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Building Creative Strategies and Solutions to Promote Benefits While Mitigating Harms of Video Games: A Workshop at CHI PLAY 2024

Published: 14 October 2024 Publication History

Abstract

Digital games are part of millions of players’ daily lives. As such a popular pastime, they have the potential to directly affect players in a variety of positive and negative ways. Players experience benefits (e.g., social, emotional, and cognitive) by playing commercial video games, while there is also an increasing concern about harms associated with play, including toxic behaviour and hate, problematic gaming and addiction, challenges for access and equitable experiences, additional risks for vulnerable players (e.g., children), and deceptive design practices. While extensive research has explored how to better understand and define both benefits and harms associated with gameplay, we still have limited knowledge regarding practical and actionable approaches, strategies, and solutions to help players, designers and developers, and games researchers effectively promote game features maintaining these benefits and addressing potential harms of gameplay. Therefore, this workshop especially focuses on building creative strategies and solutions to enhance previously identified benefits while simultaneously mitigating the harms of gameplay. We will engage in activities to envision speculative futures where we have mitigated harms while maintaining the benefits of play. In doing so, we want to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in practical ways to achieve this goal through design strategies that are informed by a holistic perspective on the impact of games on players. We also hope to build community, exchange knowledge, and develop novel and practical solutions to foster healthier and safer gaming experiences and behavioural patterns.

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        cover image ACM Conferences
        CHI PLAY Companion '24: Companion Proceedings of the 2024 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play
        October 2024
        500 pages
        ISBN:9798400706929
        DOI:10.1145/3665463
        Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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        Published: 14 October 2024

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        Author Tags

        1. accessibility
        2. addiction
        3. benefits
        4. dark patterns
        5. harassment
        6. harms
        7. loot box
        8. problematic play
        9. toxicity

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