CFP

Workshop “Love in Games: Exploring Emotional Connections with Characters” @ CHI PLAY26, 02-05 2026, York, United Kingdom

We warmly invite scholars working in game studies and related fields to participate in this workshop on love, romance, and emotional attachment in games, hosted as part of CHI PLAY26 at York. This workshop addresses a critical gap in Game Studies by inviting participants to engage with the concept of love in games. By exploring how players experience and interpret love through game characters, we aim to deepen scholarly understanding and foster a vibrant network for future research and collaboration. This initiative not only elevates an underexplored topic, but it also highlights the unique capacity of games to offer profound emotional experiences, redefining the cultural and academic discourse surrounding love. 

Games frequently evoke strong emotional responses, with love being one of the most profound human experiences reflected in narratives and gameplay. Indeed, many games allow players to actively participate in the unfolding of love stories, including major mainstream titles such as Baldur’s Gate 3 [14] as well as genre-specific games of the so-called dating-sim category, e.g. Love and Deepspace [19], comprising a significant part of the video games industry revenue [16, 25]. Game studies research has previously explored aspects of romance in games, including philosophical inquiries [15, 18], close readings and poetics [1, 21], design challenges [9, 13], feminist and queer analyses [22, 26], sociological studies [5, 12], as well as socioeconomic and transmedial perspectives [2, 24]. Furthermore, previous research studying player experience (PX) has looked at and established the importance of character attachment in game design [3, 4, 6–8, 10, 11, 17, 20, 23]. Still, studies that focus specifically on game love are not numerous, leaving several underexplored areas. There remain questions about the nature and simulation of love in virtual spaces, while a pervasive stigma as to the significance and impact of this line of research continues to accompany, if not cloud over, any such endeavours.  

This workshop aims to provide a vital platform for engaging in discussions around love with game characters, creating an inclusive space for interdisciplinary dialogue among game scholars. Some topics of inquiry could be the following: 

  • Close readings and textual analyses of games that feature love and romance. 
  • Studies on broader patterns of depicting love and romance in games. 
  • Autoethnographic and ethnographic studies around love and romance in games. 
  • Socioeconomical perspectives on emotional involvement of players with game characters. 
  • Accounts based on different markets and cultures, especially non-Western. 
  • Issues of representation of love content in games. 
  • The role of AI in love and romance in games. 
  • Explorations of different types of attachment to game characters, from romantic and friendly to object-oriented and possessive. 
  • Discussions around potential benefits and/or harms of attachment with game characters. 

While the focus of the workshop is that of digital games, we welcome contributions pertaining to any type of game, including board games, tabletops, single-player, MMORPGs, LARPs etc. 

The workshop will take place as part of CHI PLAY26 on Monday, 02 November 2026, the first day of the conference. To participate, prospective contributors should submit an abstract of 150–200 words, excluding references, by Monday 31st of August AoE, to loveingames26@gmail.com, with the email titled CHIPLAY26_Last Name_Title of submission. Notifications will be sent by 14th of September. 

