City University of Hong Kong
7 reports, presentations and talks by City University of Hong Kong in the Game Industry Library, the newest “Hakka Kitchen: Engagement with Culinary Cultural Heritage Through Immersive Game Play” (2026).
Documents
Hakka Kitchen: Engagement with Culinary Cultural Heritage Through Immersive Game Play
Hakka Kitchen serves as a critical exploration into the efficacy of virtual reality as a medium for preserving intangible culinary heritage.
- Immersive VR gameplay fosters deeper kinesthetic empathy and 'knowing-how' for traditional craft than passive video observation, which fails to convey the nuance of artisan labor.
- A study of 40 participants revealed that while active gameplay increases sensory immersion and cultural awareness, it triggers 'action masking,' where high cognitive load prevents users from retaining concurrent narrative information.
- Effective pedagogical models for cultural heritage must strategically interleave active, constraint-based gameplay with low-demand periods to balance somatic engagement with narrative retention.
Dragon Slayer Becomes the Dragon: How Players Perceive and Respond to Inequality in Whiteout Survival
Structural inequality in mobile strategy games like Whiteout Survival functions as a complex social architecture rather than a static byproduct of monetization.
- Players in Whiteout Survival often shift from resenting systemic inequality to defending it once they accumulate sufficient personal resources and alliance-based social capital.
- Perceived legitimacy in mobile strategy games relies more on the transparency and predictability of game mechanics than on the actual size of power disparities between players.
- Social capital, specifically through alliance roles and collective interdependence, serves as a critical psychological buffer that mitigates the frustration of economic disadvantage.
Order-Bound Companionship: The Practice of Emotional Labor in Professional Game Companionship
Professional game companionship in China represents a burgeoning sector of digital gig work defined by the performance of invisible emotional labor.
- Professional game companionship in China functions as a gig economy sector that merges technical gaming skill with simulated intimacy to meet client demand.
- The 'order-bound' model institutionalizes emotional labor by restricting romantic or intimate interactions strictly to the duration of paid sessions.
- Clubs enforce boundaries by prohibiting private contact between workers and clients, which serves to mitigate worker harassment and emotional exhaustion.
FIERO: Empowering Creative Writing Through Collaborative Game Play
FIERO functions as a hybrid collaborative writing system designed to enhance narrative quality through a combination of physical card-based scaffolding and AI-augmented digital tools.
- FIERO improves narrative quality by using a hybrid system of physical cards for structural scaffolding and AI-augmented digital tools to guide teams through a three-act narrative arc.
- Empirical testing with 60 participants shows that the FIERO system consistently outperforms traditional shared-document software in plot coherence, character fidelity, and idea fluency.
- The system utilizes a three-layer conflict-resolution pipeline that prioritizes human-led negotiation over automated arbitration to ensure AI acts as a supportive partner rather than a director.
Breaking the News: Taking the Roles of Influencer vs. Journalist in a LLM-Based Game
Breaking the News functions as a competitive, player-versus-player educational intervention designed to enhance media literacy through the simulation of misinformation dynamics.
- The 'Breaking the News' PvP game significantly improved media literacy, with study participants showing statistically significant gains in functional and critical content consumption (p = .039 and p < .001, respectively).
- Role-playing as an 'Influencer' in the game effectively taught participants about the low barriers to creating misinformation, fostering a more cautious and skeptical attitude toward online content creators.
- The game’s PvP mechanic successfully fostered constructive competition and intrinsic motivation, with participants reporting that learning from opponents' strategies helped them better understand the dynamics of misinformation.
Sketchar: Supporting Character Design and Illustration Prototyping Using Generative AI
Sketchar functions as a generative AI-driven prototyping platform designed to resolve persistent communication barriers between game designers and illustrators.
- Sketchar, a generative AI tool using ChatGPT and DALL-E, enables game designers to create visual character prototypes, significantly improving collaboration scores on the Creativity Support Index compared to traditional sketching-only workflows.
- Designers without professional artistic backgrounds reported higher satisfaction and perceived the tool as more expressive and worthwhile than those with formal art training, who tended to be more critical of the output quality.
- The tool addresses common industry friction points by allowing designers to articulate complex character concepts and personality traits that are otherwise difficult to communicate to illustrators, reducing potential misinterpretations.
Bringing Stories to Life in 1001 Nights: A Co-creative Text Adventure Game Using a Story Generation Model
The co-creative text adventure game 1001 Nights establishes a novel framework for interactive storytelling by tasking players with collaborating alongside an AI-driven King to construct narratives.
- The 1001 Nights project demonstrates that integrating generative AI as a core game mechanic, where narrative keywords function as in-game weapons, successfully bridges the gap between creative writing and traditional gameplay.
- Data from over 2,000 exhibition participants shows a strong positive correlation between the frequency of player input and overall in-game achievement.
- AI-supported storytelling effectively shifts the content creation burden to the player, transforming them from a passive consumer into an active co-author of the narrative.
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