HISTORY OF GAMES 2026

October 30, 2026

Amusement game centres (遊戲機中心/Arcades/Game Centres) once formed a central component of everyday videogame culture in Hong Kong (Ng, 2006). From a “golden era” in the 1980s to 2000 (Ying-Kit, 2025), when their numbers reached into the thousands, the sector entered a prolonged period of contraction, with more than 400 venues recorded in 2002 (Ng, 2015) and fewer than 200 licensed centres remaining by 2018 (Wirman & Jones, 2021). Despite media claims that the local arcade scene has since “died” (Luyao 2022), no empirical account has established how many centres remain or examined the rate and conditions of their disappearance. This project approaches the Hong Kong amusement game centre as an endangered form of videogame heritage and argues for the urgent documentation of these spaces as historical infrastructure rather than as nostalgic memory alone.
This study reports on a territory-wide census currently in progress that uses government licensing records to identify all legally registered amusement game centres and combines this archival dataset with systematic site visits to verify their continued operation. Scheduled to replicate an earlier survey conducted under the same temporal conditions, the project establishes a longitudinal method for measuring closure, survival, and spatial distribution across time. This approach treats licensing documents as historical sources and the physical arcade as a material artefact, enabling the writing of videogame history through urban space, regulation, and commercial practice.
Attention is given to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic as a moment of structural rupture. Hong Kong’s anti-epidemic measures required the prolonged closure of leisure venues and imposed distancing regulations that were fundamentally incompatible with the spatial density and machine-to-machine proximity on which arcade play depends (Harb 2020a). While these measures are frequently cited in public discourse as a cause of the sector’s decline(1000regrets, 2023), their actual effects on the number and distribution of operating centres remain undocumented. By producing an updated census, the project provides the first empirical basis for evaluating these claims. At the same time, the study examines the continued circulation of arcade imagery and machines within contemporary cultural contexts, including their appearance in local advertising campaigns with major brands such as Levis (2018) and McDonalds (2026) along with their incorporation into museum and curatorial events such as M+ at Night (2024). These recontextualisations position the arcade less as a functioning commercial venue and more as a symbol of collective memory, retro aesthetics, and local cultural identity. The project therefore distinguishes between the material disappearance of arcades as everyday play spaces and their persistence as heritage objects and mediated representations.
By documenting a rapidly vanishing form of location-based play, this study contributes to the historiography of videogames beyond software and platforms. It proposes a repeatable method for recording arcade decline in real time and argues that Hong Kong represents a distinctive case in which regulatory frameworks, urban density, and post pandemic economic conditions intersect to reshape the afterlife of arcade culture.

Ambiguous control: Designing for indeterminacy and agency negotiation

October 27, 2026

Interaction designers are increasingly challenging the status quo and enabling reflection through the design of provocative artefacts. Critical design uses speculation, subversion, and ambiguity to encourage audiences to consider the social, cultural, and ethical implications of technological products. Uncomfortable interactions intentionally provoke discomfort to support enlightenment and critical reflection on difficult topics. This research is situated at the intersection of these two practices, where interaction designers explore the use of discomfort to enable critical investigation and mediation among public audiences.
This practice-based research explores discomfort through control – subverting the ‘users in control’ norm and disturbing the ideology of human autonomy and agency – as provocation. Applying the Research through Design methodology and motivated by drift or emergence through design exploration and the development of design sensibility, I designed three spatial, interactive installations that materialise power imbalances in love, clinical hierarchy, and contemporary healthcare technologies. Engaging with the inflatable or mixed-material interfaces of these installations, the participants satirically and playfully enacted asymmetrical power dynamics with their bodies. The results from post-experience interviews and reflexive thematic analysis reveal ambiguity in control: experiences when the participants could not distinguish between when they were in control of the interactive systems and when they were not, consequently supporting reflection.
This thesis proposes a definition and elaborates on the experiential qualities of ambiguous control as its main theoretical contribution. The concept is defined as an embodied experience of indeterminacy concerning who (human, computational, or any agent) is in control of the interactions between people and technology. Such experiences can be identified through three experiential qualities: Waver occurs when we fluctuate between endeavouring to understand how to control the system and submitting to our inability to achieve it. Misrecognition emerges when our perception of the control state does not align with the true or externally observed state. Irresolution is the final unresolvedness, when our assumptions about the situation cannot be settled. Furthermore, this thesis theorises that ambiguous control not only obscures our perception but may also alter how we think about our perceptions, our assumptions, and our ways of knowing. These contributions can support the phenomenological analysis of other experiences and guide future design for ambiguous control as a space of playful indeterminacy, inviting negotiation and reparation of sociotechnical norms.

Book of Abstracts: DASTS Conference 29-30 June 2026

September 2, 2026

This experimental panel invites thinking and doing timelines of digitalization by the means of writing in a public wiki: a lived archive, remaining accessible and editable after the conference. More than a shared knowledge base, we hope for this infrastructure to serve as a tool for exploring and thinking about temporalities of digitalization.

This panel invites engagement with timelining as both object of inquiry and method of knowledge production. We propose a deliberately multiple and collaborative approach: a shared wiki where competing temporalities, scales, and standpoints can hopefully coexist and link to one another. We envision the wiki to focus on digitalization in private and public sectors, geographically anchored in the Danish realm.