References 

  1. Magdalena Bednorz. 2024. Adventuring for Digital Love. On the Readoption of Quest-romance in the Romantic Subplots of Dragon Age: Origins. Transfer. Reception Studies 9 (2024), 211–227. 
  1. Joleen Blom. 2020. The dynamic game character: Definition, construction, and challenges in character ecology. IT-Universitetet i København. 
  1. Julia Ayumi Bopp, Elisa D. Mekler, and Klaus Opwis. 2016. Negative Emotion, Positive Experience? Emotionally Moving Moments in Digital Games. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (San Jose, California, USA) (CHI ’16). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2996–3006. 
  1. Julia Ayumi Bopp, Livia J. Müller, Lena Fanya Aeschbach, Klaus Opwis, and Elisa D. Mekler. 2019. Exploring Emotional Attachment to Game Characters. In Proceedings of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (CHI PLAY ’19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 313–324. 
  1. Jacqueline Burgess and Christian Jones. 2020. “I Harbour Strong Feelings for Tali Despite Her Being a Fictional Character”: Investigating Videogame Players’ Emotional Attachments to Non-Player Characters. Game Studies 20, 1 (2020). 
  1. Tom Cole, Paul Cairns, and Marco Gillies. 2015. Emotional and functional challenge in core and avant-garde games. In Proceedings of the 2015 annual symposium on computer-human interaction in play. 121–126. 
  1. Tom Cole and Marco Gillies. 2022. Emotional Exploration and the Eudaimonic Gameplay Experience: A Grounded Theory. In Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (New Orleans, LA, USA) (CHI ’22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. 
  1. Mark Coulson, Janey Barnett, and Rebecca Gould. 2012. Real Feelings for Virtual People: Emotional Attachments and Interpersonal Attraction in Video Games. Psychology of Popular Media Culture 1 (07 2012). 
  1. Lindsay D Grace. 2020. On Flirting Games and In-Game Flirts. In Love and Electronic Affection. CRC Press, 47–60. 
  1. Ioanna Iacovides, Joe Cutting, Jen Beeston, Marta E. Cecchinato, Elisa D. Mekler, and Paul Cairns. 2022. Close but Not Too Close: Distance and Relevance in Designing Games for Reflection. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 6, CHI PLAY (Oct. 2022), 24 pages. 
  1. Ioanna Iacovides and Elisa D. Mekler. 2019. The Role of Gaming During Difficult Life Experiences. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Glasgow, Scotland UK) (CHI ’19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–12. 
  1. Veli-Matti Karhulahti and Tanja Välisalo. 2021. Fictosexuality, Fictoromance, and Fictophilia: A Qualitative Study of Love and Desire for Fictional Characters. Frontiers in Psychology Volume 11 – 2020 (2021). doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.575427 
  1. Mitu Khandaker-Kokoris. 2015. NPCs need love too: Simulating love and romance, from a game design perspective. Game love: Essays on play and affection (2015), 82–93. 
  1. Larian Studios. 2023. Baldur’s Gate 3. Game [Windows et al.]. Larian Studios, Ghent, Belgium. Last played August 2025. 
  1. Olli Tapio Leino. 2015. I know your type, you are a player: Suspended Fulfillment in Fallout: New Vegas. Game love: Essays on play and affection (2015), 165–178. 
  1. Neil Long. 2025. 2025’s Top Grossing Mobile Games So Far. Retrieved August 24, 2025 from https://mobilegamer.biz/2025s-top-grossing-mobile-games-so-far/ 
  1. Elisa D. Mekler, Ioanna Iacovides, and Julia Ayumi Bopp. 2018. “A Game that Makes You Question…”: Exploring the Role of Reflection for the Player Experience. In Proceedings of the 2018 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (Melbourne, VIC, Australia) (CHI PLAY ’18). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 315–327. 
  1. Renata E Ntelia. 2020. In the Mood for Love: Embodiment and Intentionality in NPCs. In Love and Electronic Affection. CRC Press, 61–90. 
  1. Papergames and Infold Games. 2025. Love and Deepspace. Game [Android and iOS]. Papergames, China. Last played August 2025. 
  1. Ryan Rogers, Julia Woolley, Brett Sherrick, Nicholas David Bowman, and Mary Beth Oliver. 2017. Fun Versus Meaningful Video Game Experiences: A Qualitative Analysis of User Responses. The Computer Games Journal 6, 1 (June 2017), 63–79. 
  1. Kumiko Saito. 2021. From novels to video games: Romantic love and narrative form in Japanese visual novels and romance adventure games. In Arts, Vol. 10. MDPI, 42. 
  1. Anastasia Salter. 2011. Virtually Yours: Desire and Fulfillment in Virtual Worlds. Journal of Popular Culture (John Wiley & Sons, Inc.) 44, 5 (2011). 
  1. Felix D. Schönbrodt and Jens B. Asendorpf. 2012. Attachment Dynamics in a Virtual World. Journal of Personality 80, 2 (2012), 429–463. 
  1. Hélène Sellier. 2021. Mobile Otome Games: Desire and Suspense as Economic Strategy. Replaying Japan 3 (2021), 143–149. 
  1. Games Stats. 2025. Romance Games Steam Marketing Tool. Retrieved August 24, 2025 from https://games-stats.com/steam/?tag=romance 
  1. Jordan Youngblood. 2015. Climbing the heterosexual maze: Catherine and Queering Spatiality in Gaming. Rated m for mature: Sex and sexuality in video games (2015), 240–252.