Piecing Together Performance: Collaborative, Participatory Research-Through-Design for Better Diversity in Games

Abstract

Digital games are a multi-billion-dollar industry whose production and consumption extend globally. Representation in games is an increasingly important topic. As those who create and consume the medium grow ever more diverse, it is essential that player or user-experience research, usability, and any consideration of how people interface with their technology are exercised through inclusive and intersectional lenses. Previous research has identified how character configuration interfaces preface white-male defaults (Gardner and Tanenbaum 2018), (Gardner and Tanenbaum 2021), and (Mastro and Behm-Morawitz 2005). This study relies on 1-on-1 play interviews where diverse participants attempt to create “themselves” in a series of games and on group design activities to explore how participants may envision more inclusive character configuration interface design. Our interview findings describe specific points of tension in the process of creating characters in existing interfaces and the sketches participants–collaborators produced to challenge the homogeneity of current interface designs. This project amplifies the perspective of diverse participants–collaborators to provide constructive implications and a series of principles for designing more inclusive character configuration interfaces, which support more diverse stories and gameworlds by reconfiguring the constraints that shape those stories and gameworlds.