E is for Everyone: Design and Evaluation of Inclusive User Interfaces for Digital Games

新冠肺炎的流行突显了我们在沟通和协作方面对数字游戏和虚拟环境等技术的依赖。大多数在线虚拟环境(VE)和游戏为用户提供了定制他们的化身的能力，即在环境中代表他们并被其他用户看到的角色。化身定制选项通过角色创建界面(CCIS)呈现给用户。尽管在许多游戏和在线VE中都可以定制化身，但许多CCI在如何调解用户自我表征方面施加了有问题的限制。大多数关于游戏中自我表征的研究未能解释界面负担如何限制用户与游戏的互动。通常，这些负担限制了自我表现，以至于用户不可能创建具有代表性的化身。这种现象被确定为社会排斥，描述了某些用户群体(即妇女、非二元、土著人民、有色人种等)的过程。被系统地边缘化了。拟议研究计划的主要长期目标是利用包容性设计(ID)来设计、原型和评估新颖的创作工具，以产生具有社会包容性的CCIS。我将从用户体验和社会包容的角度评估使用这些工具开发的CCIS的有效性。我将设计新的理论框架来指导这些工具的设计，并设计新的方法框架来对这些CCIS进行实证评估。我将通过应用这些方法来评估现有的CCIS，并将其与新的创作工具生成的方法进行比较，从而验证这些方法。为了更好地了解游戏中的用户如何利用CCIS，我们将关注用户体验(UX)研究及其方法论。这些方法的使用为我们提供了关于CCI负担对玩家体验影响的有意义的数据。我们认为，这些数据既可以支持关于游戏中身份的学术工作，也可以为包容性CCI设计实践提供信息，同时还可以设计出可以交付给最终用户(例如游戏开发人员)的工具，用于在未来的游戏和在线VE中开发CCIS，避免现有CCIS中常见的有问题的表示问题。因此，该计划的三个主要目标是：1.调查哪些设计框架支持包容性CCIS的长期、健壮的解决方案开发；2.验证CCI生成的工具和插件以支持包容性化身设计；以及3.探索其他新的方法来进一步支持对社交包容性CCIS的评估(例如，机器学习、基于约束的布局模型等)。这项工作在许多领域都有应用，包括但不限于计算机和视频游戏行业以及其他提供化身定制功能的领域，包括社交媒体应用程序以及支持复兴的虚拟工作场所的包容性设计实践。

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted our reliance on technologies such as digital games and virtual environments for communication and collaboration. Most online virtual environments (VEs) and games offer users the ability to customize their avatar, the character that represents them within the environment and is seen by other users. Avatar customization options are presented to users via Character Creation Interfaces (CCIs). Although avatar customization is available in many games and online VEs, many CCIs impose problematic constraints on how they mediate user self-representation. Most research on self-representation in games fails to account for how interface affordances constrain user interactions with them. Often, these affordances constrain self-representation in such a way that it is impossible for users to create representative avatars. This phenomenon, identified as social exclusion, describes the processes by which certain user groups (i.e., women, non-binary, indigenous peoples, people of colour, etc.) are systematically marginalized. The primary long-term objective of the proposed research program is to employ Inclusive Design (ID) to design, prototype, and evaluate novel authoring tools to produce socially-inclusive CCIs. I will assess the effectiveness of CCIs developed with these tools, both from a user experience and social inclusion standpoint. I will devise new theoretical frameworks to inform the design of these tools, and new methodological frameworks to empirically evaluate these CCIs. I will validate these methods by applying them to evaluate existing CCIs in comparison to those produced by the novel authoring tools. To better understand how CCIs are leveraged by users in-game, we will look to User Experience (UX) research and its methodologies. The use of such methodologies provides us with meaningful data on the effect of CCI affordances on player experience. We argue that such data can both support scholarly work on identity in games, and to inform inclusive CCI design practices, while also devising tools that can be delivered to end users (e.g., game developers) to use in developing CCIs in future games and online VEs, avoiding the problematic representation issues common in existing CCIs. Thus, the three main objectives of this program are: 1. to investigate which design frameworks support long-term, robust solution development of inclusive CCIs, 2. to validate CCI-generated tools and plugins to support inclusive avatar design, and 3. to explore other novel approaches to further support the evaluation of socially inclusive CCIs (e.g., machine learning, constraint-based layout models, etc.). This work has application in many domains, including but not limited to the computer and video games industry as well as other domains that provide avatar customization as a feature, including social media applications as well as supporting inclusive design practices in the resurging virtual workplace.