Embodied design is fostering relevant advancements in novel design methods for learning and innovation. Nevertheless, practice and research show that teaching and facilitating embodied design is a challenging task. This paper presents a playful approach for conducting embodied design sessions, which adapts existing card-game mechanics to improve the accessibility and usability of existing embodied design toolboxes during a design session. Our approach hypothesizes that card-game mechanics can address usual pitfalls common to card-based facilitation toolkits by adding structure, guidelines, and playfulness. We also envision that such toolboxes, that have become popular in the research in participatory and co-design contexts, can seamlessly incorporate card-game mechanics like the ones we propose. We describe the setting of the design session, as well as present and discuss the results obtained from observation and participant questionnaires. Finally, we also outline the next steps for designing an embodied workshop in sustainability based on the results from this study. We strive to analyze our proposed method by its capacity to blend into the structure and materials of a card-based toolbox, eliciting the playfulness embedded in the leveraged card-game mechanics to implicitly provide support and guidance through the session, to both facilitators and participants, without disrupting the flexible and open flow of an movement-based design session.

In line with the 10 years of CHI PLAY theme, we propose a playful BINGO game to activate the community to reflect on the past, present, and future work at the conference both in terms of how and what knowledge we value, and how that knowledge is articulated. In this interactivity, we present a customized BINGO card for participants to carry to sessions on-site at the venue, with the goal to spark reflection of genre conventions, how they shape the work produced at the conference, as well as facilitating interactions and discussions between speakers and attendees.

More-than-human approaches to HCI design research have gained traction in recent years, facilitating a need to employ new methods that decenter the human perspective. We propose live-action roleplay (larp), as a method and practice within HCI that can support perspective taking and empathy-building with non-humans actors. In this paper, we discuss a local community workshop where we facilitated numerous body-based and larp activities surrounding the theme of sustainability, and reflect on the strengths larp offers in service of decentering the human perspective.

Writing and genre conventions are extant to any scientific community, and CHI is no different. In this paper, we present the early phases of an AI tool called KITSUNE, which takes text and adapts it toward the writing conventions of a CHI paper. We describe the development of the tool with the intent to promote discussion around how writing conventions are upheld and unquestioned by the CHI community, and how this translates to the work produced. In addition, we bring up questions surrounding how the introduction of LLMs into academic writing will fundamentally change how conventions will be upheld now and in the future.

As of 2023, education surrounding game design has become a fixture in university education systems around the world. As the teaching of game design is an inherently interdisciplinary subject with many connections to the arts and humanities, there are a diverse range of perspectives as to what the focus of each curriculum should include. In this essay, we argue that game programs with a more technical focus should include both design and play-focused approaches embedded into the pedagogy. We present two case studies drawing from our education journeys studying games as well as our experiences teaching in both game and computer science programs, and discuss the resulting benefits of integrating these concepts into our practice.

Elements of randomness are a very common factor in modern digital games, from simple rolls of a die to complex AI systems. These elements have an impact on how the player experiences a game. We believe that exploring the field of luck analysis can benefit designers through a developed understanding of how such elements affect players. In this study, we explore how elements of randomness affect players in the roguelike deckbuilding game, Slay the Spire using data clustering. Three player skill groups were identified with the use of clustering: Winners, Low skill losers and High skill losers. Our results indicate that people who succeeded in beating the game, had an increased amount of randomness in the form of cards by a factor of 1.82. Showing that more skilled players do not shy away from randomness but instead embrace it more than lower skilled players.

Narrative structures define the skeleton of narratives and help at identifying common structures in stories, that then can be used to compare structures, define variations, and understand prototypical [structural] components. However, narrative structures are just one piece of the puzzle, their interpretation is what gives room to the stories seen in transmedia storytelling. In principle, a structure can be interpreted and developed with a myriad of stories, but requires some type of corpus to develop it further. Large language models such as ChatGPT could be employed for this task, if we are able to define a good narrative structure and give the tools to the algorithm to develop them further. For this paper, we use a narrative structure system called TropeTwist, which employs interconnected tropes as narrative structures, defining characters, conflicts, and plot devices in a relational graph, which gives raise to a set of trope micro- and meso-patterns. Using ChatGPT and through the web interface, we communicate all the possible elements to be used from TropeTwist and tasked ChatGPT to interpret them and generate stories. We describe our process and methodology to reach these interpretations, and present some of the generated stories based on a constructed narrative structure. Our results show the possibilities and limitations of using these systems and elaborate on future work to combine large language models for other tasks within narrative interpretation and generation.

Games have always been popular for connecting people, from local single-player and couch co-op, to massively multiplayer online. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, remote games that involved and fostered social interactions and connections were a highlight among strategies for staying connected. For this year’s games and play SIG, we come together to discuss the relevant and timely topic of social and playful technologies, and how they can be designed to best foster meaningful social connections over a distance. We bring together attendees from not only the games community, but also those in the broader field of CHI focusing on social and playful technologies.  

Game design is a hard and multi-faceted task that intertwines different gameplay mechanics, audio, level, graphic, and narrative facets. Games' facets are developed in conjunction with others with a common goal that makes games coherent and interesting. These combinations result in plenty of games in diverse genres, which usually require a collaboration of a diverse group of designers. Collaborators can take different roles and support each other with their strengths resulting in games with unique characteristics. The multi-faceted nature of games and their collaborative properties and requirements make it an exciting task to use Artificial Intelligence (AI). The generation of these facets together requires a holistic approach, which is one of the most challenging tasks within computational creativity. Given the collaborative aspect of games, this thesis approaches their generation through Human-AI collaboration, specifically using a mixed-initiative co-creative (MI-CC) paradigm. This paradigm creates an interactive and collaborative scenario that leverages AI and human strengths with an alternating and proactive initiative to approach a task. However, this paradigm introduces several challenges, such as Human and AI goal alignment or competing properties.

In this thesis, game design and the generation of game facets by themselves and intertwined are explored through Human-AI collaboration. The AI takes a colleague's role with the designer, arising multiple dynamics, challenges, and opportunities. The main hypothesis is that AI can be incorporated into systems as a collaborator, enhancing design tools, fostering human creativity, and reducing workload. The challenges and opportunities that arise from this are explored, discussed, and approached throughout the thesis. As a result, multiple approaches and methods such as quality-diversity algorithms and designer modeling are proposed to generate game facets in tandem with humans, create a better workflow, enhance the interaction, and establish adaptive experiences.

We propose the Interactive Constrained MAP-Elites, a quality-diversity solution for game content generation, implemented as a new feature of the Evolutionary Dungeon Designer (EDD): a mixed-initiative co-creativity tool for designing dungeons. The feature uses the MAP-Elites algorithm, an illumination algorithm that segregates the population among several cells depending on their scores with respect to different behavioral dimensions. Users can flexibly and dynamically alternate between these dimensions anytime, thus guiding the evolutionary process in an intuitive way, and then incorporate suggestions produced by the algorithm in their room designs. At the same time, any modifications performed by the human user will feed back into MAP-Elites, closing a circular workflow of constant mutual inspiration. This paper presents the algorithm followed by an in-depth evaluation of the expressive range of all possible dimension combinations in several scenarios, and discusses their influence in the fitness landscape and in the overall performance of the procedural content generation in EDD.