Meaningful Play and Malicious Delight:
Exploring Maldaimonic Game UX
Katie Seaborn

Satoru Iseya

Tokyo Institute of Technology
Tokyo, Japanseaborn.k.aa@m.titech.ac.jp

Tokyo Institute of Technology
Tokyo, Japaniseya.s.aa@m.titech.ac.jp

ABSTRACT
Maldaimonia is a new experiential concept that refers to self-actualization and self-expression through egocentric, destructive, and/or
exploitative activities. Still, it is unclear whether maldaimonia isan actual facet of real experience. As a subversive orientation, it
may be rare or socially challenging to discuss openly. However,video games provide a space in which people can be expressive
in different ways without the same repercussions as in real life.
Indeed, game spaces may be one of the few contexts in which to
study maldaimonic experiences. In this study, we examined whether
and how maldaimonia exists as a feature of game user experiencesby analyzing critical self-reports of gaming activities, confirming
its existence. We contribute this new construct to work on "darkplay" in games research.

CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → Human computer interaction (HCI); Empirical studies in HCI; • Applied computing→ Computer games.

KEYWORDS
Maldaimonia, game user experience, maldaimonic game UX, user
experience, games
ACM Reference Format:
Katie Seaborn and Satoru Iseya. 2023. Meaningful Play and Malicious Delight: Exploring Maldaimonic Game UX. In Companion Proceedings of theAnnual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (CHI PLAY Companion ’23), October 10–13, 2023, Stratford, ON, Canada. ACM, New York,NY, USA, 7 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3573382.3616095

1

INTRODUCTION

Human-computer interaction (HCI) has long recognized that wehave a range of experiences with interactive devices, spaces, andagents, including games—some predictable, others not—that go beyond mere usability. Indeed, user experience (UX) has become central to the study and design of interactive experiences [3, 23, 25, 36].
UX is a broad and imprecise [15] subjective factor that covers emotion and affect, experiential features, such as time and complexity,
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174

and non-instrumental impressions, including aesthetics and pleasure [25]. Subsequent efforts have aimed for conceptual congruity
and how to achieve “good” UX across a range of experiences that
may not be simply “positive” [23, 25, 36, 68].
One arm of this work has drawn from ancient yet persisting
Greek philosophies of living the good life: hedonia and eudaimonia [11, 29]. Hedonia refers to an orientation towards pleasureseeking and pleasurable experiences. Eudaimonia, its contrast andcompanion, refers to an orientation towards self-expression, personal growth, and meaningful experiences. Early work focused onhedonia or hedonic experiences with technology [13, 21, 22, 27].
Eudaimonia has only recently begun to experience an uptick inscholarly attention within HCI [12, 42, 46, 48, 56, 66], media [4, 59],
entertainment [4, 48, 66], and game studies [6, 9, 57]. Yet, eudaimonia has been presumed “positive,” which, like UX, may not reflect
experiential realities and desires. In response, philosopher of eudaimonia Waterman coined a new concept in 2021: maldaimonia [65].
This refers to an orientation towards pleasure and self-expressionthat is egocentric, exploitative, and/or destructive, or even harmful.
People may have maldaimonic experiences with technology, but
this is difficult to study because of social taboos [65] grounded inwell-known biases, including social acceptability biases [39] in theself and towards others [43].
One type of interactive technology offers a way forward: video
games. Games provide a “magic circle” [55] that people voluntarily
enter wherein the normal rules and norms of reality are suspended.
Since many do not see games as “real,” they may be more willing totalk about the “bad” things they have done or experienced [8, 38, 41].
Yet, gameplay, like UX, is complex and emergent [18, 19], dependent
on the player and the instance of play, as well as the game and otheractors therein. Some players engage in transgressive play [32, 44],
purposefully violating the “magic circle” in a controversial way,such that the play is serious, distressing, or harmful. We do not
advocate for such forms of “play,” although it may be an expressionof maldaimonia. Some games, like Doom (1993), Thief (1998), andDeus Ex (2000), allow the player to decide how to win: throughharmful acts or alternatives. In multiplayer contexts, some partakein dark play [45] or cruel play [58], a form of deception whereby theplayer plays by other rules and is deviant. Dark participation [37, 38]
can also occur in social contexts, characterized by toxicity, trolling,bullying, deviancy, and harassment by anonymous actors who canshirk responsibility and hide behind anonymity [37, 60]. But “dark”
orientations and experiences may not always be social, i.e., darkparticipation and dark play, deceptive, i.e., dark play, or violate thenorms of play and break the fourth wall, e.g., transgressive play. And
they may also be meaningful or self-actualizing, i.e., eudaimonic.

