Nisha Devasia

"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.

2. Meaningful gaming experiences in a particularly stressful time of life -> perceived improvements in mental/physical health. While self-suppressive escapism (Stenseng et al., 2012) may have been the initial motivation, self-expansive escapism was often the meaningful experience in and of itself.

We also used GLMMs to identify which components from the theoretical models of eudaimonic gaming experiences might correspond to certain effects. Most notably, we saw that:
1. Narrative insight/being emotionally moved -> inward-focused changes. About 80% of the games mentioned had parable stories.

From a qualitative analysis of 166 responses, we found that people reported on the following 5 kinds of effects:
1. Changes in perception of self/worldviews
2. Career
3. Interest driven learning
4. Perceived improvements in physical/mental health
5. Social connection

It's probably early to be posting for #CHIPLAY2025, but I'm excited about this paper! arxiv.org/pdf/2507.18084 tl;dr Players sometimes have very personally meaningful or eudaimonic gaming experiences and we investigated what kinds of effects people reported those experiences had on their lives.

At 17, Hannah Cairo Solved a Major Math Mystery | Quanta Magazine After finding the homeschooling life confining, the teen petitioned her way into a graduate class at Berkeley, where she ended up disproving a 40-year-old conjecture.

What a fantastic accomplishment -- and what a fantastic story! www.quantamagazine.org/at-17-hannah...

This puzzle game shows kids how they’re smarter than AI University of Washington researchers developed the game AI Puzzlers to show kids an area where AI systems still typically and blatantly fail: solving certain reasoning puzzles. In the game, users get....

UW researchers Aayushi Dangol and Julie Kientz (HCDE) and Jason Yip (iSchool) created AI Puzzlers—a game to show kids where AI systems still typically and blatantly fail: solving certain reasoning puzzles.
www.washington.edu/news/2025/07...

US senators poised to reject Trump’s proposed massive science cuts Committee gives first hint that policymakers might preserve, rather than slash, funding for US National Science Foundation and other agencies.

There may be some tiny opening to save the NSF funding. It is worth calling your Senators. This is a big deal if it can be saved.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

fully exposing me @laurenlin.bsky.social and maya camping the food line (it was really good)

“Where do you get your politics from?”

Me:

aww thanks joey <3

And finally, my AMAZING participants who get their own post. Recruiting off the internet can be hit or miss, but this was a huge hit - it was amazing and incredibly affirming to see all the wonderful practices folks have developed to express love through games.

- @elisamekler.bsky.social for inviting me to give a long form version of the DIS talk at ITU Copenhagen!
- My advisor, @juliekientz.bsky.social, for helping me turn this random idea into real research <3

Acknowledgements:
- The research idea developed while writing for the upcoming Stardew Valley volume in @drkowert.bsky.social's Psychgeist series!
- My DRG students from @uw-hcde.bsky.social who've been instrumental in prototyping/front end-ing the tool! As a backend engineer, I'm useless at that.

Generally, I want to pose the question: what does meaningful design look like for recording/reflecting on memories and experiences in digital spaces? For gaming spaces, I think it's possible to build on top of existing platforms like Discord/Steam (if you work here, please talk to me :P)

In our findings, we discuss the value of different game modalities, how partners perceive the liminality between real life and gameplay, and how people are appropriating game mechanics to express affection. We're using these findings to design a prototype for storing meaningful digital memories.

...and at the intersection of work on relational maintenance, presence-in-absence, and forming relationships online through MMOs, I wanted to ask: what can we learn from how people's existing practices around expressing intimacy through games? Could that inform game/technology design generally?

My partner of 7 years & I went long distance when I started grad school 2 years ago. We video call and text, but games are much better (in my opinion) at promoting a feeling of co-location. Weirdly, there's minimal research on how people MAINTAIN existing romantic partnerships through games...

I'll be at #DIS2025 presenting some findings from my first ever project as a PhD student (a labor of love heavily inspired by my own experiences): "Partnership through Play: Investigating How Long-Distance Couples Use Digital Games to Facilitate Intimacy" (arxiv.org/pdf/2505.09509) (details in🧵)

If you're going to be at #CHI2025, and want to talk about games for resilience, mental health, eudaimonic wellbeing, and/or learning - lmk! Games have consistently provided me strength through dark times - would love to chat about this with HCI folks. I speak Japanese and we can get lunch :)

If you, or educators you know, are interested in this work/engaging in it with your students: please reach out! Media literacy and non-reductive ways to learn media literacy are becoming more important by the day.