Innovations in Social Gaming

TorCHI is proud to kick-off 2026 with Professor Regan Mandryk, an ACM Distinguished Speaker! 

Games have long been used to support social interaction and create shared experiences that draw us closer together. Digital games are increasingly being used to form and maintain relationships, and in-game friendships have been shown to help satisfy our need to belong and can even combat loneliness, improving our wellbeing. In this talk, Mandryk will present her perspective on the benefits of social gaming—including in casual, esports, and streaming contexts, show how the benefits can be thwarted by toxicity and harassment, and discuss innovative game technologies that can better connect players, streamers, spectators, and fans.

BIO: Regan Mandryk is a Canada Research Chair in Digital Gaming and Immersive Social Technologies and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Victoria, Canada who has made foundational and significant contributions in modeling the emotional experience and personality of players, facilitating social connection through play, combating toxicity within multiplayer games, and harnessing games for the assessment and treatment of mental health. Regan led Games research in the Canadian GRAND Network, led the first ever Canadian graduate training program on games user research (SWaGUR.ca), and was pivotal in establishing the gaming research community within SIGCHI—particularly in co-establishing and leading the ACM CHI PLAY conference. She was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists in 2014, received the University of Saskatchewan New Researcher Award in 2015, the Canadian Association for Computer Science’s Outstanding Young Canadian Computer Science Researcher Prize in 2016, the prestigious E.W.R. Steacie Fellowship from NSERC in 2018, was inducted into the SIGCHI Academy in 2023, and received the Canadian Human Computer Communications Society’s Achievement Award in 2023.