Technologies for playful interactions like Generative AI and immersive realities are enabling artists and designers to work with new capabilities in narrative storytelling. LLM-based real time interactions and immersive tools allow for customized engagements that can create context-sensitive dialogues and player-centered environments. How may these tools be applied to raise awareness and increase engagement with social good topics like climate change, social identity, sustainability, inclusive communities, or empathy with diverse perspectives?

This session invites practitioners and researchers engaged with the use of diverse tools in SIGGRAPH communities for interactions that invite play, creating gameful engagements that serve particular social good. The interventions created may involve diverse forms like video games to participatory play to installations and playable media. They share the common goal of applying play to make the intervention engaging, rewarding, and experiential, turning static environments into environments of serendipity, make-belief, and imaginative. Social good issues like climate change and sustainability is often difficult to communicate to lay audiences, because the goals are often far from personal agendas and results of the social good issues are often far from alignment to personal interests. Audiences may have pre-formed beliefs and solidified opinions that are hard to change for social good perspectives.

To empower empathy and belief around social good issues, games can create a magic circle for audiences to enter a world unlike their own, where they can experience engagements that encourage switch in perspectives and acceptance of differing beliefs because they exist in a fictional world where opinions no longer align with the real world. Recent work have used art technology such as customized interactive dialogue, immersive environments designed for empathy, etc. to address social good issues using a playful paradigm. The designed playful interactions takes the audience away from opinions and policy debates and into a designed world where the narratives and world logic provides interactive content that tell about the social good narrative in a more engaging way.

Generative AI and immersive tools have particularly led to interest in SIGGRAPH communities involved with building games and interactive narrative interventions that utilizes these capabilities to tell a social good story taking players away from the ordinary world.

• What playful interactions are engendered by these tools?
• How can we overcome the challenges, limitations, and biases of these tools?
• What strategies can we develop in the future applying these tools to playful narrative interactions?

This session hopes to engage the SIGGRAPH community to show their developed concepts as well as explorations in tools for playful engagements with technology. We hope to incubate a sector of game and playful interaction based technologists in SIGGRAPH dedicated to positive social goals of social change and environmental applications.