Geoff Kaufman

Carnegie Mellon University | CMU · Human-Computer Interaction Institute

The rapid developments of new communication technologies have facilitated the popularization of digital games, which has translated into an exponential growth of the game industry in the last decades. The ubiquitous presence of digital games has resulted in an expansion of the applications of these games from mere entertainment purposes to a great...

With the growing ubiquity of wearable devices, sensed physiological responses provide new means to connect with others. While recent research demonstrates the expressive potential for biosignals, the value of sharing these personal data remains unclear. To understand their role in communication, we created Significant Otter, an Apple Watch/iPhone a...

Volunteer content moderators are essential to the social media ecosystem through the roles they play in managing and supporting online social spaces. Recent work has described moderation primarily as a functional process of actions that moderators take, such as making rules, removing content, and banning users. However, the nuanced ways in which vo...

Over 35% of Americans belong to racial minority groups. Racism targeting these individuals results in a range of harmful physical, psychological, and practical consequences. The present work aims to shed light on the current sense-making and support-seeking practices exhibited by targets of racism, as well as to identify the core needs and barriers...

We explore the potential for expressive biosignals, or displays of sensed physiological data as social cues, to influence perceptions of a member of a stigmatized group. In a between-subjects experiment (N=62) participants read a fictional interview with a drug addict in prison, and rated their empathy and closeness with the interviewee. Participan...

Harsher socio-cultural sanctions against cross-gender role play amongst boys versus girls create comparatively greater pressure for boys to adhere to traditional gender roles [29]. At the same time, strategically orchestrated play experiences may offer a potential means of counteracting this pressure. In the present research, a pair of randomized e...

While past work has admirably supported crowd workers in improving their work performance, we argue that there is also value in designing for enjoyment untied from work outcomes--- what we call "tangential play.'' To this end, we present Turker Tales, a Google Chrome extension that uses tangential play to encourage crowd workers to write, share, an...

Game narrative and theming are ways in which game designers can affect player experience. In this work, we incorporate theories of emotion into game design, to explore the relationship between aesthetic elements and player experience. We designed and playtested two differently themed variants of the game Outbreak, a 'Horror' and a 'Sanitized' versi...

Ensuring high-quality, civil social interactions remains a vexing challenge in many online spaces. In the present work, we introduce a novel approach to address this problem: using psychologically "embedded" CAPTCHAs containing stimuli intended to prime positive emotions and mindsets. An exploratory randomized experiment (N = 454 Mechanical Turk wo...

Chatbots have grown as a space for research and development in recent years due both to the realization of their commercial potential and to advancements in language processing that have facilitated more natural conversations. However, nearly all chatbots to date have been designed for dyadic, one-on-one communication with users. In this paper we p...

We present Animo, a smartwatch app that enables people to share and view each other's biosignals. We designed and engineered Animo to explore new ground for smartwatch-based biosignals social computing systems: identifying opportunities where these systems can support lightweight and mood-centric interactions. In our work we develop, explore, and e...

Obituaries are an understudied form of popular media culture. Well-known scientists can inspire the general public to learn more about their field of study, and such exposure can occur posthumously through obituaries and related press coverage of a scientist’s passing. In the current studies, we examined the influence of physicist Stephen Hawking’s...

In 2013, scholars laid out a framework for a sustainable, ethical future of crowd work, recommending career ladders so that crowd work can lead to career advancement and more economic mobility. Five years later, we consider this vision in the context of Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT). To understand how workers currently view their experiences on AMT,...

Online communities provide a forum for rich social interaction and identity development for billions of Internet users worldwide. In order to manage these communities, platform owners have increasingly turned to commercial content moderation, which includes both the use of moderation algorithms and the employment of professional moderators, rather...

In this paper, we present a design model of curiosity that articulates the relationship between uncertainty and curiosity, and defines the role of failure and question-asking within that relationship. We explore ways to instantiate failure and question-asking within a cooperative tabletop game, share data from multiple playtests both in the field a...

Research in computer-supported cooperative work has historically focused on behaviors of individuals at scale, using frames of interpersonal interaction such as Goffman's theories of self-presentation. These framings result in research detailing characteristics, personal identities, and behaviors of large numbers of connected and interacting indivi...

We explore how digital and non-digital games express diversity through characters, understood as representations of marginalized groups to which the player may or may not belong. We identify a range of techniques using visual design, abstract character representation, delineation of game setting and roles, conversation design, and the design of rul...

In 2013, scholars laid out a framework for a sustainable, ethical future of crowd work, recommending career ladders so that crowd work can lead to career advancement and more economic mobility [Kittur et al. 2013]. Five years later, we consider this vision in the context of Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT). To understand how workers currently view thei...

