New research by Rina R. Wehbe and collaborators from the Cheriton School of Computer Science and the Games Institute at University of Waterloo explores territoriality in playful applications. In the paper, Wehbe et al. investigates the relationship between digital and physical spaces as they apply players’ understanding of shared space, collaboration, and social behaviours.
The findings were collected through an experimental protocol approved by the University of Waterloo, Office of Research Ethics. During the study, researchers measured digital metrics (e.g. touch input, enemies targeted), observed player interactions and interviewed participants about their experience playing the bespoke game they created.
Alternatively, players may also choose to steal tools from the other player to defend their territory against the incoming arsenal. "I think this is one of my favourite parts of the study" admits Rina R. Wehbe, lead author of the study and Computer Science PhD candidate, "seeing how players negotiated, shared, or fought over the tools and space. I felt it was insightful to observe the participant’s actions, strategies, and behaviours when the pressure of the game surmounted."
The tools were not the only variable manipulated by the researchers, participants were assigned to different conditions; either they were either free to move around in the space or were restricted to working within fixed workplaces. In the study, the participants played two versions of the game, one with a collaborative shared score, and the other a competitive score.
“We were looking to see how physical freedom vs. restriction and competition vs. cooperation affected player behaviour,” says Wehbe. Specifically, the authors monitored physical distance between players, success in the game (number of enemy kills), and feedback about how players felt about one another afterwards.
Players were more likely to forgive the other person crossing the boundary in the digital space when they were working together, rather than against each other. If the players were cooperating, not competing, they felt taking actions in another person's territory was more acceptable. A quote from an interviewed participant summarized this finding nicely: "... it depends in terms of what my intent it was, one of them was to steal points, the other was to be useful.” Here the participant explains that when the intent was to help, crossing boundaries felt more permissible.
In summary, Wehbe et al. contributes to design for games on these large, multitouch, shared displays. The paper features suggestions for leveraging the perception of space in the design. Moreover, the paper contributes to the current understanding of the ways people perceive boundaries in digital game spaces. These contributions will allow game and app designers to create better interactive experiences on large, multi-touch displays.
The full study, “Personal Space in Play: Physical and Digital Boundaries in Large-Display Cooperative and Competitive Games”, is published in the CHI 2020 proceedings.
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Full citation and DOI:
Rina R. Wehbe, Terence Dickson, Anastasia Kuzminykh, Lennart E. Nacke, and Edward Lank. 2020. Personal Space in Play: Physical and Digital Boundaries in Large-Display Cooperative and Competitive Games. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–14. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376319
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Other cited work:
Rina R. Wehbe, Edward Lank, and Lennart E. Nacke. 2017. Left Them 4 Dead: Perception of Humans versus Non-Player Character Teammates in Cooperative Gameplay. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS ’17). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 403–415. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3064663.3064712