We plan two 90-minute sessions. The first opens with a very brief introduction to the wiki infrastructure and a short remark on the politics of timelining, followed by participant presentations. The second session is dedicated to collaborative writing: participants will work in to add, annotate, and interconnect entries. The wiki will remain publicly accessible after the conference as a growing hypertext resource for STS scholarship on Danish digitalization.

Who launched that initiative?

September 2, 2026

The abstract examines how discursive authorities within the contemporary Danish gameindustry—particularly following recent institutionalization efforts—are perceived and potentially resisted by early-careerfounders in small, local start-up game studios as they deliberate on their own game productions. First, the submission presents an original timeline of the Danish game industry. The timeline highlights instances in which public programs, private organizations, and grassroots movements intersect to structure Denmark’s digital game sector. Second, the submission analyzes ten semi-structured interviews with founders of start-up game companies, focusing on their expectations and concerns regarding the future of the Danish game industry. The interviews were conducted in autumn 2024 and spring 2025. While the timeline documents institutional developments across three decades, the interviews suggest that progression narratives surrounding the recent institutionalization are more complex and ambivalent. This submission contributes to praxiological challenges of regional framing by critically scrutinizing a timeline of the Danish game industry.

Game Industry Timeline

September 2, 2026

In 2022, Europe prioritized strengthening video games’ cultural and creative dimensions for 2023–2026. A few years later, Denmark launched Europe’s first game institute to support original Danish games and called it a “new heyday” for the industry (Games Denmark 2024). European and Scandinavian game development thrives through distinct national frameworks, politics, and communities, backed by art funding, education, and grassroots efforts (e.g. Jørgensen, Sandqvist and Sotamaa 2015). Such support has emerged at pivotal moments across decades in policies, industry, and communities (O’Brien 2023). Amid rapid local and global changes, documenting industry history enables learning from the past and strengthens collective identity among game makers.

This paper outlines methods for creating the first timeline of the Danish game industry context. It discusses opportunities and challenges in identifying key events and involving stakeholders. The timeline documents formative policies and entities shaping commerce, education, and artistry over 25 years, up to recent institutionalization, aiming to understand their impact.

Rosenberg and Grafton (2010) note that “our idea of time is so wrapped up with the metaphor of the line that taking them apart seems virtually impossible” (13), yet “these timelines are not without history themselves” (10). Timelines identify sequences as a basis for causal relations, but sequence alone does not prove causality (cf. Lunteren 2019). Game industry research is generally marked by the struggle of navigating and challenging biases from relying on anecdotal accounts from the developers themselves and navigating company practices of trade secrecy and workplace promotion (O’Donnell 2014).

A timeline of the Danish game industry ecosystem, in our view, should not imply institutions manage games and people predictably. While risking “temporally simplified narratives,” it helps question skewed developer accounts (Kultima, Ojanen and Nylund 2024, 178). Our paper describes gathering alternative evidence from a variety of stakeholders. We share our journey in answering the questions: What should go onto a timeline of the Danish game industry? and How to gather all that matters?

From this chronology, we traced overlapping, and sometimes conflicting, public programs and private interests, highlighting timeline limitations for developing more sensitive industry data points. We gathered development condition-changing events
History of Games 2026 Book of Abstracts
131
(e.g., laws/policies) to discuss ‘movements’ and ‘epochs’ (Fortun and Fortun 2023) collaboratively online and offline. Iterative co-design and ‘timeline interviews’ (Adriansen 2012) foregrounded a multitude of perspectives and made space for marginal voices. Parallel stories were included, recognizing no single “game industry” (Keogh 2023) but diverging histories of “who and why we are.”

Spanning just a few decades, the timeline further overlaps with individuals’ “lifelines” (Gramling and Carr 2004) as well as game studios’ corporate histories. Interviewing and co-designing with stakeholders emphasized this interdependence, rendering the timeline a living structure. Given the small size of the Danish industry, it is possible to engage people with notable personal involvement, unlike in game industry histories of Japan (Koyama 2023) or China (Nakamura and Wirman 2021). At this stage, the timeline offers no ‘historical explanations.’ Instead, it explores how institutional and communal changes serve as rhetorical devices and appeals to legitimacy (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006) for individuals to act and justify, rather than dictate, industry direction.

From Windows to Sequences: Modality-Aware Temporal Learning for Wearable Affect Sensing

