Players as Participants: A Review of Human Participants Practices in HCI Games Research

In this systematic mapping review, we investigated practices in HCI games research that recruit human participants to present a holistic, bird’s-eye view of the domain, both for novice researchers seeking to understand the current landscape and for veterans to see how the field is evolving and what methodological gaps remain. Our corpus comprised human participant studies from all full papers at four CHI PLAY conferences and from games-related papers at four CHI conferences (total: 384 selected studies). We examined the participants’ characteristics (e.g., type, gender, age), recruitment procedures (e.g., compensation, attrition), and the study design and methods used to engage participants (e.g., study duration, research methods). Overall, we find inconsistent reporting, indicating the need to establish standards. We discuss the results in relation to similar practices in other domains and present a call to action and recommendations for the community to advance current practices.