common::ground: A Gamified Toolkit for Facilitating Meaningful Interactive Sessions

This paper introduces common::ground, a flexible toolkit that assists facilitators in conducting more engaging, meaningful, inclusive, and sustainable icebreaking sessions for culturally diverse groups.Icebreakers play a crucial role in fostering initial social cohesion, but many existing solutions fail to engage participants from diverse backgrounds, leading to superficial conversations or discomfort due to language barriers and mismatched expectations.Using a mixed-methods research process, we conducted secondary research, collected survey (n=19) and interview (n=8) data, refined prototypes through iterative design, and performed usability studies (n=9) in an academic setting.Our findings demonstrate that structured resources, progressive conversation prompts, and facilitator-centered support significantly improve participant comfort and engagement.Usability study revealed high design goals alignment, moderate to strong usability, and overall positive participant feedback.We aim to contribute to the established works in user experience and interactive sessions, offering a validated design intervention and a model for further explorations in cross-cultural participant engagement.