August 4, 2026

Pseudo-Label Augmentation for Affect Sensing in Small Collaborative Groups

August 4, 2026

Physiological affect sensing in naturalistic group interaction is typically limited more by label density than by sensor density: wearable devices produce thousands of time windows, while self-report labels are collected only a few times per session. This paper asks how to mine more supervisory signal from sparsely labelled group sessions. More broadly, we treat this as a step toward collective-state sensing: better individual affect estimates within a team help reveal the affective structure emerging at group level. Using GroupAffect-4, a four-person collaborative dataset with wearable physiology, eye tracking, Big Five personality, and post-task VAD labels, we study a progression of label-mining strategies: no augmentation, Gaussian Process (GP) pseudo-labelling, personality-aware trust weighting, and joint personality-plus-confidence weighting under a shared target-construction pipeline. We further ask whether individual predispositions (here, Big Five personality) together with group-level context improve which pseudo-labels should be trusted. They help, but not in the originally hypothesised graded way: the compressed BFI cosine-similarity range (0.91–0.99) renders weight ordering negligible (perm p = 0.39), so personality similarity acts as a same-team membership filter rather than a calibrated trust dial. In the known-team setting, pseudo-label augmentation improves over the labelled-only baseline, with the clearest benefit coming from within-team filtering rather than from fine-grained personality ranking. With smoothing, A1–A3 are tied to rounding on Valence and Arousal, while A3 has the highest Dominance score among the augmented SVM variants; the practical choice is therefore dimension-dependent. Cross-subject LOSO transfer remains encouraging for such a small and sparsely labelled dataset, especially on Arousal, whereas strict session-isolated LOGO removes the augmentation benefit. At the current scale of only 10 groups, LOGO should be read as a conservative lower bound on unseen-group transfer rather than as a definitive ceiling, but the present evidence shows that personality weighting mainly operates as a within-team mechanism.

Six Positive Words for Talking about Theory in Games Research (in Pursuit of Interdisciplinarity)

July 14, 2026

We propose six words for talking about what a given theory or idea in games research is or does. Talking about the strengths and specialisations of each other's ideas is more likely to foster interdisciplinarity than enforcing ontological accord across our field's expanding landscape. First, we [1] review recent discussions about interdisciplinary games research and say why their recommendations don't seem optimally pluralistic. We zero in on what we take to be a promising compromise for most games scholars: Embracing middle-range theory. To bolster our rationale, we [2] discuss theoretical debates in two other young fields (film studies and organisational research) and show how they arrived at—and have been well served by—middle-range theory. Centrally, we then [3] argue for the value of six meta-synthetically derived dimensions of theory: Importance, interestingness, actionability, generality, simplicity, and accuracy. We review these six dimensions and demonstrate the framework in use. Weaknesses of our proposal are flagged prior to concluding.

Do Control Input Metrics Capture Game Feel and Skill-Challenge Balance?

July 14, 2026

Constructing the Thermal Affective Design Space for Emotion Regulation: An Autoethnographic Research Through Design Inquiry

July 14, 2026

Temperature has strong potential to mediate emotion in a range of contexts; augmenting sensory experience and/or supporting emotion regulation. Hence, there is growing interest in leveraging thermal cues for affective technologies. At present, however, the design space for thermal technologies for emotion regulation remains underexplored and largely undefined. We construct a design space for thermal affective emotion regulation technologies, clarifying the rich, expressive nature of thermal cues as a design material. We develop this through a Research through Design (RtD) approach, grounded in an 18-month autoethnographic inquiry based on the first author's emotion regulation practice. We contribute a structured design space for thermal affective interaction, linking experience and design implementation with designerly know-how. By discussing the creation of this design space we provide insights into the generative process of developing intermediate-level knowledge from autoethnographic study and design practice.

Often Discouraged, Never Refused? How Character Creator Interfaces Afford Non-Binary Gender Expression

July 14, 2026

For many trans and non-binary (NB) people video games present an important space for gender expression and exploration. Character creator interfaces (CCIs) promise one such outlet, but current theoretical vocabulary is insufficient at capturing the particular features and conditions which make NB gender expression plausible or difficult. We leverage Davis’ mechanisms and conditions framework (MCF) — an extension of affordance theory attentive to socio-technical assemblages — to analyze the ways CCIs accommodate and stymie NB gender expression. Analyzing 19 games, we find that CCIs with gender-neutral options often discourage NB gender expression, as well as reproducing cisnormative and essentialist views on gender. Yet it is also possible to find gender euphoric experiences in games with no explicit gender allowances. Based on our findings, we highlight opportunities for leveraging MCF for game design and analysis. We also outline design implications for encouraging gender play for all.

Self Determination Theory in HCI Advancing the Field

July 14, 2026

Self-determination theory (SDT) has been widely successful in human–computer interaction (HCI). It offers ready concepts, measures, and theoretical propositions for third wave HCI topics such as user experience, fun, wellbeing, motivation, or user autonomy. Still, HCI applications of SDT have been partial, at times superficial, and disconnecting—leaving great unfulfilled potential which motivated the present special issue. In this introduction, we present SDT to interested scholars, chart its use across HCI to date, and outline six advances
to move HCI toward more intentional applications of SDT. As the articles from this issue illustrate, future growth areas of SDT in HCI are in extending domain-specific models and applications, harnessing underused parts of theory, computational formalization, extending levels of analysis, facilitating design translation, and engaging in a cross-disciplinary dialogue on autonomy.

The European Parliament Virtual Role-Play Game: Results of a Player Study

July 10, 2026

The paper reports on an evaluation study of the European Parliament Virtual Role-Playing Game, a hybrid multiplayer parliamentary simulation aimed at increasing young people’s political interest and understanding of the EU legislative process. The study is based on data from pre- and post-questionnaires collected during a large-scale run of the game (303 players) at a European Youth Event. Results indicate that participants found the game to be engaging and viewed it as a helpful tool for increasing players’ political interest and knowledge. At the same time, several areas for improvement were identified, such as the need for more flexible time allocation. These considerations will be addressed in the next version of the game.