CHI PLAY Companion ’23, October 10–13, 2023, Stratford, ON, Canada

Seaborn and Iseya

As yet, a clear experiential construct on such player phenomena
has not been distinguished.
To this end, we conducted an online critical incident survey on
people’s experiences of maldaimonia in games. We followed the firststeps taken by Müller, Mekler, and Opwis [46] and alter Mekler andHornbæk [42] when initially exploring the experiential nature ofeudaimonic UX. Our goal was to take the first step towards finding
empirical support for maldaimonia using a tested methodology ona similar construct. We asked: Is maldaimonic game UX a valid experiential construct? We discovered that people do have maldaimonicexperiences in games and are willing to report on them in detail.
Our main contributions are initial empirical validation of maldaimonic UX within games and a set of implications for theorizing
and studying player experience from a maldaimonic perspective.

Maldaimonic game UX is not unprecedented. Violence in games
is a long-standing and unerringly hot topic [2, 14]. Cheating is another potentially maldaimonic example with a long history in gamestudies [7, 50]. Destructive acts, from property damage to killing off
NPCs [51], have been far less explored, even though they featureprominently in games; consider The Sims (1998), Catlateral Damage(2014), or any game that has breaking and displacing built-in. Perhaps even less explored is the effects of taking on identities throughwhat we might call “maldaimonic” characters [17]. The body ofwork suggests that maldaimonic experiences may exist across avariety of games, within and outside of multiplayer contexts, andwithin the magic circle of play, yet have implications for emotional,social, and ethical engagement.

3
2

THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

Waterman anchored the concept of maldaimonia on eudaimonia.
With Hellenic roots in Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics (4th century BCE) [65], eudaimonia has been defined as an orientation
towards and/or state of happiness (in posterity) and flourishing(in modernity) [11, 29, 31, 62–64]. As an experiential construct representing the pursuit of meaningful engagement, eudaimonia isoften contrasted with hedonia, or the pursuit of pleasure [30, 31].
Maldaimonia emerged from a critical lens on the ethics of assigning
negative forms of orientations, actions, and experiences as “eudaimonic.” Waterman argues that egocentric, destructive, exploitative,
and otherwise harmful forms of engagement cannot be called virtuous, good, or desirable, at least in theory. Quoting Haybron [26], hequestions: “Can the wicked flourish, at least in principle?” If eudaimonia is about virtue, could maldaimonia be about vice? Waterman
outlines four properties of maldaimonia: (1) attaching positive valence to egocentric, destructive, and/or exploitative activities; (2)providing a basis of personal identity; (3) striving for excellence ormastery in these activities; and (4) aligning these activities as actsof personal expressiveness. Thus, in theory, maldaimonia is distinguished from eudaimonia by its ethical properties and by “positive”
self-fulfillment and meaningful engagement.
The challenge is how to validate the construct in reality. Asking most people directly about their own maldaimonic behaviour
and experiences is difficult. Waterman proposed video games as
viable for exploration. As he points out, games can and often do
provide positive experiences that could be egocentric, destructive,
and/or exploitative. Games also require skill-building and identity
construction. Games often allow people to express themselves inways that they may not otherwise be able to do in “real” life. Indeed,hedonia and eudaimonia have been identified as features of gameUX [6, 9, 35, 40, 57, 61]. Nevertheless, Waterman argues that maldaimonia in games may be symbolic rather than “real.” Games may
merely provide a vessel through which one can carry out activities
one knows are unacceptable elsewhere, and without repercussions
in the “real” world [8]. Yet, we can also argue that this may be an
act of Nietzschean sublimation [16], or integration of part of one’s
true self-expression within a viable, perhaps “half-real” arena [33].
We are multi-faceted, and our needs, desires, and behaviours arecontextual. This may be true for maldaimonia, as well.

