-driven progression rather than creative making.

Since the first Pokémon game launched in Japan in 1996, the series has been a balancing act between casual and hardcore gaming. While the first iteration and "core" series has emphasized a modified, accessible version of traditional JRPG mechanics, other titles have frequently emphasized so-called casual play; most recently, Pokémon Go lured in a new set of players with mobile, locative Pokémon hunting. The 2018 release of a hybrid game, Let's Go, Pikachu! and its sister release Let's Go, Eevee!, has drawn renewed attention to the casual-hardcore dichotomy, meeting considerable resistance and criticism for its perceived casualization of the franchise. Through analyzing the discourse of the new game's reception as demonstrated by a dataset of user reviews on Metacritic alongside published game reviews, the gendered nature of the casual-hardcore dichotomy in the Pokémon franchise becomes clear. Key themes coded from the reviewed data include grinding, difficulty, nostalgia, and "cuteness." Placing this discourse alongside the game's own internal representations of reproductive labor through Pokémon caretaking and the contested definition of "grinding" demonstrates a fundamental resistance from the so-called hardcore game community to what are viewed as feminized play mechanics. The revealed tension is particularly remarkable given the emotional, reproductive labor of training and loving Pokémon that is front-ended in the franchise's overarching narrative and core values-a set of values that inherently conflicts with the "hardcore" gamer mentality of play.

With the move towards digital interventions for educational purposes, there has been a loss of tangible and material interfaces, the consequences of which are still being understood. Meanwhile, there is an ongoing lack of gender diversity within STEM-facing majors and careers. In response to this, we have created a physical prototype of BeadED Adventures, a system that uses a physical controller made up of jars of colorful beads to control modified Twine games that follows constructivist philosophies of learning and emphasizes player autonomy. By controlling the experience, the player creates a beaded bracelet that is personalized based on their choices within the game. In addition to the controller, we are creating an educational Twine game in which the player explores an abandoned castle, solving computational thinking puzzles to escape.

While queer narratives have recently gained greater prominence and attention [35][51][48] both in games and game studies, they still represent a tiny portion of the playable romances available. Even fewer among these represent the potential of what Edmond Chang [12] has referred to as "queergaming," or games which refuse to conform in their narrative, mechanics, and modes of play to a cisgender, white, heteronormative gaze. We argue that meaningful queergaming is impossible within the current norms and genres of so-called AAA, or mainstream. It thus requires space and platforms dedicated to transgressive game design, building on Aarseth's [1] framework of transgressive play. To substantiate our argument, we use an examination of recent queer visual novels built using Ren'Py and released on Itch.io, with a case study of most popular current exemplar Butterfly Soup [32] alongside previous exemplars of queer romance in games.

Tarot has been used for centuries as a method to give structure to storytelling, both in game and fortune-telling settings. As such, tarot cards have developed over time, expanding the symbolism and depth of meaning associated with each card. This provides a corpus for a large number of possible stories, making tarot a rich area of exploration for story generation. Therefore, we have created a tarot-based narrative generation system that creates short movie-like story synopses, along with a tagline one might see on a movie poster. This project is in early development; we have created a prototype as a proof of concept. The project exists as a webpage that an interactor can use to draw new tarot cards for the story spread (card layout) and generate new stories from them. In this paper we discuss the details of our system and describe more details about the tarot as a corpus. We also discuss future areas of exploration based on our proof of concept.

In this paper, we seek to extend the definition and scope of discourse surrounding creative games and play by looking outside the communities traditionally represented in the conception of "gamer" and game studies. Through an examination of games popular in craft communities, particularly that of the textile craft spaces dominated by women, we propose a new model for merging craft play with existing representations and understanding of "craft" and craft systems as a part of gaming. Drawing upon the community-oriented, challenge-centered models we discuss in this paper, we offer potential avenues for game designers to pursue inclusive, feminist design and rethinking creative modalities of play.

While game narrative provides a story for the player to experience, the moment-to-moment decisions made by the player are just as important to the experience. These decisions make up a personal narrative that the player creates through their choices and actions within the game. These stories describe the player's experience, and are the stories that often get shared and retold by the player. However, these narratives are rarely captured by the game and instead rely on the player to memorize and retell them. In response to this, we designed Loominary, a game platform that plays Twine games using a rigid heddle table-top loom as a controller. Not only does this provide a new method of interacting with a game, but also records each of the player's choices into a tangible object that is created by interacting with the game. Loominary is a working prototype and in this paper, we discuss the design considerations and areas for improvement.

