For the past few decades video games have been the focus of widespread concerns regarding violence, addiction and sexist content. In the United States, video games are blamed for high gun violence rates. The World Health Organization (WHO) has claimed ...

Challenge plays a critical role in enabling an enjoyable and successful player experience, but not all dimensions of challenge are well understood. A more nuanced understanding of challenge and its role in the player experience is possible through ...

Despite rewards being seemingly ubiquitous in video games, there has been limited research into their impact on the player experience. Informed by extant literature, we built a casual video game to test the impact of reward types, both individually (...

Voice interaction is increasingly common in digital games, but it remains a notoriously difficult modality to design a satisfying experience for. This is partly due to limitations of speech recognition technology, and partly due to the inherent ...

A lack of racial-ethnic diversity in game characters and limited customization options render in-game self-representation by players of colour fraught. We present a mixed-methods study of what players from different race-ethnicities require to feel ...

Digital games can offer rich social experiences and exciting narrations by the integration of interesting, believable companion characters. However, if companions fall short of the players' expectations, they may instead spoil the whole experience, ...

Livestreamed APGs (audience participation games) allow stream viewers to participate meaningfully in a streamer's gameplay. However, streaming interfaces are not designed to meet the needs of audience participants. In order to explore the game design ...

In this paper we present the design and evaluation of a first-person walker digital game called WORLD4. Walkers are a sub-genre of 3D games that typically include minimal player interaction, slow paced game play, and ambiguous goals. Walking is the ...

Virtual reality games are often centered around our feeling of 'being there'. That presence can be significantly enhanced by supporting physical walking. Although modern virtual reality systems enable room-scale motions, the size of our living rooms is ...

This work focuses on studying players behaviour in interactive narratives with the aim to simulate their choices. Besides sub-optimal player behaviour due to limited knowledge about the environment, the difference in each player's style and preferences ...

Controller-based interaction is popular due to the increasing prevalence of console and couch-based games, but is known to be slower and less accurate than aiming with a mouse. In this study we evaluated the performance of five interaction techniques ...

Research shows that bespoke Virtual Reality (VR) laboratory experiences can be differently affecting than traditional display experiences. With the proliferation of at-home VR headsets, these effects need to be explored in consumer media, to ensure the ...

Research has shown that dynamic difficulty adjustment (DDA) can benefit player experience in digital games. However, in some cases it can be difficult to assess when adjustments are necessary. In this paper, we propose an approach of emotion-based DDA ...

Ingestible sensors, such as capsule endoscopy and medication monitoring pills, are becoming increasingly popular in the medical domain, yet few studies have considered what experiences may be designed around ingestible sensors. We believe such sensors ...

Virtual reality games have grown rapidly in popularity since the first consumer VR head-mounted displays were released in 2016, however comparatively little research has explored how this new medium impacts the experience of players. In this paper, we ...

During game play a variety of undesired emotions can arise, impeding players' positive experiences. Adapting game features based on players' emotions can help to address this problem, but necessitates a way to detect the current emotional state. We ...

CHI PLAY is an international and interdisciplinary conference series for researchers and professionals across all areas of play, games, and human-computer interaction (HCI). We call this area "player-computer interaction."

The goal of CHI PLAY is to ...