Radical Gender Neutrality: Agender Euphoria in Gaming and Play Experiences
This work addresses the overlooked experiences of agender and gender minorities in gaming, offering insights for more inclusive design in games research and human-computer interaction.
The study explored agender euphoria, a new concept for positive feelings from gender-free experiences, by analyzing 142 participants' gaming experiences to understand how games can create or inhibit these feelings, providing design criteria for inclusive games.
Agender euphoria is a new term representing the powerful feelings of happiness, joy, and contentment derived from experiences in gender-free embodiments, spaces, and activities. People with and without agender and adjacent identities (e.g., genderless, gender-free, non-binary, gender-apathetic) may have such experiences under the right circumstances. Video games can offer gender minorities a safe haven for gender euphoric experiences. However, the possibility of agender euphoric experiences was unexplored. We considered this overlooked frame of self-actualization with 142 people who identified as having or desiring agender euphoric experiences. Using the critical incident technique (CIT), we uncovered how games and play experiences create (and inhibit) agender euphoria. We surface this experiential phenomenon and provide empirically-grounded criteria for the design of games to elicit agender euphoric experiences for everyone, but especially agender and agender adjacent players. This work adds to the growing critical literatures on marginalized experiences in games research and human-computer interaction.