Smart Cellular Bricks for Decentralized Shape Classification and Damage Recovery

July 3, 2026

<p dir="ltr">Biological systems possess remarkable capabilities for self-recognition and morphological regeneration, often relying solely on local interactions. Inspired by these decentralized processes, we present a novel system of physical 3D bricks—simple cubic units equipped with local communication, processing, and sensing—that are capable of inferring their global shape class and detecting structural damage. Leveraging Neural Cellular Automata, a learned, fully-distributed algorithm, our system enables each module to independently execute the same neural network without access to any global state or positioning information. We demonstrate the ability of collections of hundreds of these cellular bricks to accurately classify a variety of 3D shapes through purely local interactions. The approach shows strong robustness to out-of-distribution shape variations and high tolerance to communication faults and failed modules. In addition to shape inference, the same decentralized framework is extended to detect missing or damaged components, allowing the collective to localize structural disruptions and to guide a recovery process. This work provides a physical realization of large-scale, decentralized self-recognition and damage detection, advancing the potential of robust, adaptive, and bio-inspired modular systems.</p>

Designing Attribution: Technical Disclosure in AI-Mediated Art

June 17, 2026

Generative AI challenges established notions of authorship in contemporary art, yet little attention has been paid to how technical aspects of AI systems are disclosed in exhibition contexts. This paper presents a qualitative analysis of 23 AI-mediated artworks, with a focused discussion of 13 cases selected to illustrate distinct disclosure practices. We examine how model architectures, data provenance, interaction modalities, and energy consumption are framed or omitted in attribution materials. Our analysis reveals recurring asymmetries: model architectures are frequently named but rarely explained, data are disclosed selectively, and energy use is systematically absent. Instead of framing technical disclosure as an obligation, we approach it as a designed practice shaped by the artist. Three disclosure strategies emerge: extended technical framing, symbolic technical naming, and strategic opacity. In a climate of growing skepticism toward AI-generated outputs, technical attribution is not neutral reporting, but an active site where legitimacy and authorship are constructed.

Picnic: Playful Music-Making with Everyday Objects and Machine Learning

June 16, 2026

We present Picnic, an interactive musical installation exploring Machine Learning (ML) as design material for embodied music-making. The system transforms everyday objects in a picnic basket into a loop-based sampler, allowing users to create rhythms by striking cups, plates, and cutlery. A microphone captures sounds that are classified in real-time by an ML model, triggering percussion samples, melodic layers, and bird calls that loop sequentially. Embracing ML’s inherent uncertainty, we intentionally used an underfitted classification model to create a playful and ambiguous music-making experience.

Machine Learning as Design Material for Music-Making

June 16, 2026

We present a Research-through-Design exploration of Machine Learning (ML) as design material in music-making. We designed Picnic, an interactive musical installation that augments everyday objects in a picnic basket into a loop-based sampler which allows users to build rhythms with a variety of percussive, harmonic and more-than-human sounds. Embracing ML’s inherent uncertainty, we intentionally used an underfitted real-time classification model to create a playful and ambiguous music-making experience with the system. Through an evaluation with 23 participants of varying musical expertise and AI interest, we found that the system’s misclassifications made participants engage in a creative dialogue, constantly adapting to its unpredictability. Furthermore, when errors occurred, participants tended to criticise themselves rather than the system, indicating a tendency to overtrust the system. Our findings contribute with insights into the potential for using ML as design material for music-making and other creative domains.

Understanding AI Support in Professional Software Engineering - An Interview Study of Development Practices and Workflows

May 22, 2026

Professional software engineering is increasingly incorporating AI support for activities such as code generation, debugging, code comprehension, and documentation. While existing research has largely focused on evaluating the impact of AI on productivity and performance, less attention has been given to understanding how software engineers integrate AI into their everyday work and how they reason about its use in practice.
This short paper presents an interview study with 13 professional software engineers from seven companies, each with more than five years of experience and active use of AI tools in their daily work. Through semi-structured interviews, we explored AI usage across development tasks, how AI is integrated into their workflows, and how developers perceive and interact with AI support. Thematic analysis revealed four themes: AI Collaboration, AI Integration, Mental Models, and Workflow.
Our findings show that developers use AI across a spectrum ranging from a productivity tool to a collaborative coding partner and, in some cases, toward more agentic assistants, with interaction patterns varying according to task type and developer experience. AI adoption and integration are further shaped by organizational factors such as workplace provisioning, compliance constraints, and resistance to adoption. Participants also demonstrated a cautious and deliberate use of AI, consistently validating generated outputs and avoiding AI support during early problem diagnosis.
These findings contribute to understanding the role of AI support in professional software engineering practice and provide foundations for future empirical studies of AI-assisted software engineering.

