Over the last decades, digital games have become increasingly important for social connection and community building. However, the features that make games fantastic spaces for social connection also harbor toxicity including hate, harassment, and the propagation of extremist ideologies. Despite the growing prevalence of these issues, there has been a lack of public-facing efforts from the gaming industry to address these concerns. One roadblock in particular has been the challenge of initiating open dialogue about these topics. In this study, we conducted focus groups with professionals across the game industry to facilitate discussions about the solutions and barriers they see in addressing the challenges associated with hate harassment, and extremist ideologies in gaming spaces. Several barriers were identified, as well as actionable solutions for the industry's future.
{"title":"From Avoidance to Action: A Call for Open Dialogue on Hate, Harassment, and Extremism in the Gaming Industry","authors":"Elizabeth D. Kilmer, Zeynep Aslan, Rachel Kowert","doi":"10.1145/3656559","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3656559","url":null,"abstract":"Over the last decades, digital games have become increasingly important for social connection and community building. However, the features that make games fantastic spaces for social connection also harbor toxicity including hate, harassment, and the propagation of extremist ideologies. Despite the growing prevalence of these issues, there has been a lack of public-facing efforts from the gaming industry to address these concerns. One roadblock in particular has been the challenge of initiating open dialogue about these topics. In this study, we conducted focus groups with professionals across the game industry to facilitate discussions about the solutions and barriers they see in addressing the challenges associated with hate harassment, and extremist ideologies in gaming spaces. Several barriers were identified, as well as actionable solutions for the industry's future.","PeriodicalId":517178,"journal":{"name":"Games: Research and Practice","volume":"68 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140708447","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
As a part of the broader investigation into the social dynamics within game cheating communities, this study sheds light on the risks faced by users that surpass the conventional boundaries of gaming environments. Drawing on insights from interviews with 70 individuals with cheating experiences and a literature review, we present a framework that categorises the observed social dynamics into four distinct collectives, each varying in size and characteristics. This framework offers a nuanced perspective on how individuals engage with cheating, portraying these communities as complex networks with potential victims and perpetrators, rather than mere assemblies of rule-breakers. Through expert feedback, we evaluate the applicability of our framework in practice, and identify three areas of concern that warrant attention by both the gaming industry and broader sectors: the pervasiveness of toxic behaviours, the absence of ethical boundaries, and the oversight of supporting roles that facilitate cheating. This research surfaces the need for targeted strategies to safeguard players who are not adequately covered by traditional safety measures in gaming.
{"title":"Unpacking the Dynamics of Harm in Game Cheating Communities: A Guiding Framework for Cross-Industry Intervention","authors":"Selina Cho, Jonathan Lusthaus, Ivan Flechais","doi":"10.1145/3656558","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3656558","url":null,"abstract":"As a part of the broader investigation into the social dynamics within game cheating communities, this study sheds light on the risks faced by users that surpass the conventional boundaries of gaming environments. Drawing on insights from interviews with 70 individuals with cheating experiences and a literature review, we present a framework that categorises the observed social dynamics into four distinct collectives, each varying in size and characteristics. This framework offers a nuanced perspective on how individuals engage with cheating, portraying these communities as complex networks with potential victims and perpetrators, rather than mere assemblies of rule-breakers. Through expert feedback, we evaluate the applicability of our framework in practice, and identify three areas of concern that warrant attention by both the gaming industry and broader sectors: the pervasiveness of toxic behaviours, the absence of ethical boundaries, and the oversight of supporting roles that facilitate cheating. This research surfaces the need for targeted strategies to safeguard players who are not adequately covered by traditional safety measures in gaming.","PeriodicalId":517178,"journal":{"name":"Games: Research and Practice","volume":"65 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140709665","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Extremist Activities in Digital Gaming Spaces: Challenges and Opportunities for Counter-extremism","authors":"Linda Schlegel","doi":"10.1145/3649810","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3649810","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":517178,"journal":{"name":"Games: Research and Practice","volume":"272 51‐54","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140233380","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"At the Nexus of Gaming and Extremism","authors":"Jessica White, Galen Lamphere-Englund","doi":"10.1145/3643805","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3643805","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":517178,"journal":{"name":"Games: Research and Practice","volume":"46 24","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140231676","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Co-Creating Transformative Futures through the Lens of Deep Game Design","authors":"Doris C. Rusch","doi":"10.1145/3643026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3643026","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":517178,"journal":{"name":"Games: Research and Practice","volume":"330 8","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140232680","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Stefania Stamou, K. C. Apostolakis, S. Ntoa, G. Margetis, C. Stephanidis
Video games are maturing as a medium to tell stories inspired by historical struggles and real-life experiences. In this regard, they could work as a mechanism in Transitional Justice pursuit. In this paper, we argue that games can become agents for promoting education, reconciliation and healing. We hence identify means by which museums and video games create empathy, reported in recent literature, and draw inceptive parallels between museum space design philosophies and design choices in modern video game experiences. Finally, we identify in the literature that there is a lack of a framework bringing together experts in memory and heritage studies with game developers, to derive guidelines for developing empathy-inducing games around sensitive topics. Thus, we propose a methodological approach on the creation of such a framework. This framework would instrument a collaborative effort to apply domain adaptation of the strategies and design philosophies for memory and Transitional Justice museum exhibitions to video game storytelling frameworks and mechanics.
