Designed & Discovered Euphoria: Insights from Trans-Femme Players' Experiences of Gender Euphoria in Video Games

Many transgender (and cisgender) people experience gender euphoria - satisfaction and relief caused by self-actualization and gender congruence - a term that has been overlooked by the design community. Video games create intense experiences involving identities, bodies, and social interaction, providing opportunities to empower people through gender euphoria. We develop themes for creating and supporting gender euphoria in games within the Design, Dynamics, Experience Game Design Framework from a reflexive thematic analysis of 25 games, with an in-depth analysis of four of them. The analysis combines the authors' positionalities as trans gamers with close reading and content analysis of the games, employing perspectives from critical discourse analysis. We contribute an operational understanding of gender euphoria to support design, in-depth case studies of particularly euphoric game experiences, and identify themes that designers and researchers can use to develop new games and analyze existing ones.