This study explores how user gender, agent gender, and control over agent aesthetics affect experiences in a VR phishing awareness training application. As digital agents become more common in immersive training, understanding their design impact is critical. Participants were assigned to one of three conditions: (1) full customization of the agent’s appearance, (2) selection from pre-made agents, or (3) no choice. We measured outcomes including phishing awareness (immediate and retained), mental effort, enjoyment, presence, and relatedness. Results showed no significant effects of user gender or choice condition on awareness, mental effort, or presence. However, female participants reported greater relatedness with their agent at a three-month follow-up, suggesting potential long-term engagement benefits. Aesthetic control did not significantly influence learning or awareness retention, underscoring the importance of content quality over personalization. These findings contribute to research on gender dynamics and customization in immersive learning environments.

Competitive VR gaming has emerged as a new trend in recent years, due to the availability of consumer grade VR technologies and the rise of esports as a billion dollar industry. Despite the considerable attention to competitive VR gaming, there is a lack of research on attitudes and experiences that players have with these games. In this qualitative study with a pre-post interview design, we recruited eight competitive Counter-Strike: Global Offensive players from a university esports club. We aimed to understand their attitudes towards VR esports and their experiences playing a representative location based VR esports game. Findings showed that players had visceral and positive affective experiences in the game, such as how players map physical movements to the game. These findings can help design future competitive VR esports, while also further contributing to HCI as the first exploration on player experiences with VR esports, laying groundwork for future studies.

Toxicity in online environments is a complex and a systemic issue. Collegiate esports communities seem to be particularly vulnerable to toxic behaviors. In esports games, negative behavior, such as harassment, can create barriers to players achieving high performance and can reduce enjoyment which may cause them to leave the game. The aim of this study is to investigate how players define, experience and deal with toxicity in esports games that they play. Our findings from an interview study and five monthly follow ups with 19 participants from a university esports club show that players define toxicity as behaviors disrupt their morale and team dynamics, and are inclined to normalize negative behaviors, rationalize it as part of the competitive game culture akin to traditional sports, and participate a form of gamer classism, believing that toxicity is more common in lower level play than in professional and collegiate esports. There are many coping mechanisms employed by collegiate esports players, including ignoring offenders, deescalating tense encounters, and using tools to mute offenders. Understanding the motivations behind collegiate esports players' engagement with toxicity may help the growing sport plot a positive trajectory towards healthy play.

Online Collectible Card Games (OCCGs) are enormously popular worldwide. Previous studies found that the social aspects of physical CCGs are crucial for player engagement. However, we know little about the different types of sociability that OCCGs afford. Nor to what extent they influence players' social experiences. This mixed method online survey study focuses on a representative OCCG, Hearthstone [24] to 1) identify and define social design features and examine the extent to which players' use of these features predict their sense of community; 2) investigate participants' attitudes towards and experiences with the game community. The results show that players rarely use social features, and these features contribute differently to predicting players' sense of community. We also found emergent toxic behaviors, afforded by the social features. Findings can inform the best practices and principles in the design of OCCGs, and contribute to our understanding of players' perceptions of OCCG communities.