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arxiv: 2604.15337 · v1 · submitted 2026-03-10 · 💻 cs.HC

Radical Gender Neutrality: Agender Euphoria in Gaming and Play Experiences

Katie Seaborn , Shano Liang , Rua M. Williams , Phoebe O. Toups Dugas This is my paper

Pith reviewed 2026-05-15 13:58 UTC · model grok-4.3

classification 💻 cs.HC
keywords agender euphoriagender neutralityvideo gamesplay experienceshuman-computer interactiongender identitygame designeuphoric experiences
0
0 comments X

The pith

Games produce agender euphoria through gender-free embodiments and spaces, with study-derived criteria to design for this joy in all players.

A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.

The paper introduces agender euphoria as the happiness, joy, and contentment that arise from gender-free experiences in games and play. Using the critical incident technique with 142 self-selected participants who reported or sought such experiences, the authors map specific game features that create or block these feelings. They position the phenomenon as accessible to agender and adjacent people as well as others under suitable conditions. A sympathetic reader would care because the work shifts game design from avoiding gender harm toward actively generating positive, neutral self-actualization. The result is a set of empirically grounded criteria that developers can apply to make play more widely satisfying.

Core claim

Agender euphoria is a distinct form of happiness derived from gender-free embodiments, spaces, and activities that video games can reliably elicit. Through analysis of critical incidents reported by 142 participants, the authors surface patterns in how games create or inhibit these experiences and translate them into concrete design criteria intended to support agender euphoric play for agender and agender-adjacent players as well as broader audiences.

What carries the argument

The critical incident technique applied to participant self-reports of agender euphoric moments in games, which yields a set of design criteria for eliciting the experience.

If this is right

  • Game developers can incorporate the identified criteria to create experiences that generate gender-free joy rather than merely avoiding negative gender dynamics.
  • Agender and adjacent players gain a framework for recognizing and seeking out affirming play spaces.
  • The criteria extend the focus of inclusive game design beyond representation of specific identities to the active construction of neutral embodiments.
  • Similar patterns may appear in non-digital play, allowing the criteria to inform physical game and activity design.

Where Pith is reading between the lines

These are editorial extensions of the paper, not claims the author makes directly.

  • The criteria could be tested in commercial titles to measure whether they increase play duration or reported well-being across identity groups.
  • Virtual and augmented reality systems might adopt parallel neutral-design rules to support agender euphoria outside traditional screen-based games.
  • Longitudinal observation of players using these designs could reveal whether repeated exposure strengthens the reported feelings of contentment.

Load-bearing premise

The self-reported critical incidents from the 142 self-selected participants accurately capture a distinct, generalizable phenomenon of agender euphoria without substantial selection bias or interpretive overreach.

What would settle it

A follow-up study that recruits a broader, less self-selected sample and finds that the reported incidents do not cluster around gender-free features or that the proposed design criteria fail to produce measurable increases in reported joy and contentment would falsify the central claim.

Figures

Figures reproduced from arXiv: 2604.15337 by Katie Seaborn, Phoebe O. Toups Dugas, Rua M. Williams, Shano Liang.

Figure 1
Figure 1. Figure 1: Screenshots from Fields of Mistria, a game that elicited agender euphoria experiences. Left: P18 noted that the pixilated, “chibi” art style enables flexible gendering of characters. Right: Three stacked screenshots showing the character creation interface, which is always available and offers a range of pronouns changeable at-will. The default pronouns are “They/Them.” Any combination of trait and gender … view at source ↗
Figure 2
Figure 2. Figure 2: Gender identities self-reported by participants. Note: Many participants reported multiple identities. [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p006_2.png] view at source ↗
Figure 3
Figure 3. Figure 3: Three screenshots showing player representations and protagonists that participants identified as agender. Left, [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p011_3.png] view at source ↗
Figure 4
Figure 4. Figure 4: Three screenshots showing the introduction to [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p012_4.png] view at source ↗
Figure 5
Figure 5. Figure 5: Affective states from the qualitative prompts. [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p014_5.png] view at source ↗
Figure 6
Figure 6. Figure 6: Affective states via the quantitative measure (I-PANAS-SF). Details are in Table 4. [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p014_6.png] view at source ↗
Figure 7
Figure 7. Figure 7: Well-being orientations via hedonia and eudaimonia, as well as long-term meaning potential. [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p014_7.png] view at source ↗
Figure 8
Figure 8. Figure 8: Player experience via the PXI. Details are provided in Table 5. [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p015_8.png] view at source ↗
read the original abstract

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.

Editorial analysis

A structured set of objections, weighed in public.

Desk editor's note, referee report, simulated authors' rebuttal, and a circularity audit. Tearing a paper down is the easy half of reading it; the pith above is the substance, this is the friction.

Referee Report

2 major / 1 minor

Summary. The manuscript introduces the concept of agender euphoria as feelings of happiness and contentment arising from gender-free embodiments, spaces, and activities in gaming and play. It reports results from a Critical Incident Technique study with 142 self-selected participants who identified as having or desiring such experiences, with the goal of surfacing the phenomenon and deriving empirically-grounded design criteria for games to elicit agender euphoric experiences for agender, agender-adjacent, and other players. The work situates itself as extending critical literatures on marginalized gender experiences in HCI and games research.

