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

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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.