Rina R. Wehbe
Edward Lank
Lennart E. Nacke
ABSTRACT
Why do we care if our teammates are not human? This study seeks to uncover whether or not the perception of other players as human or artificial entities can influence player experience. We use both deception and a between-participants blind study design to reduce bias in our experiment. Our qualitative results show that people do care about the perceived nature of other players, even though they are not always able to correctly identify them as human or as non-player character teammates. Interview data suggest believing that one is playing with other humans can positively affect a player's subjective experience. Furthermore, our qualitative results indicate that players view their non-player character teammates as humanized entities, but adopt a neo-feudalistic (i.e., an unequal rights) view of them. Based on our results, we establish game design guide- lines for non-player character teammates leading to stronger, emotional human-computer relationships in video games.
- Raul Arrabales, Agapito Ledezma, and Araceli Sanchis. 2009. Towards conscious-like behavior in computer game characters. CIG2009 - 2009 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games (2009), 217--224. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Jaime Banks and Nicholas David Bowman. 2016. Emotion, anthropomorphism, realism, control: Validation of a merged metric for player-avatar interaction (PAX). Computers in Human Behavior 54 (2016), 215--223. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Anton Bogdanovych, Simeon Simoff, Marc Esteva, and John Debenham. 2008. Teaching autonomous agents to move in a believable manner within virtual institutions. IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 276 (2008), 55--64.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Julia Ayumi Bopp, Elisa D. Mekler, and Klaus Opwis. 2016. Negative Emotion, Positive Experience? Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '16 (2016), 2996--3006. Google ScholarDigital Library
- David M Bourg and Glenn Seemann. 2004. AI for game developers. O'Reilly Media, Inc. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Mat Buckland. 2005. Programming game AI by example. Jones & Bartlett Learning.Google Scholar
- Shira Chess and Adrienne Shaw. 2015. A conspiracy of fishes, or, how we learned to stop worrying about# GamerGate and embrace hegemonic masculinity. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 59, 1 (2015), 208--220.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Juliet M Corbin and Anselm Strauss. 1990. Grounded theory research: Procedures, canons, and evaluative criteria. Qualitative sociology 13, 1 (1990), 3--21.Google Scholar
- Mihalyi Csikszentlmihalyi. 1990. The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper and Row, New York.Google Scholar
- Yvonne A. W. De Kort and Wijnand A Ijsselsteijn. 2008. People, places, and play. Computers in Entertainment 6, 2 (2008), 1. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Ansgar E Depping, Regan L Mandryk, Chengzhao Li, Carl Gutwin, and Rodrigo Vicencio-Moreira. 2016. How Disclosing Skill Assistance Affects Play Experience in a Multiplayer First-Person Shooter Game. Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2016), 3462--3472. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Stephen R Donaldson. 1986. Epic Fantasy in the Modern World. Kent, OH: Kent State University Libraries (1986).Google Scholar
- Nicolas Ducheneaut, Nicholas Yee, Eric Nickell, and Robert J. Moore. 2007. The Life and Death of Online Gaming Communities: A Look at Guilds in World of Warcraft. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '07). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 839--848. Google ScholarDigital Library
- M. E. Ellithorpe, D. R. Ewoldsen, and K. Porreca. 2015. Die, Foul Creature! How the Supernatural Genre Affects Attitudes Toward Outgroups Through Strength of Human Identity. Communication Research September (2015).Google Scholar