Narrative-centric analog games 1 have emerged from a hybridization of genres: they borrow conventions from pen and paper-based role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons, as well as the foundations of eurogames and war games. Historically, board game narratives and themes have primarily been imposed through design elements rather than mechanics: in his study of Eurogames, Woods noted that while players often value a "sense of narrative" that unifies theme and mechanics, this is rarely an emphasis of the genre [34]. However, modern narrative-centric board games demonstrate new levels of unity between play and story, integrating players into the narrative as meaningful actors and borrowing conventions from video games to build nonlinear play. In this paper, we examine and compare some exemplars of the narrative-centric board game genre, and use these games as a lens to propose a taxonomy of narrative-based physical games that builds from and extends Espen Aarseth's narrative theory of digital games [1] and suggest new possibilities for digital game narratives.

There has been a significant increase in commercial interest in wearable technologies, spearheaded by Google's Glass project, and also by the success of a new generation of fitness oriented biosensors such as the Fitbit, the Bodymedia Fit, and the Misfit Shine. Concurrently, there has been a proliferation of embodied interfaces for digital games such as Nintendo's Wii, Sony's Move controller, and Microsoft's Kinect. These technologies often only scratch the surface of the design possibility space, overlooking nuances of social and emotional experience for wearers/players that are important in other areas of design, such as theatrical costuming and fashion. We propose a studio that offers participants the chance to create wearable game controllers that afford a playful exploration of this design terrain, encouraging transformation, collaboration, and enjoyment of rich spectacle.

Computer role-playing games (CRPGs) have strong narratives, but in general lack interesting and meaningful choices for the player within the story. As a result, the stories are not playable. In this paper we present an existence proof for a new approach to CRPG stories that addresses this, while providing details of our implementation. We designed and created a new playable experience, Mismanor, to test our theories of playable stories. We discuss the design decisions made as well as the details of the CiF-RPG and GrailGM systems used for complex quest generation and story management based on player's traits and the social state of the game world.

This paper presents lessons learned from five years of teaching a game design and programming outreach course. This class is taught over the course of a month to high school students participating in the California Summer School for Mathematics and Science (COSMOS) at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Over these five years we have changed everything in the course, from the overall project structure to the programming language used in the class. In this paper we discuss our successes and failures, and offer recommendations to instructors offering similar courses.

One compelling aspect of computer RPGs is the promise of player agency: the ability to make significant and desired choices in a large, complex, and story-rich environment. Giving players meaningful choice has traditionally required the creation of tremendous amounts of hand-authored story content. This authoring paradigm tends to introduce both structural and workload problems for RPG designers. Our hypothesis is that reducing authorial burden and increasing agency are two sides of the same coin, both requiring advancement in three distinct areas: (1) dynamic story management architecture that allows story elements to be selected and re-ordered in response to player choices; (2) dynamic dialogue generation which takes history and relationships into account; and (3) an authoring interface that lets writers focus on quests and characters. This paper describes SpyFeet, a playable prototype of a storytelling system designed to test this hypothesis.

"Player modeling" is a loose concept. It can equally apply to everything from a predictive model of player actions resulting from machine learning to a designer's description of a player's expected reactions in response to some piece of game content. This lack of a precise terminology prevents practitioners from quickly finding introductions to applicable modeling methods or determining viable alternatives to their own techniques. We introduce a vocabulary that distinguishes between the major existing player modeling applications and techniques. Four facets together define the kind for a model: the scope of application, the purpose of use, the domain of modeled details, and the source of a model's derivation or motivation. This vocabulary allows the identification of relevant player modeling methods for particular problems and clarifies the roles that a player model can take.

In this paper, we describe a video game design and programming class offered as part of the California Summer School for Mathematics and Science (COSMOS) program at University of California, Santa Cruz. The authors have co-taught this class for four years, and have had an opportunity to iteratively explore a number of approaches in teaching the class. The course has evolved a great deal over the last four years; this paper presents a post-mortem of the program so far, describes our different approaches, and provides insight into the game design process for students.

Studying the genealogy of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG), it is easy to trace their lineage back to table-top RPG systems such as Dungeons & Dragons. Because these table-top games were built around a discrete system of rules and calculations, it was very simple to transfer these systems to their computer-based counterparts. Unfortunately, the majority of these calculations focused primarily on combat, leaving the dungeon master (DM) to integrate the players' non-combat role-playing efforts such as story-arc and character development into the game. While the math-based rules of the table-top RPGs were easily integrated into the computer role-playing games, it was not possible to convert the DM into a computer system [11]. With the loss of the DM, these games also lost their depth; typically becoming combat-centric systems with a thin story veneer and a shallow quest system focused on combat.

Abstract Hand held long exposures often result in blurred photographs due to camera shake. Long exposures are desirable both for artistic effect and in low‐light situations. We propose a novel method for digitally reducing imaging artifacts, which does not require additional hardware such as tripods or optical image stabilization lenses. A series of photographs is acquired with short shutter times, stabilized using image alignment, and then composited. Our method is capable of reducing noise and blurring due to camera shake, while simultaneously preserving the desirable effects of motion blur. The resulting images are very similar to those obtained using a tripod and a true extended exposure.