175

METHODS

We conducted an online survey using the critical incident method[67], a qualitative approach to gathering critical, i.e., significant
and influential, self-reports of incidents, i.e., occurrences and experiences, through an interview or questionnaire format. Having
a long history in industrial psychology and usability studies [67],this method has also been used to capture positive and negative
experiences with technologies in a post-hoc fashion [24, 42, 46].
This study was approved by the university ethics committee on
August 9th , 2022 (#2022153). Responses were collected from August
24th , 2022 until August 31st , 2022. Our protocol was registered inadvance of data collection on OSF1 on July 5th , 2022.

3.1

Participants

We gathered anonymous responses from 51 adult (aged 21+) US
participants through Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT). This sample
size is appropriate for the critical incident method (e.g., N=45 [49]).
We first conducted a pilot study with n=10 participants. Then, 51
participants completed the full study. For quality assurance, we required that all participants had Masters status, granted by Amazon
after high performance across a range of tasks2 , at least a 95% HIT
approval rate, and had purchased a video game (as a baseline measure of game experience). We also used Nicoletti’s verification code
procedure3 , which all participants completed correctly. With thesestringent criteria, we were able to accept all responses. As such, 24
women (47.1%) and 27 men (52.9%) participated (no one of othergender identities). Most identified as white (41, 80.4%), with two
Black and/or African American (3.9%), two Hispanic and/or Latin
American (3.9%), one Southeast Asian (2%), and one East Asian(2%). All participants had a high school education or higher, andmost had a degree (29, 56.9%). Participants were paid in line withthe ethics board standards for participant compensation. Since thesurvey was estimated to take about 20 minutes, we offered USD$3.70 as compensation via AMT.

3.2

Procedure

We provided a link to a Google Form on AMT. At the top of the form,
the idea of maldaimonia was introduced: “‘Maldaimonia’ refers
1 https://osf.io/7cvs9

2 https://www.mturk.com/worker/help

3 http://nicholasnicoletti.com/survey-monkey-and-mechanical-turk-theverification-codeMeaningful Play and Malicious Delight

CHI PLAY Companion ’23, October 10–13, 2023, Stratford, ON, Canada

to feelings of enjoyment and self-fulfillment through egocentric,
destructive, and/or exploitative acts. In games, this could include,for example, killing enemies, stealing from others, and destroying
cities. These are just examples; there may be more.” After submitting
their responses, they were provided with a participation code for
AMT to receive credit for their work. The average completion time
according to AMT was 16 minutes and 27 seconds.

3.3

Qualitative Instrument

We elicited accounts using open-ended questions [42]. We began bydefining maldaimonia, providing some examples, and requesting“one example from your personal experience.” We prompted: "Bringto mind a single ‘maldaimonic’ experience you’ve had in a game.
Think of ‘maldaimonia’ in whatever way that makes sense to you.
You can choose any type of game on any platform, including games
played on a smartphone, a computer, a console, etc. You can sharea solo or multiplayer experience. It can be one where you chose toact in a maldaimonic way or someone else did, or it was required by
the gameplay." We asked for the name of the game, the platform it
was played on, e.g., smartphone, Nintendo Switch, what motivatedthem to play the game in general and maldaimonically, to accountfor the influence of prior motivations [29], and who they played
the game with, if anyone. We then asked respondents to “describethe ‘maldaimonic’ experience you had in the game. Focus on how
your experience involved feelings of enjoyment and self-fulfillment
through egocentric, destructive, and/or exploitative acts in the game.
Please be as detailed as possible.”

