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As video games and esports continue to grow in popularity, gaming injuries are also on the rise. In recent years, medical professionals have placed greater emphasis on preventing and treating gaming injuries and proposed specific gaming health guidelines. However, the game industry and game research community have not done enough to address the hazards of gaming injuries or raise awareness about such hazards to players, parents, and game designers. In this paper, we propose a framework of injury-aware game design that addresses the two main causes of gaming injuries: prolonged gaming and repetitive microtrauma. We have identified a set of injury-aware game design techniques to help raise awareness of gaming-related hazards, promote healthy gaming behavior, and optimize gameplay to prevent injuries. We believe an effective way to deliver gaming-related health information to game players is through games themselves. To demonstrate this framework, we have developed an injury-aware game and conducted a user study with players and game designers. The results from the proof-of-concept game and user study show that both players and designers have a positive reception to the idea of implementing more inclusive measures into games, with nearly all participants of the user study being interested in the idea of hand exercise recommendations.
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Understanding and Mitigating Challenges for Non-Profit Driven Indie Game Development to Innovate Game Production
Non-profit driven indie game development represents a growing open and participatory game production model as an alternative to the traditional mainstream gaming industry. However, this community is also facing and coping with tensions and dilemmas brought by its focus on artistic and cultural values over economic benefits. Using 28 interviews with indie game developers with a non-profit agenda across various cultures, we investigate the challenges non-profit driven indie game developers face, which mainly emerge in their personal or collaborative labor and their endeavors to secure sustainable resources and produce quality products. Our investigation extends the current HCI knowledge of the democratization of technology and its impact on the trajectory of innovating, designing, and producing future (gaming) technologies. These insights may help increase the opportunities for and retention of previously underrepresented groups in technology production and inform effective decision/policy making to better support the creativity industry in the future.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1849718
- PAR ID:
- 10462223
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- CHI '23: Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 16
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580976