We present a mixed methods study of the online forum r/RoastMe, a comedy-focused subreddit of the parent site reddit.com, wherein members post photos of themselves to be ridiculed by other members; the site generally encourages harsh and offensive forms of humor in these interper-sonal exchanges. We conducted semi-structured interviews with sixteen...

We present a mixed methods study of the online forum r/RoastMe, a comedy-focused subreddit of the parent site reddit.com, wherein members post photos of themselves to be ridiculed by other members; the site generally encourages harsh and offensive forms of humor in these interpersonal exchanges. We conducted semi-structured interviews with sixteen...

In two studies, the present research tested whether a paper-based game intervention that guides participants into understanding and questioning their assumptions about gender can decrease biases. Participants in Study 1 (N = 143 college students) and Study 2 (N = 341 high school students) played a game in which they either had to realize that a sci...

Although the effect of biases and stereotype threat on women in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields is well documented, less is known about how men and women attribute an undergraduate woman’s anxieties in a STEM class. We examined how undergraduate men and women perceive a woman facing emotional struggles in a physics class (S...

Although the vignette method is widely used in psychology, it is often implemented without the key feature of iterative decision making that can affect the eventual outcome of the vignettes. This Tutorial provides an explanation of how to use Twine, an interactive narrative platform, to create vignettes with iterative decision making. Twine is an e...

We are exploring the concept of expressive biosignals: leveraging wearable technologies to introduce sensed physiological data as cues for social perception. Biosignals can help us achieve a deeper understanding of each other by revealing or clarifying the psychological processes that underlie our subjective experience. We conducted an exploratory...

Expressive autobiographical writing has generally been shown to have positive psychological effects, as well as health benefits. The current study examined whether dispositional factors moderate the emotional benefits of expressive writing about personal experiences with social bias. Participants (N = 154 undergraduate students) completed personali...

The present work explores the social dynamics of expressive biosignals: leveraging wearable technologies to introduce sensed physiological data as a means of clarifying the emotional or psychological processes underlying our subjective experiences. We developed an Android application that linked to a wearable heart rate sensor and allowed for the d...

In this study, we consider what Nintendo's widely downloaded Miitomo mobile application, which simultaneously promotes non-idealized self-fictionalization and authentic self-presentation, can suggest to us about self-presentation and technology design. Ten groups of four friends each (N=40), all novice users, engaged with Miitomo for one week, and...

Persuasive games tackling serious issues in a literal, explicit fashion are far less likely to succeed in changing attitudes or behaviors than are games that take the more “stealthy” approach of embedding persuasive messages within a game’s content or context. The “Embedded Design” model, developed by the design and research team at Tiltfactor Labo...

Treehouse Dreams is a card game that can simultaneously function as an ice breaker for children engaged in group activities, and as a research tool for interviewing children. The game, which asks players to collectively imagine a fantasy treehouse, incorporates game design techniques that encourage openness and sharing. The game is also easily cust...

The present research investigated whether digital and non-digital platforms activate differing default levels of cognitive construal. Two initial randomized experiments revealed that individuals who completed the same information processing task on a digital mobile device (a tablet or laptop computer) versus a non-digital platform (a physical print...

With an increasing reliance on crowdsourcing games as data-gathering tools, it is imperative to understand how to motivate and sustain high levels of voluntary contribution. To this end, the present work directly compared the impact of various "emphasis frames," highlighting distinct intrinsic motivational factors, used to describe an online game i...

Prosocial games often utilize a direct, explicit approach to engage players with serious real-life scenarios and present information about key societal issues. This approach, however, may limit a game’s persuasive impact and ability to produce beneficial outcomes, particularly when the apparent aims of the game trigger players’ psychological defens...

In light of a growing body of work demonstrating the ability of games to transform cognitive skill sets and change attitudes toward social issues, including in public health, it is crucial to understand the potentially divergent experiences and outcomes afforded by analog and digital platforms. In a recent empirical study, the authors addressed the...

This article presents the design and empirical investigation of the "RePlay Health" game ( www.replayhealth.com/ ), a novel "role-playing sport" derived from a complex, data-driven, computational simulation of healthcare dynamics. By immersing players in a fictional world in which they take on the role of characters facing specific behavioral and e...

The present research introduces the concept of experience-taking-the imaginative process of spontaneously assuming the identity of a character in a narrative and simulating that character's thoughts, emotions, behaviors, goals, and traits as if they were one's own. Six studies investigated the degree to which particular psychological states and fea...