3.4

Data Analysis

We used hybrid thematic analysis [52] with a combination of deductive and inductive theme development. For the deductive thematic
framework, we used the theoretical models underlying the PXI[1]: Means-Ends theory [20] and the Mechanics, Dynamics, andAesthetics (MDA) model [28]. This choice was based on a view
towards a future quantitative instrument for maldaimonia. The PXI
is a reliable and validated measure based on solid theoretical models
and conceptually compatible with maldaimonia as an experience.
For the analysis, we used the factors making up the psycho-social
consequences layer as themes: mastery, curiosity, immersion, autonomy, meaning. We also used inductive theme development asrecommended for the critical incident method [67]. For this, thefirst author considered how the theory of maldaimonia, as outlined,
mapped and did not map onto the gathered accounts of experiences.
They generated codes by reading through the data several times
and then constructing themes, as per Braun and Clarke [5], aroundclusters of codes that could not be classified with the deductive
themes. These were then classified under higher-order “types.” Thesecond author was brought in to discuss and achieve consensus on
the themes; there were no disagreements. No inter-rater reliability
test was conducted. The second author was also responsible forcategorizing the gaming context data.

4 FINDINGS
4.1 Where and Who in Maldaimonic UX
4.1.1 Gaming Context. Respondents reported 40 unique games
across a range of genres. These included: action-adventure (11, 23%;

176

e.g., the Grand Theft Auto series, the Saints Row series, Pokémon Go),MMO (7, 15%; e.g., the World of Warcraft series, Eve Online, Cityof Heroes, Ultima Online), RPG (7, 15%; e.g., the Elder Scrolls series,
Elden Ring, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild), simulation (5,11%; e.g., SimCity, Minecraft), strategy (3, 6%; e.g., Civilization, Ageof Empires II ), and adventure (2, 4%; e.g., Moirai, Days Gone), withothers in action (e.g., Uncharted 4), survival (e.g., survivor.io), andstealth (e.g., Thief ). Others included shooter games and especiallyfirst-person shooter or FPS (6, 13%; e.g., Doom Eternal, Half Life,
Hotline Miami 2, Back 4 Blood) and battle games, including battle
royale and battle arena-style games (3, 6%; e.g., Fortnite, Leagueof Legends, World of Warships). Platforms included PCs (24, 48%),
PlayStation (15, 30%) smartphones (5, 10%), Xbox (4, 8%), and theNintendo Switch (2, 4%). This indicates that maldaimonic experiences can happen across a variety of games and genres and systems,
even those not typically associated with violence or “dark play.”
4.1.2 Social Context. Most people reported having maldaimonicexperiences alone, in single-player play sessions (29, 57%). Thisdistinguishes maldaimonia from dark participation [37, 38] as being more about solo play and individual experience, congruent
with Waterman’s criteria for maldaimonia as a construct of identity forming and expression [65]. Still, seven accounts related to
two-player experiences (14%), twelve were multiplayer (24%), andthree involved massive numbers of people, hundreds or more (6%).
Of the social experiences, thirteen involved friends or family (62%),
five involved strangers (24%), and three involved a mix of friends,
family, and strangers (14%). While we might expect people to carryout maldaimonic acts against people that they do not know, i.e., toavoid identification and accountability [47], or encounter maldaimonic acts with strangers, this was not the case in most accounts.
This suggests an element of personal expressiveness deemed socially acceptable, the fourth of Waterman’s criteria situated against
common perceptions of play as “not real.”

4.2

Why Play: Patterns of Maldaimonic
Orientations and Experiences

4.2.1 Motivations to Play. Four respondents (8%) indicated thatthey had played the game with the goal of having a maldaimonicexperience. For example, P3 stated, “freedom to do what you want
including illegal acts,” while P10 was inspired by a friend’s accountof the maldaimonic experiences that the game offered: “my friend
at work, they would go play it and run into things, people, steal cars
and things like that.” The rest provided a variety of reasons ranging
from a desire for fun, stress relief, social experiences, a challenge,
and being influenced by others to play. P29, for instance, wrote “Mynephew started me playing it when we were all at the beach on year
on a family trip and now we have all been playing this RPG game foryears like 8 plus years.” This suggests that people did not plan or
expect to carry out or participate in maldaimonic activities.
4.2.2 Motivations to Play Maldaimonically. Respondents generallyindicated that the game made them play in a maldaimonic way(18, 35%). Otherwise, most sought mastery (12, 24%), amusement(7, 14%), were curious about maldaimonic acts and consequences(7, 14%), driven by extrinsic needs satisfaction (7, 14%), or werefeeling competitive (7, 14%). On this point, some sought revenge,

