2026-08-26 · paper-digest
Byers et al.: Who Is Player Time Designed For? — Fukai Reads
A peer-reviewed CHI 2026 paper (Best Paper Honourable Mention) by Thomas Byers, Martin Gibbs and Bjorn Nansen. Twenty hour-long interviews with AAA, indie, mobile and live-service developers produce a grounded account of how the time-shaped parts of a game get decided inside a studio: undocumented intuition, metrics spanning seconds to months, and design that works backwards from a number. The authors close with four heuristics — and they land squarely on anyone shipping a daily puzzle.
