Regan Mandryk

Regan Mandryk is a Canada Research Chair in Digital Gaming and Immersive Social Technologies and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Victoria, Canada who has made foundational and significant contributions in modeling the emotional experience and personality of players, facilitating social connection through play, combating toxicity within multiplayer games, and harnessing games for the assessment and treatment of mental health. Regan led Games research in the Canadian GRAND Network, led the first ever Canadian graduate training program on games user research (SWaGUR.ca), and was pivotal in establishing the gaming research community within SIGCHI—particularly in co-establishing and leading the ACM CHI PLAY conference. She was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists in 2014, received the University of Saskatchewan New Researcher Award in 2015, the Canadian Association for Computer Science’s Outstanding Young Canadian Computer Science Researcher Prize in 2016, the prestigious E.W.R. Steacie Fellowship from NSERC in 2018, was inducted into the SIGCHI Academy in 2023, and received the Canadian Human Computer Communications Society’s Achievement Award in 2023.

Keynote

Innovations in Social Gaming
Games have long been used to support social interaction and create shared experiences that draw us closer together. Digital games are increasingly being used to form and maintain relationships, and in-game friendships have been shown to help satisfy our need to belong and can even combat loneliness, improving our wellbeing. In this talk, Mandryk will present her perspective on the benefits of social gaming—including in casual, esports, and streaming contexts, show how the benefits can be thwarted by toxicity and harassment, and discuss innovative game technologies that can better connect players, streamers, spectators, and fans.

Hanneke Scholten

Hanneke Scholten is an assistant professor at the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry/Psychology at Erasmus Medical Center, and co-director of the Games for Emotional and Mental Health (GEMH) lab. Her mission is to understand the world young people live in and to create or streamline digital experiences that matter to youth and improve their wellbeing. Her research evolves around the design and evaluation of evidence-based interactive experiences – oftentimes games – that promote emotional resilience and behaviour change for youth.

Keynote

The hybrid playground: Games as interactive spaces for discovery and identity
development.
Young people increasingly grow up in a hybrid ecosystem where physical and digital environments intersect. The traditional playground, once central to development, now partly exists in digital spaces such as games. While often framed negatively in public debate, games—like classic play settings—offer valuable opportunities to practice skills. They support cognitive, social, and emotional growth and play a key role in shaping narrative identity during adolescence. Unlike passive media, games provide agency and immersive experiences that foster reflection and self-discovery. This talk examines how hybrid play spaces positively contribute to youth development and identity formation and how these spaces could be built in an evidence-based yet engaging way.

Hannah Boeijkens

Hannah Boeijkens is a researcher at the Participatory Innovation in Youth Care and Prevention research group at Avans University of Applied Sciences. With a background in neuroscience and industry experience as a designer for the Tovertafel for Children—a series of light projection games supporting the social-emotional development of children in special education—she brings both scientific and creative perspectives to her work. She specialises in co-creation with children and is particularly interested in mental health and how we can help young people gain the resilience and skills they need to navigate an increasingly uncertain future.

Keynote

On Metrics and Meaning: Combining scientific and experiential knowledge for impactful game design.
Is the impact of our games on players always clearly measurable? This talk dives into the gap between scientific knowledge and the richness of what players experience. Inspired by a classic thought experiment from neurophilosophy, we explore why knowing about something isn’t the same as living it—and why that matters in game design. While research often leans heavily on data and validation, the messy, meaningful experiences of players deserve careful attention. Through academic and industry examples on working with children with special needs, Hannah advocates for including participatory methods in research and design to create games that truly make a difference in the lives of our players.

Geoff Engelstein

Geoff Engelstein is an award-winning table-top game designer and educator. His game titles include Space Cadets, The Expanse, and the Super Skill Pinball series, and book titles include Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design, Achievement Relocked, and The Universe Explained with a Cookie. Podcast credits include the long-running GameTek series on The Dice Tower, and Ludology.  He is also on the faculty of the NYU Game Center.

Keynote

Human Psychology and the Player Experience: Leveraging Cognitive Biases
Loss aversion is a core cognitive bias in human psychology. Simply stated, losses make people feel worse than gains make them feel better – the negative emotions from losing money, for example, are stronger than the positive emotions from gaining the same amount. Understanding this and other cognitive biases allows game designers to fine tune the emotional engagement and reactions of players to the ludic experience. This talk will survey a number of experiments exploring these biases and discuss how they have been used in various designs. The goal is to give a toolkit to the designer to craft mechanics and systems for specific effects.