CHI PLAY Companion ’23, October 10–13, 2023, Stratford, ON, Canada

Seaborn and Iseya

Table 1: Maldaimonic game UX factors classified into higher order types and linked to the four criteria of maldaimonia.
Type

FactorTransgressions Murder & Mayhem
Reflections

Feelings
Appreciations

Chaos
Rule Subversion
HubrisVengeance
Malight
Power
Mood Shifts
Extrinsic Appetite
Aesthetics

Description

Criteria

Destructive acts, including killing, maiming, and harm, as well as destroying property
and/or environments.
Actions that lead to confusion, instability, disorder, or simply have no point or impetus.
Getting away with morally and/or ethically deviant actions, including exploitation,stealing, looting, cheating, insults, and shady deals.
Recognition of pride and confidence, especially extreme pride and overconfidence.
Reacting to perceived or actual slights with vengeful acts, often of escalating severity.
Malicious delight (“malight”) directly linked to the maldaimonic experience.
Expressions of power and invincibility, and the successful use of force.
Moods and affective states influence or are influenced by maldaimonia.
Satisfaction of needs and desires through external factors, such as rewards, praise, fame,and collecting material goods.
Recognizing or incorporating the visuals, sounds, animations, and other sensory features.

(1)(1)(1),(3)(2),(3),(4)(1),(4)(1)(3)(2)(3),(4)(4)

Table 2: Psychosocial and maldaimonic game UX factors in the critical incident accounts.
Type

FactorExampleFreq.

Psychosocial
Factors

Mastery

P26: “Beating down their Pokemon methodically and strategically knowing when touse my shields is the best part.”
P41: “Trying to survive for as long as possible with a 5 star wanted level. I was in a
hospital fighting off so many cops for like an hour. It was so crazy how many cops I
beat and how long I survived for.”
P34: “its all I wanted to do in the game (so much that I forgot to do other parts of thegame that were needed as well)”
P51: “I made my character steal a car from someone . . . drove it around the city andcrashed [it].”
P19: “They appeal to my creative side . . . it’s fun to do something illegal and get awaywith it.”30 (59%)Curiosity
Immersion
Autonomy
Meaning

Maldaimonic Game UX Factors
Transgressions Murder & Mayhem

Chaos
Reflections

Rule Subversion
HubrisVengeance

Feelings

Malight
Power
Mood Shifts

Appreciations

Extrinsic Appetite
Aesthetics

P27: “this underhanded and grief-y style of playing where I just murdered curious folksfrom the safety of my own home.”
P37: “As the goat, I would headbutt people into traffic so that they would get hit bycars.”
P8: “I just liked going to these areas and killing everyone, trying to start a faction
war/fight.”
P3: “you could do anything you wanted in the game including running from the police”
P45: “One of my favorite melee weapons is the Scythe (. . . ) It’s considered somewhat
insulting to be killed by melee weapons as it implies the opponent can’t aim well toshoot the attacker”
P22: “I think I went overboard. I just wanted to prove a point and to completely annihilate
the other.”P20: “I derived great satisfaction and enjoyment from mowing down these rampaging
zombies. It felt thrilling to come through large battles with low odds of success.”
P30: “You are the boss of the gang, so everyone looks to this character for leadership.”P21: “When I first started the game, I was actually a little taken aback by some ofthe violence. . . . After a while, I started to really enjoy it. There was almost a sadistic
pleasure in being good enough to destroy an entire village and kill everybody in it. I
started to enjoy my success and feel a little bit vindictive ...”
P25: “It makes me feel like I’m going something good when I kill them because they
reward me with loot.”
P23: “jumping off a high cliff thing and landing a deadly blow which looked cool.”177