Using Biometrics to Understand AI-Assisted Coding Performance and its Perception

May 18, 2026

GroupAffect-4: A Multimodal Dataset of Four-Person Collaborative Interaction

May 18, 2026

HISTORY OF GAMES 2026

October 30, 2026

Amusement game centres (遊戲機中心/Arcades/Game Centres) once formed a central component of everyday videogame culture in Hong Kong (Ng, 2006). From a “golden era” in the 1980s to 2000 (Ying-Kit, 2025), when their numbers reached into the thousands, the sector entered a prolonged period of contraction, with more than 400 venues recorded in 2002 (Ng, 2015) and fewer than 200 licensed centres remaining by 2018 (Wirman & Jones, 2021). Despite media claims that the local arcade scene has since “died” (Luyao 2022), no empirical account has established how many centres remain or examined the rate and conditions of their disappearance. This project approaches the Hong Kong amusement game centre as an endangered form of videogame heritage and argues for the urgent documentation of these spaces as historical infrastructure rather than as nostalgic memory alone.
This study reports on a territory-wide census currently in progress that uses government licensing records to identify all legally registered amusement game centres and combines this archival dataset with systematic site visits to verify their continued operation. Scheduled to replicate an earlier survey conducted under the same temporal conditions, the project establishes a longitudinal method for measuring closure, survival, and spatial distribution across time. This approach treats licensing documents as historical sources and the physical arcade as a material artefact, enabling the writing of videogame history through urban space, regulation, and commercial practice.
Attention is given to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic as a moment of structural rupture. Hong Kong’s anti-epidemic measures required the prolonged closure of leisure venues and imposed distancing regulations that were fundamentally incompatible with the spatial density and machine-to-machine proximity on which arcade play depends (Harb 2020a). While these measures are frequently cited in public discourse as a cause of the sector’s decline(1000regrets, 2023), their actual effects on the number and distribution of operating centres remain undocumented. By producing an updated census, the project provides the first empirical basis for evaluating these claims. At the same time, the study examines the continued circulation of arcade imagery and machines within contemporary cultural contexts, including their appearance in local advertising campaigns with major brands such as Levis (2018) and McDonalds (2026) along with their incorporation into museum and curatorial events such as M+ at Night (2024). These recontextualisations position the arcade less as a functioning commercial venue and more as a symbol of collective memory, retro aesthetics, and local cultural identity. The project therefore distinguishes between the material disappearance of arcades as everyday play spaces and their persistence as heritage objects and mediated representations.
By documenting a rapidly vanishing form of location-based play, this study contributes to the historiography of videogames beyond software and platforms. It proposes a repeatable method for recording arcade decline in real time and argues that Hong Kong represents a distinctive case in which regulatory frameworks, urban density, and post pandemic economic conditions intersect to reshape the afterlife of arcade culture.

Ambiguous control: Designing for indeterminacy and agency negotiation

October 27, 2026

Interaction designers are increasingly challenging the status quo and enabling reflection through the design of provocative artefacts. Critical design uses speculation, subversion, and ambiguity to encourage audiences to consider the social, cultural, and ethical implications of technological products. Uncomfortable interactions intentionally provoke discomfort to support enlightenment and critical reflection on difficult topics. This research is situated at the intersection of these two practices, where interaction designers explore the use of discomfort to enable critical investigation and mediation among public audiences.
This practice-based research explores discomfort through control – subverting the ‘users in control’ norm and disturbing the ideology of human autonomy and agency – as provocation. Applying the Research through Design methodology and motivated by drift or emergence through design exploration and the development of design sensibility, I designed three spatial, interactive installations that materialise power imbalances in love, clinical hierarchy, and contemporary healthcare technologies. Engaging with the inflatable or mixed-material interfaces of these installations, the participants satirically and playfully enacted asymmetrical power dynamics with their bodies. The results from post-experience interviews and reflexive thematic analysis reveal ambiguity in control: experiences when the participants could not distinguish between when they were in control of the interactive systems and when they were not, consequently supporting reflection.
This thesis proposes a definition and elaborates on the experiential qualities of ambiguous control as its main theoretical contribution. The concept is defined as an embodied experience of indeterminacy concerning who (human, computational, or any agent) is in control of the interactions between people and technology. Such experiences can be identified through three experiential qualities: Waver occurs when we fluctuate between endeavouring to understand how to control the system and submitting to our inability to achieve it. Misrecognition emerges when our perception of the control state does not align with the true or externally observed state. Irresolution is the final unresolvedness, when our assumptions about the situation cannot be settled. Furthermore, this thesis theorises that ambiguous control not only obscures our perception but may also alter how we think about our perceptions, our assumptions, and our ways of knowing. These contributions can support the phenomenological analysis of other experiences and guide future design for ambiguous control as a space of playful indeterminacy, inviting negotiation and reparation of sociotechnical norms.

Book of Abstracts: DASTS Conference 29-30 June 2026

September 2, 2026

This experimental panel invites thinking and doing timelines of digitalization by the means of writing in a public wiki: a lived archive, remaining accessible and editable after the conference. More than a shared knowledge base, we hope for this infrastructure to serve as a tool for exploring and thinking about temporalities of digitalization.

This panel invites engagement with timelining as both object of inquiry and method of knowledge production. We propose a deliberately multiple and collaborative approach: a shared wiki where competing temporalities, scales, and standpoints can hopefully coexist and link to one another. We envision the wiki to focus on digitalization in private and public sectors, geographically anchored in the Danish realm.