- Jesse Fox, Sun Joo Ahn, Joris H Janssen, Leo Yeykelis, Kathryn Y Segovia, and Jeremy N Bailenson. 2015. Avatars versus agents: a meta-analysis quantifying the effect of agency on social influence. Human--Computer Interaction 30, 5 (2015), 401--432. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Johan Hagelbäck and Stefan J. Johansson. 2010. A study on human like characteristics in real time strategy games. Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games, CIG2010 (2010), 139--145.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Kiran Ijaz, Anton Bogdanovych, and Simeon Simo. 2011. Enhancing the believability of embodied conversational agents through environment-, self- and interaction-awareness. Conferences in Research and Practice in Information Technology Series 113, Acsc (2011), 107--116. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Katherine Isbister. 2006. Better Game Characters by Design: A Psychological Approach (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Interactive 3D Technology). 368 pages. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Katherine Isbister, Hideyuki Nakanishi, Toru Ishida, and Cliff Nass. 2000. Helper agent. Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems - CHI '00 January (2000), 57--64. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Daniel Johnson, Peta Wyeth, Madison Clark, and Christopher Watling. 2015. Cooperative Game Play with Avatars and Agents: Differences in Brain Activity and the Experience of Play. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '15. 3721--3730. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Lilian Juma. 2008. The Role of secondary emotions in Action Selection and its Effects on the Believability of a Character. (2008), 137.Google Scholar
- Dennis L. Kappen, Pejman Mirza-Babaei, Jens Johannsmeier, Daniel Buckstein, James Robb, and Lennart E. Nacke. 2014. Engaged by boos and cheers. In Proceedings of the first ACM SIGCHI annual symposium on Computer-human interaction in play - CHI PLAY '14. Toronto, Canada, 151--160. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Petri Lankoski and Staffan Björk. 2007. Gameplay design patterns for believable non-player characters. In Situated Play: Proceedings of the 2007 Digital Games Research Association Conference. 416--423.Google Scholar
- Christopher Lee, Peta Wyeth, Daniel Johnson, and Joshua Hall. 2015. Flow during Individual and Co-operative Gameplay. Proceedings of Computer-human Interaction in Play - CHI Play'15 (2015), 103--107. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Sohye Lim and Byron Reeves. 2010. Computer agents versus avatars: Responses to interactive game characters controlled by a computer or other player. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 68, 1 (2010), 57--68. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Jonas Linderoth, Staffan Björk, and Camilla Olsson. 2012. Should I stay or should I go-Boundary maintaining mechanisms in Left 4 Dead 2. In Proceedings of.Google Scholar
- Ian J. Livingston, Carl Gutwin, Regan L. Mandryk, and Max Birk. 2014. How Players Value Their Characters in World of Warcraft. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1333--1343. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Daniel Livingstone. 2006. Turing's test and believable AI in games. Computers in Entertainment 4, 1 (2006), 6. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Linbo Luo, Suiping Zhou, Wentong Cai, Malcolm Yoke, Hean Low, Feng Tian, Yongwei Wang, Xian Xiao, and Dan Chen. 2008. Agent-based human behavior modeling for crowd simulation. Computer Animation And Virtual Worlds 19, August (2008), 271--281. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Regan L. Mandryk, Kori M. Inkpen, and Thomas W. Calvert. 2006. Using psychophysiological techniques to measure user experience with entertainment technologies. Behaviour & Information Technology 25, 2 (mar 2006), 141--158.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Raymond A. Mar and Keith Oatley. 2008. The Function of Fiction is the Abstraction and Simulation of Social Experience. Perspectives on Psychological Science 3, 3 (2008), 173--192.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Raymond A. Mar, Keith Oatley, Jacob Hirsh, Jennifer dela Paz, and Jordan B. Peterson. 2006. Bookworms versus nerds: Exposure to fiction versus non-fiction, divergent associations with social ability, and the simulation of fictional social worlds. Journal of Research in Personality 40, 5 (2006), 694--712.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Tim Merritt and Kevin McGee. 2012. Protecting Artificial Team-mates: More Seems Like Less. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2793--2802. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Maxim Mozgovoy and Iskander Umarov. 2010. Building a believable and effective agent for a 3D boxing simulation game. Proceedings - 2010 3rd IEEE International Conference on Computer Science and Information Technology, ICCSIT 2010 3, 2 (2010), 14--18.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Maxim Mozgovoy and Iskander Umarov. 2011. Behavior Capture: Building Believable and Effective AI Agents for Video Games. International Journal of Arts and Sciences (2011). http://web-ext.u-aizu.ac.jp/Google Scholar