{"title":"Museum-inspired Video Games as a Symbolic Transitional Justice Policy: Overview, Concepts and Research Directions","authors":"Stefania Stamou, K. C. Apostolakis, S. Ntoa, G. Margetis, C. Stephanidis","doi":"10.1145/3651279","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3651279","url":null,"abstract":"Video games are maturing as a medium to tell stories inspired by historical struggles and real-life experiences. In this regard, they could work as a mechanism in Transitional Justice pursuit. In this paper, we argue that games can become agents for promoting education, reconciliation and healing. We hence identify means by which museums and video games create empathy, reported in recent literature, and draw inceptive parallels between museum space design philosophies and design choices in modern video game experiences. Finally, we identify in the literature that there is a lack of a framework bringing together experts in memory and heritage studies with game developers, to derive guidelines for developing empathy-inducing games around sensitive topics. Thus, we propose a methodological approach on the creation of such a framework. This framework would instrument a collaborative effort to apply domain adaptation of the strategies and design philosophies for memory and Transitional Justice museum exhibitions to video game storytelling frameworks and mechanics.","PeriodicalId":517178,"journal":{"name":"Games: Research and Practice","volume":"95 10","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140249459","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The games industry is seeing unparalleled mass layoffs since 2022. Cheap debt, the Covid-19 bubble, investor imprudence, and executive extravagance have produced an unsustainable boom and investment spree that flowed into today’s disastrous bust. For workers in the games industry, collective organization is a difficult but necessary response to ensure a healthier and more resilient future for all.
{"title":"The Game Industry’s Cataclysmic Layoffs: Where Do We Go From Here?","authors":"Amanda Farough, Michael Futter","doi":"10.1145/3651280","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3651280","url":null,"abstract":"The games industry is seeing unparalleled mass layoffs since 2022. Cheap debt, the Covid-19 bubble, investor imprudence, and executive extravagance have produced an unsustainable boom and investment spree that flowed into today’s disastrous bust. For workers in the games industry, collective organization is a difficult but necessary response to ensure a healthier and more resilient future for all.","PeriodicalId":517178,"journal":{"name":"Games: Research and Practice","volume":"48 9","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140259073","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Story writers and other creative professionals often rely on concept artists to visualize and then further iterate on their work during game development and other visualization processes. This exchange and its various stages are time-consuming, and there is no easy remedy for creating a walkable 3D concept art without involving a 3D artist yet. As a first step, we present Broomrocket, an open source text-to-3D algorithm for 3D concept art. Broomrocket’s contribution is an object relation and placement algorithm that transforms user input describing a 3D scene given in plain English language into actual models placed in a 3D scene. It runs locally using an existing downloaded natural language processing model and does not require third party services unless a connection to an online 3D model distribution platform is desired. In that case, Broomrocket will search for the keywords from the user’s narrative input and desired license, and place them in the 3D scene, adding each model’s individual license to a license file for further usage.