We plan two 90-minute sessions. The first opens with a very brief introduction to the wiki infrastructure and a short remark on the politics of timelining, followed by participant presentations. The second session is dedicated to collaborative writing: participants will work in to add, annotate, and interconnect entries. The wiki will remain publicly accessible after the conference as a growing hypertext resource for STS scholarship on Danish digitalization.

Who launched that initiative?

September 2, 2026

The abstract examines how discursive authorities within the contemporary Danish gameindustry—particularly following recent institutionalization efforts—are perceived and potentially resisted by early-careerfounders in small, local start-up game studios as they deliberate on their own game productions. First, the submission presents an original timeline of the Danish game industry. The timeline highlights instances in which public programs, private organizations, and grassroots movements intersect to structure Denmark’s digital game sector. Second, the submission analyzes ten semi-structured interviews with founders of start-up game companies, focusing on their expectations and concerns regarding the future of the Danish game industry. The interviews were conducted in autumn 2024 and spring 2025. While the timeline documents institutional developments across three decades, the interviews suggest that progression narratives surrounding the recent institutionalization are more complex and ambivalent. This submission contributes to praxiological challenges of regional framing by critically scrutinizing a timeline of the Danish game industry.

Game Industry Timeline

September 2, 2026

In 2022, Europe prioritized strengthening video games’ cultural and creative dimensions for 2023–2026. A few years later, Denmark launched Europe’s first game institute to support original Danish games and called it a “new heyday” for the industry (Games Denmark 2024). European and Scandinavian game development thrives through distinct national frameworks, politics, and communities, backed by art funding, education, and grassroots efforts (e.g. Jørgensen, Sandqvist and Sotamaa 2015). Such support has emerged at pivotal moments across decades in policies, industry, and communities (O’Brien 2023). Amid rapid local and global changes, documenting industry history enables learning from the past and strengthens collective identity among game makers.

This paper outlines methods for creating the first timeline of the Danish game industry context. It discusses opportunities and challenges in identifying key events and involving stakeholders. The timeline documents formative policies and entities shaping commerce, education, and artistry over 25 years, up to recent institutionalization, aiming to understand their impact.

Rosenberg and Grafton (2010) note that “our idea of time is so wrapped up with the metaphor of the line that taking them apart seems virtually impossible” (13), yet “these timelines are not without history themselves” (10). Timelines identify sequences as a basis for causal relations, but sequence alone does not prove causality (cf. Lunteren 2019). Game industry research is generally marked by the struggle of navigating and challenging biases from relying on anecdotal accounts from the developers themselves and navigating company practices of trade secrecy and workplace promotion (O’Donnell 2014).

A timeline of the Danish game industry ecosystem, in our view, should not imply institutions manage games and people predictably. While risking “temporally simplified narratives,” it helps question skewed developer accounts (Kultima, Ojanen and Nylund 2024, 178). Our paper describes gathering alternative evidence from a variety of stakeholders. We share our journey in answering the questions: What should go onto a timeline of the Danish game industry? and How to gather all that matters?

From this chronology, we traced overlapping, and sometimes conflicting, public programs and private interests, highlighting timeline limitations for developing more sensitive industry data points. We gathered development condition-changing events
History of Games 2026 Book of Abstracts
131
(e.g., laws/policies) to discuss ‘movements’ and ‘epochs’ (Fortun and Fortun 2023) collaboratively online and offline. Iterative co-design and ‘timeline interviews’ (Adriansen 2012) foregrounded a multitude of perspectives and made space for marginal voices. Parallel stories were included, recognizing no single “game industry” (Keogh 2023) but diverging histories of “who and why we are.”

Spanning just a few decades, the timeline further overlaps with individuals’ “lifelines” (Gramling and Carr 2004) as well as game studios’ corporate histories. Interviewing and co-designing with stakeholders emphasized this interdependence, rendering the timeline a living structure. Given the small size of the Danish industry, it is possible to engage people with notable personal involvement, unlike in game industry histories of Japan (Koyama 2023) or China (Nakamura and Wirman 2021). At this stage, the timeline offers no ‘historical explanations.’ Instead, it explores how institutional and communal changes serve as rhetorical devices and appeals to legitimacy (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006) for individuals to act and justify, rather than dictate, industry direction.

From Windows to Sequences: Modality-Aware Temporal Learning for Wearable Affect Sensing