2 (4%)
4 (8%)
23 (45%)
1 (2%)
40 (78%)9 (18%)
20 (39%)5 (10%)
3 (6%)
32 (63%)27 (53%)
12 (24%)17 (33%)6 (12%)Meaningful Play and Malicious Delight

CHI PLAY Companion ’23, October 10–13, 2023, Stratford, ON, Canada

like P44, who “wanted to give them a taste of their own medicine,”
while others were in it for the warmongering, like P14: “I am petty
for revenge.” Some were seeking an extraordinary experience (4,8%) “that can’t be done in real life” (P37). Others were bored (3,6%) or looking for an escape from frustration and stress in real life
(5, 10%). A few considered games a moral “hall pass” where they
could explore maldaimonic situations without repercussions. This
speaks directly to the notion of the “magic circle” of games [55], ademarcation from “real life” that players voluntarily step into for
creative exploration and other pursuits. Notably, no one sought
an immersive experience or meaning, the latter of which directly
contradicts the expected pattern of maldaimonia as a corollary of
eudaimonia but speaks to hedonic and extrinsic desires.

4.3

What It Is: Maldaimonic and Psychosocial
Factors of the Player Experience

People provided critical incident accounts of maldaimonia on a widearray of game experiences. We found that these were characterized
by the range of psychosocial factors in the PXI [1] (Table 2). However, we also derived a new set of ten maldaimonic-specific andgame-contextualized factors, which we classified under four highlevel types as well as linked to the four criteria of maldaimonia as
proposed by Waterman (Table 1 and Table 2).
The accounts mapped onto the three activities central to Waterman’s definition of maldaimonia. We identified egocentrism (Hubris,
Vengeance, Mood Shifts), destruction (Murder and Mayhem, Chaos,Power), and exploitation (Rule Subversion, Extrinsic Appetite). However, two may be particularly relevant to game UX: Malight, or
Malicious Delight, and Aesthetics. Games are typically created forentertainment and pleasure, linking the maldaimonic factor of Malight to hedonia. Aesthetics refers to the interactive medium, themodalities through which the game is played, and how these areused to craft visual, audio, and tactile experiences. For example,
P9 describes a vivid scene from a Grand Theft Auto game: “youcan cause a massive accident that just looks impressive and cars arecompletely wrecked.” Additionally, accounts ranged in severity. For
instance, P10 recounted feelings of maldaimonia about mischiefwith paper: “Honestly, I just found that I really enjoyed running into
the news paper stands. It made me happy for some reason.”
The ethical quandary of maldaimonic actions appeared to be
grounded in self-identity and self-expression, two of Waterman’s
criteria. Some expressed a laissez-faire attitude, such as P6, who “I
got dressed and got in my car with my guns and just went aroundbeing a menace.” Others offered a defense, an example self/otherreputation management [43]. P37 explained that the simulated
environment was a caveat: “Being so transgressive in such a ridiculous
way was hilarious and kind of thrilling, but only because it wasn’treal people dying.” P14 ruled that the other player was a “griefer,”someone who deliberately provokes others to ruin their enjoymentof the game, and so they were ethically exempt: “It was clear that
he was a griefer as I saw other people talking about him in the lobby.”
Only a few accounts (8, 16%) related to dark participation, involving negative human-to-human interactions. The relative scarcity
of bullying, toxicity, and abuse in our corpus suggests that maldaimonic is a distinct concept from dark participation, even while bysome accounts it overlaps with features of “toxic game spaces.”