- Florian Mueller, Martin R. Gibbs, and Frank Vetere. 2010. Towards understanding how to design for social play in exertion games. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 14, 5 (jan 2010), 417--424. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Clifford Nass, Jonathan Steuer, and Ellen R. Tauber. 1994. Computers Are Social Actors. In Conference Companion on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '94). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 204--. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Magalie Ochs, Nicolas Sabouret, and Vincent Corruble. 2009. Simulation of the dynamics of nonplayer characters' emotions and social relations in games. IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games 1, 4 (2009), 281--297.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Marc Ponsen and Pieter Spronck. 2004. Improving Adaptive Game AI with Evolutionary Learning. Proceedings of the Computer Games: Artificial Intelligence, Design and Education Conference Manslow 2002 (2004), 389--396.Google Scholar
- Mike Preuss, Nicola Beume, Holger Danielsiek, Tobias Hein, Boris Naujoks, Nico Piatkowski, Raphael Stüer, Andreas Thom, and Simon Wessing. 2010. Towards intelligent team composition and maneuvering in real-time strategy games. IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games 2, 2 (2010), 82--98.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Steffen Priesterjahn. 2007. Imitation-based evolution of artificial game players. ACM SIGEVOlution 2, 4 (2007), 2--13. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Niklas Ravaja, Timo Saari, Marko Turpeinen, Jari Laarni, Mikko Salminen, and Matias Kivikangas. 2006. Spatial presence and emotions during video game playing: Does it matter with whom you play? Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 15, 4 (2006), 381--392. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Gabriela T Richard. 2015. Intersecting vulnerabilities in game culture: the effects of inequities and stereotype threat on player confidence, identification and persistence across gender and race. In Proceedings of DiGRA.Google Scholar
- Adam Roberts. 2002. Science fiction. Routledge.Google Scholar
- Robert Rosenthal. 1973. The Pygmalion Effect Lives. Psychology Today (1973).Google Scholar
- Pieter Spronck, Ida Sprinkhuizen-Kuyper, and Eric Postma. 2004. Difficulty scaling of game AI. Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Intelligent Games and Simulation (GAMEON'2004) (2004), 33--37.Google Scholar
- Jaakko Stenros, Janne Paavilainen, and Frans Mäyrä. 2009. The Many Faces of Sociability and Social Play in Games. In Proceedings of the 13th International MindTrek Conference: Everyday Life in the Ubiquitous Era (MindTrek '09). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 82--89. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Anselm Strauss and Juliet Corbin. 1994. Grounded theory methodology. Handbook of qualitative research 17 (1994), 273--85.Google Scholar
- Anselm Strauss and Juliet M Corbin. 1997. Grounded theory in practice. Sage.Google Scholar
- Christine Szentgyorgyi, Michael Terry, and Edward Lank. 2008. Renegade Gaming: Practices Surrounding Social Use of the Nintendo DS Handheld Gaming System. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '08). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1463--1472. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Gustavo F. Tondello, Rina R. Wehbe, Zachary O. Toups, Lennart E. Nacke, and Nicole K. Crenshaw. 2015. Understanding Player Attitudes Towards Digital Game Objects. In Proceedings of the 2015 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (CHI PLAY '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 709--714. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Alan M. Turing. 1950. Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind 59, 236 (1950), 433--460.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Deepika Vaddi, Zachary Toups, Igor Dolgov, Rina Wehbe, and Lennart Nacke. 2016. Investigating the Impact of Cooperative Communication Mechanics on Player Performance in Portal 2. In Proceedings of Graphics Interface 2016 (GI 2016). Canadian Human-Computer Communications Society / Société canadienne du dialogue humain-machine, 41--48. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Deepika Vaddi, Rina R. Wehbe, Zachary O. Toups, Samantha N Stahlke, Rylan Koroluk, and Lennart E. Nacke. 