Participatory narratives are compelling, at least partly because of their ability to help players suspend disbelief in the fictional world in which they engage. Game makers have used the phrase “This is Not a Game” (TINAG) to capture the willingness of players to buy into such narratives in ways that promote productive roleplaying and authentic engagement. Although TINAG has permeated the academic and popular literature on gaming and immersive narratives for decades, there has not been a scientific grounding for the term that provides researchers support for a more rigorous study of the topic. This article makes two primary contributions. First, it provides a definition of the Perception of TINAG based on a systematic literature review of 50 articles that define or describe critical characteristics of TINAG: The Perception of TINAG is a player’s acceptance that they are embedded in and able to influence a fictional story woven into the real world. Second, the paper develops and validates a survey instrument that researchers can use to measure the Perception of TINAG and its three unique components: (1) the player accepts that they are embedded in a fictional story, (2) the player believes their actions influence the narrative, and (3) the player perceives that the story is woven into the real world. We evaluated the instrument using exploratory factor analysis using expert reviewers and game players. We include a table of the articles describing TINAG and our final scale to facilitate future research.

This paper introduces the Designing for Extended Latency (DELAY) Framework meant to inspire new systems that support social interaction in high-latency settings such as interplanetary communication, intermittent internet access, and time-zone incompatibilities. The framework includes six dimensions: Goal, Communication Genre, Sequencing, Cardinality, Mutability, and Responsiveness. We describe the iterative design process used to create the Framework, as well as three novel prototypes designed to increase social connectedness and social presence in high-latency situations: 1) the InSync app that allows partners to perform activities simultaneously even though they only see proof of their synchronicity later; 2) the After the Beep system that lets users leave IoT messages that are triggered by the recipients; and 3) the Surrogate platform where players play group battle games against "surrogate" artificial intelligence avatars that mimic unavailable individuals. Data from two design workshops validates the usefulness of the framework for generating new solutions to high-latency scenarios.

There are a variety of fitness technologies such as activity trackers, exergames and mobile applications available to promote physical activity. Based on our previous research, we found that children prefer having social interaction, a narrative and flexibility while interacting with such technologies. Other research has shown that persuasive displays encouraged adults towards physical activity. In this research, we present the initial results from a user study conducted on 16 children (ages 6-11) who used the Kidfit suite, a collection of mobile applications that combine and utilize the elements found from previous research to promote activity in children.

An Alternate Reality Game (ARG) is an interactive storygame hybrid whose core mechanics include collaborative problem solving and storytelling. ARGs are also participatory experiences, because game designers dynamically adjust content in response to players' actions as game play progresses. What if the participatory process was extended during the design phase of an ARG as well? Few, if any, studies have explored how to include player populations in the ARG design process -- especially ARGs that target youth. In this paper, we share the process we followed to design a large-scale ARG to promote scientific inquiry for teenagers (13-17 years old) by partnering with them. Our findings suggest that co-designing with youth resulted in novel design features in the final game, and gave us insight into adolescent attitudes toward various scientific concepts. We also share co-design techniques that were not as effective and offer suggestions for future approaches.

This paper presents insights from designers of Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) regarding the design tactics they employ to integrate participatory storytelling and "authentic fiction" into the transmedia experiences they create. Our approach was motivated by recent efforts in HCI to more closely align the development of interaction design theory to the craft knowledge and experiences of designers themselves. The resulting insights enhance our understanding of design approaches that a diverse group of ARG producers follow to create interactive, participatory narratives. We outline narrative-specific themes to support designers who craft similar interactive experiences.

Local communities are turning to new online systems to help motivate and coordinate local volunteerism and problem solving. Inspired by the American barn raising tradition, ACTion Alexandria is designed to help local residents and service-oriented organizations collectively take action to address pressing local needs. This paper introduces "civic action brokering" as a new theoretical concept and frames it within a year-long evaluation of ACTion Alexandria. A mixed-method, case study approach was used to understand how social practices, roles, and technologies helped or hindered successful action brokering. Successes were attributed to a competent community manager, institutional support from an existing nonprofit brokering agency, effective use of social media, a synergistic partnership with nonprofits that helped grow each group's donor network, and emphasis on promoting immediate actions and soliciting ideas for Community Challenges among residents and nonprofit organizations.

An Alternate Reality Game (ARG) is a form of transmedia storytelling that engages players in scavenger hunt-like missions to collectively uncover, interpret, and reassemble the fragments of a story that is distributed across multiple media, platforms, and locations. ARGs are participatory experiences, because players have a central role in reconstructing the storyline. Furthermore, players interact with the game as themselves, not via avatars. Although transmedia formats like ARGs have garnered increasing attention in entertainment and education, most have been targeted for adults 18 and older. Few studies have explored the design process of education-based ARGs for children. In this paper, we detail the design and implementation of an ARG for middle school students (13--15 years old). We describe the strategies we used to distribute story elements across various media and to encourage players to participate in an authentic inquiry process. We found that a "protagonist by proxy", or in-game character with whom players related closely, served as a strong motivator and a model for positive participation. We highlight student interactions and offer insights for designers who implement ARGs and similar immersive learning experiences.

