Nisha Devasia

me at CHI PLAY (positive)

Q&A: How video games can lead people to more meaningful lives UW researchers discuss their study which surveyed 166 gamers about how video games sparked meaningful changes in their lives.

How do video games shape who we are?
HCDE & @ischool.uw.edu researchers found that 78% of gamers reported life-changing experiences from play—from coping with stress to building identity.
Findings will be presented at @chiplay.bsky.social later this month.

www.washington.edu/news/2025/09...

There's an article about this paper now! Especially in the ✨current political climate✨, I try to remember what games (especially FF7) have instilled in me: hope in times of despair, and that fighting back can defeat the bad guys and their systems of oppression. www.washington.edu/news/2025/09...

Cropped photo of a flyer. Black text on white paper with a shine and a light reflection of the photographer behind. The top lines mention trash room, dumpster, and “Thank you for your cooperation.” The text below reads: “To do the useful thing, To say the courageous thing, To contemplate the beautiful, That is enough for one man’s life.” - T.S. Eliot

The folks who manage our building put a flyer in the elevator every week. Along with the weekly weather and notes about building rules being broken, they often add a quote. This is one I snapshotted a few weeks ago:

Charlie Kirk Was Not Practicing Politics the Right Way The mainstream media seems entirely uninterested in explaining Charlie Kirk's work.

Mainstream pundits have instantly sanitized and ignored Charlie Kirk's core political project and its impacts. He has been remembered by the mainstream press as someone they merely disagreed with, a debate me-guy whose words and actions had zero consequences:

www.404media.co/charlie-kirk...

“The problem that Democrats actually need to solve is how to effectively message in an information environment that is designed from the ground up to benefit reactionary narratives. If they don’t figure that out, they’ll end up… dreaming up middling solutions to non-existent problems.” Great article

Has anybody ever gotten the chance to ask Fletz and/or Fitzpatrick why their levels of reflection are zero-indexed?

(not complaining, just a genuine question)

This kind of rocks. Hopefully it is not AI generated

Final Fantasy LoFi Mix

When I legitimately need to study (like for my general exam) I like listening to bland lo-fi, but sometimes it gets too bland. I also like listening to video game instrumental, but sometimes I get too emotional and it makes me cry. The solution I just found: open.spotify.com/playlist/1M3...

I'm at PAX West! Let me know if you are too :) (and come check out the foundry10 booth in the tabletop free play area)

Luckily I was slouching so hopefully it's not as noticeable as I feel it is haha

Recorded my CHI PLAY presentation video, realized I was wearing my "whiskey is liquid sunshine" shirt the whole time, wondered if I should rerecord it to *not* memorialize me looking like an alcoholic into ACM YouTube for posterity, then gave up and uploaded it anyways

New preprint! A Crowdsourced Megastudy of 12 Digital Single-Session Interventions for Depression in American Adults

What's the best way to help someone overcome depression with just 10 minutes of their time online? We ran a trial (n=7,505) testing 12 diverse interventions.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

YouTube video by Nisha Devasia Game Annotator (v1)

Made a silly demo of what I'm working on right now - it's a tool for annotating while gaming, similar to annotating a book. As I mentioned in my last post, it's very inspired by ideas discussed re. critical reflection in The Well Read Game. Feedback appreciated on the MVP! youtu.be/LIdFdVaLWCI

To Fight Misinformation, We Need to Teach That Science Is Dynamic Science is a social process, and teaching students how researchers work in tandem to develop facts will make them less likely to be duped by falsehoods

8. This has been a short and honestly rather peevish thread, so if you want read more that has been written in a more equanimous tone, here's a short piece that I coauthored a few years ago, precisely about how we deal with this kind of duplicity.

How to go viral with dire-sounding – but phony – “statistical trends” Those bent on creating anti-internet panics keep rigging their presentations.

Please, I beg everyone panicking about “kids these days” to just display the full scale on the y-axis of their (not so) terrifying charts. Oh wait, maybe that story would not sell 🤔 mikemales.substack.com/p/how-to-go-...

Me not writing a paper:

(Oh, and ofc everything by @rowandaneels.bsky.social, who is already tagged in this thread)

- (Iten et al., 2018) and (Yin & Xiao, 2022) re. meaningful choices in narrative games
- (Happ et al., 2013) and (Bopp et al., 2019) re. empathy for/attachment to game characters
@pietervdheede.bsky.social feel free to DM me, I'm fresh off that project and happy to share thoughts/more papers!

I've been summoned - thanks Elisa :) Some relevant/favorite references from that paper are:
- @dpossler.bsky.social's theoretical modeling around eudaimonic gaming experiences
- (Lu & Moller, 2024) re. narrative and SDT in games
- (Tyack & Wyeth, 2020) re. relatedness in single player games
[cont.]

"To this end" "There is an opportunity to design" :melting-face:

I submitted one yesterday, thankfully about something unrelated in the interest of anonymous review haha - but yes I will definitely send some stuff over once I've created all the materials for the book club!

!!! Thank you, I loved the book! I'm actually hacking on some tools to use in a game book club setting - I've been talking about running one for almost a year, but your book gave me tangible ideas for how to actually do it well :) hopefully I'll have interesting things to report back!

Acknowledgments (although almost nobody is on Bluesky):
- My co-authors Michele and Georgia for dealing with the insane codebook
- My advisors @juliekientz.bsky.social and Jin Ha Lee for their kindness and guidance
- Jake Wobbrock, without whom I could not have figured out any of the stats

Would love to hear folks' thoughts - I'm hoping to head further down this track for my dissertation work. I also just care about eudaimonic gaming experiences a lot, so I would love to hear folks' thoughts regardless of relevance to research or not :)

In current work, we're building tools for helping kids reflect more deeply on their gaming to hopefully spur some of the processing required for those experiences to become personally meaningful. Fullerton & Farber's theory of player response is a huge inspo here. (see bsky.app/profile/docf...)

- Many of these extremely meaningful experiences happened by chance - i.e. people did not start playing the game actively seeking meaning, something often assumed in models of gaming motivation. We denote this as incidental vs. intentional. People are mostly happening into these experiences!

Common Sense Media also reports fairly low joint media engagement between parents and children when it comes to games specifically. We see this as a potential design space to explore in future work. (Would also love ideas from folks on here re. JME for kids and games.)

- More than half of participants believed that these experiences occurred when they were a formative period of life - childhood, early adolescence, or early adulthood. But there was extremely low engagement with parents, either during gaming or when discussing their meaningful gaming experience.

In the discussion, we talk about:
- Interest driven learning seems to be individually motivated, but turning those learnings into a career likely requires engagement with communities of like-minded players. More investigation needed, although games influencing people's careers is anecdotally common.