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Women face pervasive biases in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), and games may be one avenue through which biases can be reduced. We tested whether embodying a woman scientist in virtual reality (VR) leads to more positive attitudes toward women in STEM. We also examined the effect of revealing the scientist character’s gender earlier or later in the game based on previous work indicating that a later reveal may lead to greater identification with the character. Undergraduate men (N = 96) played a physicist in a VR game in which they were randomly assigned to a man or a woman avatar whose gender they saw earlier or later in the game. Compared to participants in the man scientist condition, participants in the woman scientist condition felt more positively about women and viewed the category of woman as more overlapping with the category of scientist; however, they viewed their own scientist character more negatively. Furthermore, in both avatar conditions, participants viewed the scientist character as less competent after playing. In addition, there were no effects of the early versus late reveal on attitudes toward women scientists or toward the scientist character. Finally, there were no effects of game conditions on implicit biases, perceptions of the climate for women in STEM, stereotype endorsement, or game enjoyment. Together, this study suggests that VR interventions may decrease some negative attitudes toward women in STEM but are not a panacea for the pervasive biases against women in STEM.

Despite the international prohibition on torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, torture became more prevalent as a counter-terrorism instrument after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. While torture is not new, the post-9/11 practice of torture exhibited its own distinctive characteristics. This chapter examines two key trends. First, the United States argued that aggressive or ‘enhanced’ interrogation techniques did not amount to torture or ill-treatment, despite fairly clear international legal authority to the contrary. Secondly, even where torture was prohibited, some state personnel acted in excess of their domestic legal authority in interrogating or detaining suspects. While sometimes dismissed as the misconduct of a few ‘bad apples’, their individual responsibility can only be understood in the light of the prevailing military and political institutional cultures generated by the ‘war on terror’ and the protection of the ‘homeland’. This chapter situates these practices within the international legal framework on torture and remedies for it. It concludes by examining efforts to secure accountability for US torture in the US, foreign courts, and international fora, in relation to both those who exceeded domestic legal authority and those who acted under the cover of it.

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 personality measures one week prior to writing about a personal experience being the target of bias. Results indicated that self-esteem, public self-consciousness, and need for cognition may play an important role in predicting individuals' reactions to communicating their own experience with social bias. Specifically, higher scores on the Public Self-Consciousness Scale were correlated with more negative emotions (measured with the PANAS), whereas higher scores on the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale were correlated with more positive emotions. Higher scores on the Need for Cognition Scale were associated with heightened positive and negative reactions. Thus, personality variables appear to be an important moderator of the short-term outcomes of expressive writing.

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 experiments, involving a strategy game that puts players in the role of princesses, revealed a positive impact of delaying the timing of the revelation of the characters' gender (Study 1) and reducing the degree of femininity of the illustrated representation of the characters (Study 2) on boys' evaluations of the game, level of experience-taking (identification and role assumption) with the princess characters, and shift in both gender perceptions and self-perceptions. Together, these findings illustrate that strategic design choices can facilitate boys' adoption of cross-gender personae and open the door to malleability in adherence to rigid gender roles and norms.

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 basic question of whether transferring a public health game from an analog to a digital format would impact players’ perceptions of the game and the efficacy of the game for stimulating changes to beliefs and cognitions. Results revealed that the digital version of the game, despite being a nearly identical translation, was perceived by players to be more complicated than the analog version and, consequently, was less effective at facilitating learning and attitude change. The authors propose several explanations for this finding, based on psychological theories, to help elucidate critical distinctions between non-digital and digital game play phenomenology.

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 in which players provide descriptive metadata "tags" for digitized images. An initial study showed that, compared to frames emphasizing personal enjoyment or altruistic motivations, a frame emphasizing a "growing community of players" solicited significantly fewer contributions. A second study tested the hypothesis that this lower level of contribution resulted from social loafing (the tendency to exert less effort in collective tasks in which contributions are anonymous and pooled). Results revealed that, compared to a no-frame control condition, a frame emphasizing the preponderance of other players reduced contribution levels and game replay likelihood, whereas a frame emphasizing the scarcity of fellow players increased contribution and replay levels. Various strategies for counteracting social loafing in crowdsourcing contexts are discussed.

