This paper uses research through game design to explore how we can make video games that invite players to invent their own personal play-practices through making and changing rules. Through a reflective process of designing and playtesting a multiplayer game in which changing rules and parameters is the central mechanic, we have identified how we can create opportunities for players to exert their own creative authority on the structure of their play-practices. As our contribution, we present three design themes which aim to invite player authorship on practices of gameplay: opening up digital rules and parameters, bringing internal rules to the surface, and leaving space for internal goals. We also bring a larger discussion of these design patterns in which we investigate the duality of responsibility and freedom in play when we design for player creativity, and the role of video games as tools to make metagames.
When people play digital games together, their experiences are often influenced by the group. While prior research has focused on the individual player experience, we argue that a deeper understanding of group dynamics is required for designing digital games that effectively support complex social interactions. In this paper, we characterise the lived group experiences of fifteen long-term players, using qualitative content analysis of semi-structured interviews examining group lifecycles, their impact on play, and how games and platforms support or constrain them. Our findings show that gaming groups are diverse, often shifting between people- and task-orientation based on needs and motivations. They influence how games are experienced, establishing shared practices that persist across contexts. Yet, while games and tools support group play, they often lack flexibility to accommodate such evolving and nuanced social dynamics. We provide insight into how group-based play unfolds and examples of how games can better support it.
As long as there have been digital games, there have been players who seek to modify them, using settings, mods, online resources, and other methods. Despite the long history of modification in games, research has been limited by the dichotomous values implied by players using modifications for cheating (negative) or accessibility (positive). To address these limitations, we explore game modification broadly and neutrally by surveying 167 participants about their experiences, examining how and why players modify games, effects of modification, and perceptions of ethics. The results of a qualitative analysis distill diverse player perspectives into six core findings related to playfulness, agency, connection, norms, leet-ness, and technology in modified gaming experiences, where modifications add significant value to play by enabling users to tailor games to their optimal play experience. Results highlight the diversity and morality of users, and indicate that previous understandings may be too narrow and cynical.
One central goal of game designers is to make games that resonate with players. Yet, within HCI games research, resonance is used vaguely as an everyday notion. In this work, we draw on psychological research on resonance to conduct a qualitative survey (n = 110) to explore how players characterize game experiences that resonated with them, to deliminate what resonance means for players and the interactive medium of games. Our findings illustrate how resonance captures the feeling of gameplay encounters that go on to have profound and long-lasting emotional and cognitive impacts. Our findings outline resonance as an underlying experiential quality relevant to various existing PX conceptualizations, such as eudaimonia, meaningfulness, reflection, emotional challenge, game feel, and perspective or behavioral change. Based on our findings, we outline resonance as a useful explanatory concept for what makes videogame experiences emotional, meaningful, moving, and even transformative experiences.
Open-world missions often rely on repeated formulas, yet designers lack systematic ways to examine pacing, variation, and experiential balance across large portfolios. We introduce the Mission Action Quality Vector (MAQV), a six-dimensional framework—covering combat, exploration, narrative, emotion, problem-solving, and uniqueness—paired with an action block grammar representing missions as gameplay sequences. Using about 2200 missions from 20 AAA titles, we apply LLM-assisted parsing to convert community walkthroughs into structured action sequences and score them with MAQV. An interactive dashboard enables designers to reveal underlying mission formulas. In a mixed-methods study with experienced players and designers, we validate the pipeline’s fidelity and the tool’s usability, and use thematic analysis to identify recurring design trade-offs, pacing grammars, and systematic differences by quest type and franchise evolution. Our work offers a reproducible analytical workflow, a data-driven visualization tool, and reflective insights to support more balanced, varied mission design at scale.
How have player experiences changed over the years? For instance, have there been general shifts in what kinds of emotions players experience and express? We probe these questions with help of recent methodological advances in psychology and Large Language Models (LLMs), in particular the possibility to predict Likert-scale responses based on free-form text. Applying this at scale to three player experience questionnaires (PXI, CORGIS, AESTHEMOS) and 152143 Metacritic user reviews from years 2010-2024, we reveal trends such as an increasing portion of reviews expressing emotional challenge, meaning, and nostalgia. We then analyze the contributions of different genres and games to the trends, in addition to reasons explicitly indicated by the reviews, and establish correlations between review scores and different player experience constructs. Taken together, our results provide novel insights into how player experiences have evolved. Methodologically, we propose and demonstrate a novel and scalable method for analyzing game reviews.
GenAI is currently reshaping game development practices, production pipelines, and value networks in an unprecedentedly pervasive manner with cascading consequences remaining unclear. In the last five years since GenAI's inception, a growing body of qualitative research has explored these early transformations from different settings and demographic angles. However, these studies often contextualise and consolidate their findings weakly with related work; for research to keep up with and support stakeholders in this development, the current moment calls for a synthesis of the findings emerged thus far. Here, we address this need through a qualitative research synthesis via meta-ethnography. We followed PRISMA-S to systematically search the relevant literature from 2020-2025, including major HCI and games research databases. We then synthesised the ten eligible studies, conducting reciprocal translation and line-of-argument synthesis guided by eMERGe, informed by CASP quality appraisal. We identified nine overarching themes, provide recommendations, and contextualise our insights in wider game production trajectories. With this work, we seek to provide practitioners, researchers and policy-makers with grounded insights to guide practice, research and governance.