August 4, 2026

Pseudo-Label Augmentation for Affect Sensing in Small Collaborative Groups

August 4, 2026

Physiological affect sensing in naturalistic group interaction is typically limited more by label density than by sensor density: wearable devices produce thousands of time windows, while self-report labels are collected only a few times per session. This paper asks how to mine more supervisory signal from sparsely labelled group sessions. More broadly, we treat this as a step toward collective-state sensing: better individual affect estimates within a team help reveal the affective structure emerging at group level. Using GroupAffect-4, a four-person collaborative dataset with wearable physiology, eye tracking, Big Five personality, and post-task VAD labels, we study a progression of label-mining strategies: no augmentation, Gaussian Process (GP) pseudo-labelling, personality-aware trust weighting, and joint personality-plus-confidence weighting under a shared target-construction pipeline. We further ask whether individual predispositions (here, Big Five personality) together with group-level context improve which pseudo-labels should be trusted. They help, but not in the originally hypothesised graded way: the compressed BFI cosine-similarity range (0.91–0.99) renders weight ordering negligible (perm p = 0.39), so personality similarity acts as a same-team membership filter rather than a calibrated trust dial. In the known-team setting, pseudo-label augmentation improves over the labelled-only baseline, with the clearest benefit coming from within-team filtering rather than from fine-grained personality ranking. With smoothing, A1–A3 are tied to rounding on Valence and Arousal, while A3 has the highest Dominance score among the augmented SVM variants; the practical choice is therefore dimension-dependent. Cross-subject LOSO transfer remains encouraging for such a small and sparsely labelled dataset, especially on Arousal, whereas strict session-isolated LOGO removes the augmentation benefit. At the current scale of only 10 groups, LOGO should be read as a conservative lower bound on unseen-group transfer rather than as a definitive ceiling, but the present evidence shows that personality weighting mainly operates as a within-team mechanism.

Six Positive Words for Talking about Theory in Games Research (in Pursuit of Interdisciplinarity)

July 14, 2026

We propose six words for talking about what a given theory or idea in games research is or does. Talking about the strengths and specialisations of each other's ideas is more likely to foster interdisciplinarity than enforcing ontological accord across our field's expanding landscape. First, we [1] review recent discussions about interdisciplinary games research and say why their recommendations don't seem optimally pluralistic. We zero in on what we take to be a promising compromise for most games scholars: Embracing middle-range theory. To bolster our rationale, we [2] discuss theoretical debates in two other young fields (film studies and organisational research) and show how they arrived at—and have been well served by—middle-range theory. Centrally, we then [3] argue for the value of six meta-synthetically derived dimensions of theory: Importance, interestingness, actionability, generality, simplicity, and accuracy. We review these six dimensions and demonstrate the framework in use. Weaknesses of our proposal are flagged prior to concluding.

Do Control Input Metrics Capture Game Feel and Skill-Challenge Balance?

July 14, 2026

Constructing the Thermal Affective Design Space for Emotion Regulation: An Autoethnographic Research Through Design Inquiry

July 14, 2026

Temperature has strong potential to mediate emotion in a range of contexts; augmenting sensory experience and/or supporting emotion regulation. Hence, there is growing interest in leveraging thermal cues for affective technologies. At present, however, the design space for thermal technologies for emotion regulation remains underexplored and largely undefined. We construct a design space for thermal affective emotion regulation technologies, clarifying the rich, expressive nature of thermal cues as a design material. We develop this through a Research through Design (RtD) approach, grounded in an 18-month autoethnographic inquiry based on the first author's emotion regulation practice. We contribute a structured design space for thermal affective interaction, linking experience and design implementation with designerly know-how. By discussing the creation of this design space we provide insights into the generative process of developing intermediate-level knowledge from autoethnographic study and design practice.

Often Discouraged, Never Refused? How Character Creator Interfaces Afford Non-Binary Gender Expression

July 14, 2026

For many trans and non-binary (NB) people video games present an important space for gender expression and exploration. Character creator interfaces (CCIs) promise one such outlet, but current theoretical vocabulary is insufficient at capturing the particular features and conditions which make NB gender expression plausible or difficult. We leverage Davis’ mechanisms and conditions framework (MCF) — an extension of affordance theory attentive to socio-technical assemblages — to analyze the ways CCIs accommodate and stymie NB gender expression. Analyzing 19 games, we find that CCIs with gender-neutral options often discourage NB gender expression, as well as reproducing cisnormative and essentialist views on gender. Yet it is also possible to find gender euphoric experiences in games with no explicit gender allowances. Based on our findings, we highlight opportunities for leveraging MCF for game design and analysis. We also outline design implications for encouraging gender play for all.

Self Determination Theory in HCI Advancing the Field

July 14, 2026

Self-determination theory (SDT) has been widely successful in human–computer interaction (HCI). It offers ready concepts, measures, and theoretical propositions for third wave HCI topics such as user experience, fun, wellbeing, motivation, or user autonomy. Still, HCI applications of SDT have been partial, at times superficial, and disconnecting—leaving great unfulfilled potential which motivated the present special issue. In this introduction, we present SDT to interested scholars, chart its use across HCI to date, and outline six advances
to move HCI toward more intentional applications of SDT. As the articles from this issue illustrate, future growth areas of SDT in HCI are in extending domain-specific models and applications, harnessing underused parts of theory, computational formalization, extending levels of analysis, facilitating design translation, and engaging in a cross-disciplinary dialogue on autonomy.

The European Parliament Virtual Role-Play Game: Results of a Player Study

July 10, 2026

The paper reports on an evaluation study of the European Parliament Virtual Role-Playing Game, a hybrid multiplayer parliamentary simulation aimed at increasing young people’s political interest and understanding of the EU legislative process. The study is based on data from pre- and post-questionnaires collected during a large-scale run of the game (303 players) at a European Youth Event. Results indicate that participants found the game to be engaging and viewed it as a helpful tool for increasing players’ political interest and knowledge. At the same time, several areas for improvement were identified, such as the need for more flexible time allocation. These considerations will be addressed in the next version of the game.

