FW-HTF-R: Collaborative Research: Virtual Meeting Support for Enhanced Well-Being and Equity for Game Developers

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The COVID-19 pandemic ushered in a new era of remote work, highlighting barriers to well-being, equity, and inclusion. Virtual meeting fatigue, the exhaustion that occurs after long periods of videoconferencing, has been identified as especially harmful to women and people of color, compounding common face-to-face inequities like unequal talking time and interruptions in meetings. To develop more inclusive and equitable remote workspaces, this research asks: How can future virtual meeting platforms better support well-being and social equity? To address this question, the project focuses on a uniquely appropriate group: video game developers, who rely heavily on virtual meetings within teams with varied expertise (i.e., design, programming, and art), represent an estimated $160 billion industry (over $40 billion domestic), and grapple with issues of social equity in the workplace. The interdisciplinary research is using insights from these workers to identify general best practices for virtual meetings among diverse teams to minimize fatigue and improve well-being, equity, and inclusion. The project uses a mixed-methodological approach to pinpoint and test virtual meeting-platform features that influence user welfare. Study 1 utilizes natural language processing of social media to develop a broad, inductive understanding of how virtual meeting elements relate to well-being and social equity. Study 2 utilizes a survey of remote workers in an exploratory analysis of how virtual meeting features statistically relate to user welfare. Study 3 uses targeted interviews to qualitatively interpret broader insights about virtual meetings within the context of video game developers. Study 4 uses an online experiment to test hypotheses about which specific virtual meeting features enhance video game-developer welfare. Study 5 prototypes and user tests a virtual reality meeting platform with game development teams to confirm which design features promote well-being and social equity. A public “Guide to Virtual Meetings for Well-Being and Equity” is being developed based on insights from these studies.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.