Today, gaming is an essential aspect of culture and a big part of millions of players' daily lives. It is estimated that 79% of the global online population plays video games. Gaming has been shown to facilitate a range of benefits for players. Playing digital games can build social capital that translates into out-of-game benefits, such as decreased loneliness and improved wellbeing, provide cognitive benefits such as improved attention, and support resilience and recovery from stress. On the other hand, there is increasing concern about the problematic side of games, including toxic behavior and hate, deceptive design, problematic gaming and addiction, challenges for access and equitable experiences, a lack of diversity and bias in representation, and other ethical considerations.

Very little progress has been made on many of these issues with calls for progress from various sectors. It seems clear a multidisciplinary approach is necessary (including computer science approaches and human-centered, interdisciplinary knowledge) as well as input from academic and industry perspectives. We aim for a better understanding of harms in digital games and the contextual factors that lead to them, along with the design and development of novel sociotechnical solutions to mitigate these harms. For example, it is necessary to progress the design and development of systems, algorithms, interfaces, frameworks, and tools that can support researchers, developers, moderators, policymakers, and other stakeholders involved in games.

In this Dagstuhl Seminar, we aim to bring together researchers and industry practitioners who study and build digital games. The goal is to generate a better understanding of the harms in games and progress towards enriching playful experiences for broad groups of players. This requires combating the harms, e.g., with design principles, guidelines, frameworks, and adaptive systems that model player experiences and behaviors, while maintaining the benefits. We want to 1) build and strengthen the community in the interdisciplinary area, 2) collaboratively develop a research agenda for the future of digital games, in which we address critical harms, and 3) iteratively develop tangible outcomes for solutions (e.g., tools, interfaces, frameworks) to these challenges.

Creative Commons BY 4.0

Julian Frommel, Kathrin Gerling, Daniel Johnson, and Regan L. Mandryk