The rising popularity of location-based applications and games (LBAGs) that break spatial, temporal, and social boundaries creates new challenges for designers. This paper introduces PLACE, an iterative, mixed-fidelity approach to Prototyping Location, Activities, Collective experience, and Experience over time in LBAGs. PLACE consists of 6 design principles: start small and scale up the fidelity, treat participants as co-designers, test in a representative space, focus on activities more than interfaces, respect authentic social experience, and represent time authentically. The effectiveness of PLACE was evaluated by prototyping Floracaching, a geocaching game for citizen science. This revealed the types of insights that PLACE provides, best practices for implementing PLACE, and how PLACE com-pares to other prototyping methods.

Successful Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), such as The Lost Experience, I Love Bees and Urgent EVOKE have solicited thousands of active participants and, often, millions of spectators from around the world. ARGs require significant resources not only in terms of initial design, but also in implementation, since live, dynamic interplay between players and designers is an inherent aspect of their interactive storylines. This paper outlines a novel design framework for creating reusable ARGs that will help extend the lifespan of ARGs and allow them to permeate new domains such as education. The framework includes three key reusable design objectives (replayability, adaptability, extensibility), each of which can be enacted at different levels of depth. We also identify barriers to reusable ARGs and design strategies for overcoming those barriers, drawing upon ARG designer interviews and existing ARGs.

The FamilySearch Indexing project has enabled hundreds of thousands of volunteers to transcribe billions of records, making it one of the largest crowdsourcing initiatives in the world. Assuring high quality transcriptions (i.e., indexes) with a reasonable amount of volunteer effort is essential to keep pace with the mounds of newly digitized documents. Using historical data, we show the relationship between prior experience and native language on transcriber agreement. We then present a field experiment comparing the effectiveness (accuracy) and efficiency (time) of two quality control mechanisms: (1) Arbitration -- the existing mechanism wherein two volunteers independently transcribe records and disagreements go to an arbitrator, and (2) Peer Review -- a mechanism wherein one volunteer's work is reviewed by another volunteer. Peer Review is significantly more efficient, though not as effective for certain fields as Arbitration. Design suggestions for FamilySearch Indexing and related crowdsourcing initiatives are provided.

We describe the first iteration of an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) designed to lead players into a newly enfranchised relationship with history and engage them in scientific thinking and information literacy practices. We found that the points at which the game's mythology blurred the lines between fact and fiction prompted middle school students to move beyond rote memorization of content. Instead, they began to question, analyze, and make hypotheses about the data presented. However, striking a meaningful balance between "true" history and imagined events poses new design challenges. We present a formative typology of counterfactual design patterns that can help designers, educators, and players locate interesting fault lines in reality that facilitate the expansion of ARG mythologies.

Online citizen science projects engage volunteers in collecting, analyzing, and curating scientific data. Existing projects have demonstrated the value of using volunteers to collect data, but few projects have reached the full collaborative potential of scientists and volunteers. Understanding the shared and unique motivations of these two groups can help designers establish the technical and social infrastructures needed to promote effective partnerships. We present findings from a study of the motivational factors affecting participation in ecological citizen science projects. We show that volunteers are motivated by a complex framework of factors that dynamically change throughout their cycle of work on scientific projects; this motivational framework is strongly affected by personal interests as well as external factors such as attribution and acknowledgment. Identifying the pivotal points of motivational shift and addressing them in the design of citizen-science systems will facilitate improved collaboration between scientists and volunteers.

This article explores the opportunities and challenges of creating and sustaining large‐scale “content curation communities” through an in‐depth case study of the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL). Content curation communities are large‐scale crowdsourcing endeavors that aim to curate existing content into a single repository, making these communities different from content creation communities such as Wikipedia. In this article, we define content curation communities and provide examples of this increasingly important genre. We then follow by presenting EOL, a compelling example of a content curation community, and describe a case study of EOL based on analysis of interviews, online discussions, and survey data. Our findings are characterized into two broad categories: information integration and social integration. Information integration challenges at EOL include the need to (a) accommodate and validate multiple sources and (b) integrate traditional peer reviewed sources with user‐generated, nonpeer‐reviewed content. Social integration challenges at EOL include the need to (a) establish the credibility of open‐access resources within the scientific community and (b) facilitate collaboration between experts and novices. After identifying the challenges, we discuss the potential strategies EOL and other content curation communities can use to address them, and provide technical, content, and social design recommendations for overcoming them.

There is great interest in understanding media bias and political information seeking preferences. As many media outlets create online personas, we seek to automatically estimate the political preferences of their audience, rather than of the outlet itself. In this paper, we present a novel method for computing preference among an organization's Twitter followers. We present an application of this technique to estimate political preference of the audiences of U.S. media outlets. We also discuss how these results may be used and extended.

Recommender systems traditionally recommend individual items. We introduce the idea of collection recommender systems and describe a design space for them including 3 main aspects that contribute to the overall value of a collection: the value of the individual items, co-occurrence interaction effects, and order effects including placement and arrangement of items. We then describe an empirical study examining how people create mix tapes. The study found qualitative and quantitative evidence for order effects (e.g., first songs are rated higher than later songs; some songs go poorly together sequentially). We propose several ideas for research in this space, hoping to start a much longer conversation on collection recommender systems.