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

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.