2015. Validating Test Chambers to Study Cooperative Communication Mechanics in Portal 2. In Proceedings of the 2015 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play. ACM, 721--726. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Amy Voida and Saul Greenberg. 2009. Wii All Play: The Console Game As a Computational Meeting Place. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '09). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1559--1568. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Henrik Warpefelt. 2016. The Non-Player Character : Exploring the believability of NPC presentation and behavior. Ph.D. Dissertation. Stockholm University, Department of Computer and Systems Sciences.Google Scholar
- Henrik Warpefelt, Magnus Johansson, and Harko Verhagen. 2013. Analyzing the believability of game character behavior using the Game Agent Matrix. In Proceedings of DIGRA. 70--81.Google Scholar
- Henrik Warpefelt and Björn Strååt. 2013. Anti-heuristics for maintaining immersion through believable non-player characters.. In FDG. 455--456.Google Scholar
- Rina R. Wehbe. 2014. Evaluating Social and Cognitive Effects of Video Games using Electroencephalography. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT). http://hdl.handle.net/10155/460Google Scholar
- Rina R. Wehbe, Dennis L. Kappen, David Rojas, Matthias Klauser, Bill Kapralos, and Lennart E. Nacke. 2013. EEG-based assessment of video and in-game learning. Proc. CHI'13 Extended Abstracts (2013). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Rina R. Wehbe and Lennart E. Nacke. 2015. Towards Understanding the Importance of Co-Located Gameplay. In Proceedings of the 2015 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (CHI PLAY '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 733--738. Google ScholarDigital Library
- David Weibel, Bartholomäus Wissmath, Stephan Habegger, Yves Steiner, and Rudolf Groner. 2008. Playing online games against computer- vs. human-controlled opponents: Effects on presence, flow, and enjoyment. Computers in Human Behavior 24, 5 (sep 2008), 2274--2291. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Dmitri Williams, Nicolas Ducheneaut, Li Xiong, Yuanyuan Zhang, Nick Yee, and Eric Nickell. 2006. From Tree House to Barracks. Games and Culture 1, 4 (2006), 338--361.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Geogios N. Yannakakis. 2012. Game AI Revisited. Proceedings of the 9th Conference on Computing Frontiers (2012), 285--292. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Rina R. Wehbe Gustavo F. Tondello Zachary O. Toups, Nicole K. Crenshaw and Lennart E. Nacke. 2016. "The Collecting Itself Feels Good": Towards Collection Interfaces for Digital Game Objects. In Proceedings of the 2016 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play - CHI PLAY '16. ACM, Austin, TX, USA. LUDOGRAPHY 1. Majesco, 505 Games. 2008. Zumba Fitness. Game {Wii}. (2008). Majesco Entertainment, Edison, New Jersey, USA. 2. Valve Corporation. 2008. Left4Dead. Game {Windows, Xbox 360, OS X}. (2008). Valve Corporation, Bellevue, Washington, USA. 3. Valve Corporation. 2009. Left4Dead. Game {Windows, Xbox 360, OS X}, Linux. (2009). Valve Corporation, Bellevue, Washington, USA. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Left Them 4 Dead: Perception of Humans versus Non-Player Character Teammates in Cooperative Gameplay
Recommendations
Left 4 Dead: The Sacrifice
SIGGRAPH '11: ACM SIGGRAPH 2011 Computer Animation FestivalFrom Valve (the creators of Counter-Strike, Half-Life and more) comes Left 4 Dead, a co-op action horror game for the PC and Xbox 360 that casts up to four players in an epic struggle for survival against swarming zombie hordes and terrifying mutant ...
BoomChaCha: A Rhythm-based, Physical Role-Playing Game that Facilitates Cooperation among Players
CHI EA '16: Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing SystemsWe designed a new genre of gaming that is rhythm-based, cooperative, physical and involves role-playing. In the game, three players as a team combat monsters by waving physical weapons on certain beats of the background music. The game requires a ...
Social Experience in World of Warcraft: Technological and Ideological Mediations
CHI PLAY Companion '16: Proceedings of the 2016 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play Companion Extended AbstractsI analyze social experience in World of Warcraft (WoW), one of the longest running massively multiplayer online games (MMO). Changes to WoW intended to streamline aspects of gameplay, such as time required to play and level of difficulty in play, ...
Comments