Smart Cellular Bricks for Decentralized Shape Classification and Damage Recovery

July 3, 2026

<p dir="ltr">Biological systems possess remarkable capabilities for self-recognition and morphological regeneration, often relying solely on local interactions. Inspired by these decentralized processes, we present a novel system of physical 3D bricks—simple cubic units equipped with local communication, processing, and sensing—that are capable of inferring their global shape class and detecting structural damage. Leveraging Neural Cellular Automata, a learned, fully-distributed algorithm, our system enables each module to independently execute the same neural network without access to any global state or positioning information. We demonstrate the ability of collections of hundreds of these cellular bricks to accurately classify a variety of 3D shapes through purely local interactions. The approach shows strong robustness to out-of-distribution shape variations and high tolerance to communication faults and failed modules. In addition to shape inference, the same decentralized framework is extended to detect missing or damaged components, allowing the collective to localize structural disruptions and to guide a recovery process. This work provides a physical realization of large-scale, decentralized self-recognition and damage detection, advancing the potential of robust, adaptive, and bio-inspired modular systems.</p>

Designing Attribution: Technical Disclosure in AI-Mediated Art

June 17, 2026

Generative AI challenges established notions of authorship in contemporary art, yet little attention has been paid to how technical aspects of AI systems are disclosed in exhibition contexts. This paper presents a qualitative analysis of 23 AI-mediated artworks, with a focused discussion of 13 cases selected to illustrate distinct disclosure practices. We examine how model architectures, data provenance, interaction modalities, and energy consumption are framed or omitted in attribution materials. Our analysis reveals recurring asymmetries: model architectures are frequently named but rarely explained, data are disclosed selectively, and energy use is systematically absent. Instead of framing technical disclosure as an obligation, we approach it as a designed practice shaped by the artist. Three disclosure strategies emerge: extended technical framing, symbolic technical naming, and strategic opacity. In a climate of growing skepticism toward AI-generated outputs, technical attribution is not neutral reporting, but an active site where legitimacy and authorship are constructed.

Picnic: Playful Music-Making with Everyday Objects and Machine Learning

June 16, 2026

We present Picnic, an interactive musical installation exploring Machine Learning (ML) as design material for embodied music-making. The system transforms everyday objects in a picnic basket into a loop-based sampler, allowing users to create rhythms by striking cups, plates, and cutlery. A microphone captures sounds that are classified in real-time by an ML model, triggering percussion samples, melodic layers, and bird calls that loop sequentially. Embracing ML’s inherent uncertainty, we intentionally used an underfitted classification model to create a playful and ambiguous music-making experience.

Machine Learning as Design Material for Music-Making

June 16, 2026

We present a Research-through-Design exploration of Machine Learning (ML) as design material in music-making. We designed Picnic, an interactive musical installation that augments everyday objects in a picnic basket into a loop-based sampler which allows users to build rhythms with a variety of percussive, harmonic and more-than-human sounds. Embracing ML’s inherent uncertainty, we intentionally used an underfitted real-time classification model to create a playful and ambiguous music-making experience with the system. Through an evaluation with 23 participants of varying musical expertise and AI interest, we found that the system’s misclassifications made participants engage in a creative dialogue, constantly adapting to its unpredictability. Furthermore, when errors occurred, participants tended to criticise themselves rather than the system, indicating a tendency to overtrust the system. Our findings contribute with insights into the potential for using ML as design material for music-making and other creative domains.

Understanding AI Support in Professional Software Engineering - An Interview Study of Development Practices and Workflows

May 22, 2026

Professional software engineering is increasingly incorporating AI support for activities such as code generation, debugging, code comprehension, and documentation. While existing research has largely focused on evaluating the impact of AI on productivity and performance, less attention has been given to understanding how software engineers integrate AI into their everyday work and how they reason about its use in practice.
This short paper presents an interview study with 13 professional software engineers from seven companies, each with more than five years of experience and active use of AI tools in their daily work. Through semi-structured interviews, we explored AI usage across development tasks, how AI is integrated into their workflows, and how developers perceive and interact with AI support. Thematic analysis revealed four themes: AI Collaboration, AI Integration, Mental Models, and Workflow.
Our findings show that developers use AI across a spectrum ranging from a productivity tool to a collaborative coding partner and, in some cases, toward more agentic assistants, with interaction patterns varying according to task type and developer experience. AI adoption and integration are further shaped by organizational factors such as workplace provisioning, compliance constraints, and resistance to adoption. Participants also demonstrated a cautious and deliberate use of AI, consistently validating generated outputs and avoiding AI support during early problem diagnosis.
These findings contribute to understanding the role of AI support in professional software engineering practice and provide foundations for future empirical studies of AI-assisted software engineering.

Using Biometrics to Understand AI-Assisted Coding Performance and its Perception

May 18, 2026

GroupAffect-4: A Multimodal Dataset of Four-Person Collaborative Interaction

May 18, 2026