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Ahmetovic et al.: Handing half your controller to someone else — Fukai Reads
A study from the University of Milan on how people with upper-limb impairments operate games. The authors built GamePals, a framework that splits control in off-the-shelf titles, and had 13 participants play Rocket League with a human copilot and with a software copilot. Seven said they could not have played without support, while participants also mistook the copilot's actions for their own.
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.
Geheeb et al.: Let an LLM Poke at Your Game Design Pillars — Fukai Reads
A paper on game design pillars and LLMs by Julian Geheeb and colleagues at the Technical University of Munich. Pillars are heavily used in industry but almost unexamined academically; the paper gives them a formal definition and quality criteria, then hands structural checking, contradiction detection and feature evaluation to an LLM in a prototype called SPINE. A 42-hour game jam and interviews with four developers produce a consistent picture: useful at the moment of putting a pillar into words, thinning with each rewrite iteration, and unable to recognise deliberate juxtaposition when flagging contradictions. Peer-reviewed at FDG '26.
Luo et al.: How AI Delivers Help Matters as Much as the Help Itself — Fukai Reads
A paper by Luo et al. (UC Santa Barbara) on how a mixed-initiative AI delivers help. Using Rush Hour puzzles, they compare on-demand (Button) help with inactivity-triggered (Timer) help, and show that although task performance is nearly identical, the Timer mode earns more positive perceptions of the AI. Accepted to IUI '26.