178

5

DISCUSSION

Maldaimonic experiences happen in games. The array of accounts
indicate that maldaimonic game UX is a legitimate experiential
construct grounded in player psychosocial needs and consequences.
Moreover, it relates in ways both expected and unexpected with its
theorized “good” twin, eudaimonia, as well as features of the game
experience, including player experience, moods and affective states,
and mechanics. Maldaimonic game UX, as indicated by the findings
on our corpus of critical incident self-reports, is a distinct concept.
Overlapping to a small degree with dark participation [37, 38] andtransgressive play [32, 45], it appears to be centred on solo player
experiences that allow for immersive self-expression without an audience or where the “transgression” is socially acceptable by known
peers and social networks. Critical incidents were reported acrossa variety of game genres and particular games, suggesting that it
is not tied to specific game experiences, notably, violent games,
despite what Waterman’s contemplations and the “dark play” literature might predict. Nevertheless, maldaimonic experiences were
overwhelmingly positive ones. People tended not to feel angry,
guilty, or sad. People played maldaimonically when required by
the goals and requirements of the game itself, but a large subset
also sought mastery, pleasure, and the fulfillment of extrinsic needs
through egocentric, destructive, and/or harmful acts. Indeed, thissuggests that we should explore the roles of hedonia, i.e., pleasure[30], and extrinsic motivation and needs satisfaction [54] within
maldaimonic (as well as eudaimonic) game experiences.
All four of Waterman’s [65] proposed criteria for maldaimonia
as an experiential construct were found in the critical accounts ofgaming experiences. As Table 1 demonstrates, there are varietiesof maldaimonic game UX, such that diverse experiences of play
may not necessarily have the same maldaimonic features, even
if they meet the four criteria for maldaimonic play. For example,
experiences characterized as Malight and Hubris (two of the ten
factors across two higher order types) would suffice. We can generalize the findings with respect to Waterman’s criteria. The first
criteria, attaching positive valence, emphasis on the “positive,” toegocentric, destructive, and/or exploitative activities, was largely
confirmed. Indeed, some experienced a form of affective synchrony[53] through engagement in the maldaimonic experience, feeling
better by playing a game that matched their mood at the time. The
second, providing a basis of personal identity, was more nuanced,
with many reports of pride, perhaps hubris, and self-attribution ofmastery and accomplishments alongside feelings of incongruity.
The third, striving for excellence or mastery, was the most frequent
psychosocial factor of experience, and thus confirmed. The last,
assigning these activities as acts of personal expressiveness, depended on the person. Autonomy was the second most frequent
psychosocial factor, but the perceived benefits of the expressivenessthat this feeling of autonomy offered varied. Perhaps maldaimonia
is not universal, but it does exist.
We can summarize the features of maldaimonic game UX as:• Found in single-player or, collaborative multiplayer, and/or
social contexts with known others• Confined to the “magic circle” of the game• Existing across a variety of games and game genres• Marked by positive affect and psychosocial consequences

CHI PLAY Companion ’23, October 10–13, 2023, Stratford, ON, Canada

Seaborn and Iseya• Engendered through multiple combinations of maldaimonic
factors linked to Waterman’s four criteria
Going forward, standardized methods of evaluating and/or measuring maldaimonia will be needed. Waterman [65] proposed thedevelopment of a two-factor instrument, including personal expressiveness and ethicality scales. Schadenfreude, translated from theGerman as “malicious delight,” has been included in previous game
instruments [10]; items could be extracted and expanded upon todevelop a comprehensive scale. Here, we contribute a multi-tiered
thematic framework of maldaimonic game UX; this framework
could also seed the creation of a quantitative instrument.

5.1

Limitations

A diversity of gamers, especially non-white people beyond theUS, will need to be targeted in future. Post hoc recall is limited[30, 34, 42]; since we cannot predict when maldaimonic experiences
will occur, this is likely to continue being a challenge.

6

CONCLUSION

Maldaimonic UX appears be an experiential construct, at least in thecontext of games. There is ample opportunity to explore whether
and how maldaimonia in games relates (or not) to maldaimonia inother contexts. We have provided an initial set of empirical findings
and descriptive frameworks anchored to critical incident reports ofmaldaimonic experiences in games. These can be carried forwardin the design and study of game UX and UX more broadly.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work was funded by department funds. Our gratitude to Peter
Pennefather for years of engaging discussion on eudaimonia andmore recent lively debates on maldaimonia.

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