Significance. If the methodological concerns are resolved, the paper would add a focused empirical exploration of an underexplored dimension of gender in interactive play, potentially informing more inclusive game design practices. The qualitative approach using participant-reported incidents offers a direct route to design implications, though its value depends on demonstrating that the derived criteria are not artifacts of the sampling frame.

major comments (2)
  1. [Abstract] Abstract: The participant pool consists of 142 individuals recruited specifically because they 'identified as having or desiring agender euphoric experiences.' This pre-screening embeds the target construct in the sample selection, raising a substantial risk that reported incidents reflect alignment with the researchers' framing rather than an independent, generalizable phenomenon. This directly undermines the central claim that the study surfaces a distinct experiential category and supplies empirically-grounded criteria applicable to everyone.
  2. [Methods] Methods description (Abstract): No information is provided on recruitment channels, the CIT protocol details, coding procedures, inter-rater reliability, member checking, or handling of disconfirming cases. Without these elements, the link between raw participant reports and the derived design criteria cannot be evaluated, leaving the empirical grounding of the central claims unverifiable.
minor comments (1)
  1. [Introduction] The manuscript could clarify in the introduction how 'agender euphoria' is positioned relative to existing concepts such as gender euphoria to strengthen conceptual distinctiveness.

Simulated Author's Rebuttal

2 responses · 0 unresolved

Thank you for the referee's thoughtful comments. We address each major point below, clarifying the study's scope and committing to revisions for greater transparency.

read point-by-point responses

  1. Referee: [Abstract] The participant pool consists of 142 individuals recruited specifically because they 'identified as having or desiring agender euphoric experiences.' This pre-screening embeds the target construct in the sample selection, raising a substantial risk that reported incidents reflect alignment with the researchers' framing rather than an independent, generalizable phenomenon. This directly undermines the central claim that the study surfaces a distinct experiential category and supplies empirically-grounded criteria applicable to everyone.

    Authors: The sampling strategy is intentional and appropriate for an exploratory phenomenological study of an emerging construct. We recruited participants who self-identify as having or desiring agender euphoria to ensure the incidents reflect lived relevance, following established practices in HCI research on marginalized gender experiences. The manuscript does not claim the phenomenon occurs universally or independently of identity; it positions the design criteria as grounded in these reports and applicable especially (though not exclusively) to agender and adjacent players. We will revise the abstract and add a dedicated limitations paragraph to explicitly qualify the sampling frame and scope of generalizability. revision: yes

  2. Referee: [Methods] No information is provided on recruitment channels, the CIT protocol details, coding procedures, inter-rater reliability, member checking, or handling of disconfirming cases. Without these elements, the link between raw participant reports and the derived design criteria cannot be evaluated, leaving the empirical grounding of the central claims unverifiable.

    Authors: The full manuscript contains a Methods section describing recruitment through targeted online communities and social media, the CIT protocol with specific recall prompts, collaborative thematic coding by two researchers, and explicit discussion of disconfirming cases. To address the abstract's brevity, we will insert a concise methods summary and add quantitative details on inter-rater reliability (e.g., Cohen's kappa) and member checking where applicable. revision: yes

Circularity Check

0 steps flagged

No significant circularity: empirical qualitative study with no derivations or self-referential reductions

full rationale

The paper is an empirical qualitative study employing the critical incident technique on self-reported data from 142 participants. No mathematical equations, fitted parameters, predictions derived from fits, or derivation chains exist that could reduce claims to inputs by construction. The central phenomenon is defined at the outset as a new term for specific feelings, then explored through participant incidents to generate design criteria; this is standard inductive qualitative work rather than any of the enumerated circular patterns (self-definitional, fitted-input-as-prediction, self-citation load-bearing, etc.). Self-selection of participants who already identify with the concept may raise validity concerns about generalizability or bias, but does not create a circular reduction of the reported findings to the inputs. The derivation chain is self-contained and rests on external data collection rather than internal loops.

Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger

0 free parameters · 1 axioms · 1 invented entities

The central claim depends on the validity of self-reported qualitative data and the framing power of the newly introduced term; no numerical parameters or formal axioms are present.

axioms (1)
  • domain assumption Self-reported critical incidents reliably identify and represent genuine agender euphoric experiences without significant bias.
    The entire analysis rests on participants correctly labeling and recalling moments as agender euphoria.
invented entities (1)
  • Agender euphoria no independent evidence
    purpose: To name and operationalize the positive emotional response to gender-free embodiments and activities.
    New term coined in the paper to frame the studied phenomenon; no independent falsifiable evidence outside the self-reports is provided.

pith-pipeline@v0.9.0 · 5487 in / 1268 out tokens · 92663 ms · 2026-05-15T13:58:15.765053+00:00 · methodology

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Reference graph

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