Dynamics of Social Play

Digital games have become a social medium. Players are often socially motivated to play games and actively seek out games that offer social interactions. Early studies on games such as World of Warcraft demonstrate that players can form meaningful bonds within the game. Catering to this trend, most game titles now include multiplayer experiences in their gameplay. Despite the growing popularity of social elements within play, we still have little empirically-founded guidance on how to effectively design for social experiences. If we want to design for social play, we have to understand what makes games social. What are the properties of play that are responsible for facilitating social ties between players? We address this question by synthesizing the exiting literature on design recommendations for social play into identify overarching properties of play that we think are the most prolific in literature: cooperation and interdependence. We perform two experimental studies demonstrating how games facilitate trust between players and how cooperation and interdependence are crucial properties of social play. Furthermore, we validate our framework in a field study, investigating the experiences within games that predict in-game social capital. We demonstrate that interdependence and toxicity are strongly linked to the social capital our participants experience in their gaming communities. We also illustrate how in-game social capital is negatively associated with feelings of loneliness and positively associated with need satisfaction of relatedness outside of the context of play. Overall, our findings emphasize how strongly the experiences within the game affect the social ties that emerge from play, suggesting that informed design choices are crucial for the success of social games. This dissertation also contributes to the ongoing debate about the effects that in-game relationships have on the player’s mental health—we show a strong positive link between in-game social capital and markers for psychological well-being. It is easy to disregard in-game relationships, as they are fundamentally distinct from the in-person ones we think of as natural. Yet we cannot ignore the emergence of digital games as a social medium. The more we understand the underlying elements of social play, the better we can design games that bring people closer together

Recognizing Affiliation: Using Behavioural Traces to Predict the Quality of Social Interactions in Online Games

Online social interactions in multiplayer games can be supportive and positive or toxic and harmful; however, few methods can easily assess interpersonal interaction quality in games. We use behavioural traces to predict affiliation between dyadic strangers, facilitated through their social interactions in an online gaming setting. We collected audio, video, in-game, and self-report data from 23 dyads, extracted 75 features, trained Random Forest and Support Vector Machine models, and evaluated their performance predicting binary (high/low) as well as continuous affiliation toward a partner. The models can predict both binary and continuous affiliation with up to 79.1% accuracy (F1) and 20.1% explained variance (R2) on unseen data, with features based on verbal communication demonstrating the highest potential. Our findings can inform the design of multiplayer games and game communities, and guide the development of systems for matchmaking and mitigating toxic behaviour in online games.Comment: CHI '2

How Disclosing Skill Assistance Affects Play Experience in a Multiplayer First-Person Shooter Game

ABSTRACT In social play settings, it can be difficult for people with different skill levels to play a game together. Player balancing that provides skill assistance for the weaker player can allow for enjoyable play experiences; however, previous research (and conventional wisdom) has suggested that skill assistance should be kept hidden to avoid perceptions of unfairness. We carried out a study to test how disclosing skill assistance affects player experience. We found -surprisingly -that disclosing assistance did not harm play experience; players were more influenced by the benefits of equalized performance resulting from assistance than by their knowledge of the assist. We introduce the idea of attribution biases to help explain why awareness was not harmful -people tend to take credit for their successes, but attribute failures externally. We discuss how game designers can incorporate skill assistance to build multiplayer games that improve experiences for a wide range of players

Through the looking glass: the effects of feedback on self-awareness and conversation during Video Chat

Video chat is a popular form of computer-mediated communication in a range of contexts from online job interviews to chatting with friends. Although seeing your own video feedback is the predominant interface design, self-awareness research suggests that seeing oneself could induce self-consciousness and affect interaction. We created a custom video chat application and asked pairs of strangers to engage in an online personal information exchange task with or without video feedback. Feedback increased self-awareness and the use of socially-focused words, and decreased the use of words expressing certainty. In addition, mixed-gender dyads rated themselves as more socially orientated with feedback than without, which was reflected in an increased use of inclusive pronouns and affiliation words, and fewer words expressing discrepancy. However, with feedback, same-gender dyads reported greater task orientation than mixed-gender dyads reflected in increased use of task-relevant words. We discuss design implications in contexts from remote therapy to online dating

Statistical Significance Testing at CHI PLAY: Challenges and Opportunities for More Transparency

Statistical Significance Testing -- or Null Hypothesis Significance Testing (NHST) -- is common to quantitative CHI PLAY research. Drawing from recent work in HCI and psychology promoting transparent statistics and the reduction of questionable research practices, we systematically review the reporting quality of 119 CHI PLAY papers using NHST (data and analysis plan at https://osf.io/4mcbn/. We find that over half of these papers employ NHST without specific statistical hypotheses or research questions, which may risk the proliferation of false positive findings. Moreover, we observe inconsistencies in the reporting of sample sizes and statistical tests. These issues reflect fundamental incompatibilities between NHST and the frequently exploratory work common to CHI PLAY. We discuss the complementary roles of exploratory and confirmatory research, and provide a template for more transparent research and reporting practices.Peer reviewe

Self-Determination Theory in HCI Games Research: Current Uses and Open Questions

Self-Determination Theory (SDT), a major psychological theory of human motivation, has become increasingly popular in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research on games and play. However, it remains unclear how SDT has advanced HCI games research, or how HCI games scholars engage with the theory. We reviewed 110 CHI and CHI PLAY papers that cited SDT to gain a better understanding of the ways the theory has contributed to HCI games research. We find that SDT, and in particular, the concepts of need satisfaction and intrinsic motivation, have been widely applied to analyse the player experience and inform game design. Despite the popularity of SDT-based measures, however, prominent core concepts and mini-theories are rarely considered explicitly, and few papers engage with SDT beyond descriptive accounts. We highlight conceptual gaps at the intersection of SDT and HCI games research, and identify opportunities for SDT propositions, concepts, and measures to more productively inform future work.Peer reviewe