在游戏开发和其他可视化过程中，故事编剧和其他创意专业人员经常依赖概念艺术家对其作品进行可视化和进一步迭代。这种交流及其各个阶段都非常耗时，目前还没有一种简便的方法可以在没有三维艺术家参与的情况下创建可行走的三维概念图。作为第一步，我们提出了 Broomrocket，一种用于 3D 概念艺术的开源文本到 3D 算法。Broomrocket 的贡献在于它是一种对象关系和放置算法，能将用户用纯正英语输入的三维场景描述转换为三维场景中实际放置的模型。它使用现有下载的自然语言处理模型在本地运行，不需要第三方服务，除非需要连接到在线三维模型分发平台。在这种情况下，Broomrocket 会从用户的叙述输入和所需许可证中搜索关键字，并将它们放入三维场景中，同时将每个模型的单独许可证添加到许可证文件中，以便进一步使用。
{"title":"Broomrocket: Open Source Text-to-3D Algorithm for 3D Object Placement","authors":"Sanja Bonic, Janos Bonic, Stefan Schmid","doi":"10.1145/3648233","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3648233","url":null,"abstract":"Story writers and other creative professionals often rely on concept artists to visualize and then further iterate on their work during game development and other visualization processes. This exchange and its various stages are time-consuming, and there is no easy remedy for creating a walkable 3D concept art without involving a 3D artist yet. As a first step, we present Broomrocket, an open source text-to-3D algorithm for 3D concept art. Broomrocket’s contribution is an object relation and placement algorithm that transforms user input describing a 3D scene given in plain English language into actual models placed in a 3D scene. It runs locally using an existing downloaded natural language processing model and does not require third party services unless a connection to an online 3D model distribution platform is desired. In that case, Broomrocket will search for the keywords from the user’s narrative input and desired license, and place them in the 3D scene, adding each model’s individual license to a license file for further usage.","PeriodicalId":517178,"journal":{"name":"Games: Research and Practice","volume":"105 5","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139963810","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
John Dunham, Jiangnan Xu, Konstantinos Papangelis, Nicolas LaLone, Michael Saker, David Schwartz
Traditional location-based advertising (LBA), such as billboards and signage, has long been a staple of direct-to-consumer advertising. In recent years, however, the prominence and popularity of location-based games have made digital LBA even more appealing. This paper draws on an original research project devised to explore a notable gap in the literature on locative media: the impacts of LBA on small businesses in the location-based game Pokémon GO . The project was conducted between August and October 2021, employing semi-structured interviews with thirty-five (35) businesses leveraging Niantic’s sponsored location LBA. Our findings indicate that (1) participant businesses found location-based game advertising to be rewarding, (2) LGA can act as an amenity offered by the business, and (3) local community is an essential factor for success in location-based game advertising. In sum, this research demonstrates that local businesses could successfully utilize LGBs like Pokémon GO to advertise themselves.
{"title":"Pokémon GO\u0000 as an Advertising Platform: The Case for Locative Advertising in Location-Based Games","authors":"John Dunham, Jiangnan Xu, Konstantinos Papangelis, Nicolas LaLone, Michael Saker, David Schwartz","doi":"10.1145/3641509","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3641509","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Traditional location-based advertising (LBA), such as billboards and signage, has long been a staple of direct-to-consumer advertising. In recent years, however, the prominence and popularity of location-based games have made digital LBA even more appealing. This paper draws on an original research project devised to explore a notable gap in the literature on locative media: the impacts of LBA on small businesses in the location-based game\u0000 Pokémon GO\u0000 . The project was conducted between August and October 2021, employing semi-structured interviews with thirty-five (35) businesses leveraging Niantic’s sponsored location LBA. Our findings indicate that (1) participant businesses found location-based game advertising to be rewarding, (2) LGA can act as an amenity offered by the business, and (3) local community is an essential factor for success in location-based game advertising. In sum, this research demonstrates that local businesses could successfully utilize LGBs like\u0000 Pokémon GO\u0000 to advertise themselves.\u0000","PeriodicalId":517178,"journal":{"name":"Games: Research and Practice","volume":"20 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139896739","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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