A lack of quality metadata is a key problem encountered with mass-digitization projects as institutions strive to "go digital." This paper reports on a pilot study of Metadata Games, a software system that uses computer games to collect information about archival images in libraries and archives as these institutions digitize millions of items across national collections. Games offer a unique advantage for collecting metadata because they can entice users who might normally be inclined to visit archives to explore humanities content and, in the process, contribute to vital records, and they can work in a wide-scale, distributed fashion to collect much more metadata than a typical archives staff member could contribute alone in the same time frame. Metadata Games can be used to enhance knowledge about images associated with particular disciplines and fields, or in interdisciplinary collections. This open-source system is easily customized to meet each institution's needs. By inviting mass participation, Me...

Mary Flanagan is a game designer, artist, and media theorist based in New York City who leads the Tiltfactor research group at Hunter College. Flanagan's artwork has been shown internationally at venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art, ACM SIGGRAPH (Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques), Ars Electronica, the Moving Image Centre in Auckland, ARCO Madrid, and the Guggenheim. She is author or co-editor of three books, including a book on the popular Sims? game.

In an era when new technology and media increasingly infiltrate all facets of our lives, and progress on gender, racial, and other forms of equity appears excruciatingly slow, now seems a critical time to examine new technologies and their potential value for feminist activism. Since its public emergence in the late 1980s, the internet has been simultaneously criticized as oppressive and heralded as empowering for different communities. In this review, we will examine some of the emerging forms that feminist activist art is taking in relation to the internet and consider how technology has contributed to the goals of feminist artists and activists. It is important to contextualize this review by considering the conflicted term "cyberfeminism" (Braidotti 1996; Gajjala 1999; Sollfrank 2002). Since the mid-1990s, the term cyberfeminism has been used to investigate the ways in which technology, especially new media and internet technology, and gender interact. Cyberfeminists investigate the celebratory yet contradictory nature of new technologies and work to determine methods of appropriation, intervention, or parallel practice to insert women's issues into the dominant technology discourse. While many women working with technology have regarded this term suspiciously, feminist activist artist Faith Wilding pointed to the possibilities and optimism inherent within it. In her influential article, "Where is Feminism in Cyberfeminism?" Wilding asserts that "cyberfeminists have the chance to create new formations of feminist theory and practice which address the complex new social conditions created by global technologies" (1 998). Prominent feminist theorist Rosi Braidotti noted that a central aim of cyberfeminism was the breakdown and disintegration of contemporary gender boundaries (1996). Cyberfeminism as a liberatory ideal has not yet achieved its potential, in part because of larger societal pressures surrounding the information technology fields. If a fundamental aim of cyberfeminism is to change and reorganize social and political realities by engaging technology to address gender issues, little progress has been achieved for women. In the United States, for instance, the dearth of women, especially women of color, in computer science and technology studies and professions has been described by researchers as a social justice issue (Wardle, Martin, and Clarke 2004). Female enrollment in information technology academic areas continues to decline, and the current gender imbalance in computing and new technology areas such as game and software development, hinders progress for women in social equity, equal access, and empowerment

Young people interact with games, animations, and simulations all of the time. But few of them are able to create interactive media. The obstacle: traditional programming languages are too difficult to learn and understand. This panel brings together a group of researchers, developers, and educators who are aiming to democratize the activity of programming. They are developing a new generation of programming environments that enable children and teens to create their own interactive games, stories, animations, and simulations. Panelists will discuss and critique their programming environments, then set up interactive demonstration stations for focused exploration and small-group discussion. Audience members will also have the opportunity to download the environments onto their own laptops, so that they can experiment in greater depth.

As information technologies become increasingly prevalent in children’s lives, designers must make difficult design decisions regarding both the developmental constraints of the user population (e.g., cognitive capacity, literacy, attention span, etc.) and implications for fundamental human values (e.g., information access, privacy, autonomy, informed consent, psychological welfare, etc.). Whether interacting with digital reference systems (Silverstein, 2005), robotic pets (Kahn, Friedman, Perez-Granados, & Freier, in press), or educational games to teach young girls programming (Flanagan, Howe, & Nissenbaum, 2005), children are continuously constructing knowledge about these information systems and utilizing that knowledge to reflect upon larger domains of life such as the personal-psychological, socialconventional, and moral.