Katie Seaborn

Players often engage with video games maldaimonically—pursuing self-realization and self-expression through egocentric, destructive, exploitative, or otherwise harmful activities. Despite its recognition as a meaningful and cross-cultural experiential construct in games, no established instrument currently exists to measure the motivations associated with maldaimonic play. To address this gap, we developed the Inventory on Maldaimonic Motivations in Player Experiences (IMPEX) to assess player motivations as expressed through maldaimonic gaming activities. Following established scale development procedures, we conducted four iterative item development and initial validation studies, resulting in a 33-item, multidimensional scale encompassing eudaimonic motives, hedonic motives, malicious power-seeking, escapism, transgressive autonomy, social ambition, and extrinsic pursuits. We found initial support for understanding maldaimonic game experiences as involving established motivational dimensions and maldaimonic dimensions like malicious power-seeking, thereby extending current frameworks of player motivation.

1. “Kawaii” is the Japanese notion of “cute,” a positive adjective that not only describes perceivable features of an object but also expresses a person’s feelings (Nittono, 2022), such as the impr...

Kawaii is the Japanese instantiation of cuteness. As a multimodal percept theoretically derived from the notion of baby schema, kawaii can be a property of voice and sound, visual appearance and form factor, and movement and expression. However, measuring user perceptions of kawaii remains an open question. In the absence of a validated instrument, a one-item self-report measure has been used extensively, but has not been validated. Here, we report on three types of validity—convergent, known groups, and cross-context—and reliability for the single item measure across nine data sets featuring responses to video game character voices and visual appearances and computer-generated voice assistant voices from N = 967 unique participants. Our results demonstrate initial evidence of the validity of the one-item measure for voice and visual kawaii perceptions. Further rigour can be pursued with novel stimuli, test-retest validation, and concurrent validity against the upcoming multi-item measure of kawaii.

ChatGPT, a chatbot powered by a large language model (LLM), is used by millions globally. Whether it is perceived as an anthropomorphic agent is currently being mapped out. Notably, the degree and nature of how ChatGPT is gendered remains unclear, despite agent gender cues being known to impact user attitudes and behaviors. ChatGPT, with its natural communication style and minimal gender cues, may offer radical insights on agent gendering. In this online mixed methods study, we invited first-time and experienced users to undertake tasks with ChatGPT. We surveyed their perspectives at two time-points following the interaction. Results indicated that ChatGPT’s communicative abilities correlated with gendered traits and its perceived capabilities reflected gender stereotypes. Our work suggests that ChatGPT is not gender-neutral, with implicit gender stereotyping occurring in the absence of gender cues and regardless of exposure. We advocate for conscientious design interventions to overcome agent-based perpetuation of human stereotypes.

Agender euphoria is a new term representing the powerful feelings of happiness, joy, and contentment derived from experiences in gender-free embodiments, spaces, and activities. People with and without agender and adjacent identities (e.g., genderless, gender-free, non-binary, gender-apathetic) may have such experiences under the right circumstances. Video games can offer gender minorities a safe haven for gender euphoric experiences. However, the possibility of agender euphoric experiences was unexplored. We considered this overlooked frame of self-actualization with 142 people who identified as having or desiring agender euphoric experiences. Using the critical incident technique (CIT), we uncovered how games and play experiences create (and inhibit) agender euphoria. We surface this experiential phenomenon and provide empirically-grounded criteria for the design of games to elicit agender euphoric experiences for everyone, but especially agender and agender adjacent players. This work adds to the growing critical literatures on marginalized experiences in games research and human-computer interaction.