Response: This is not a One-Horse Race

This paper is a study of a multi-player group based health game. The paper focused on the behaviour and motivation of individuals that can effect the participation of themselves and influence others in a group health game.
The researchers studied the American Horse Power game competition among 15 middle schools. The research did not focus on the effect of the physical activity on the individual's body, just the step count. The researchers interviewed 200 people including the participants and teachers from the school. This paper was able to identify 5 prominent categories of participants.

Achievers: They focus on game related goals and behaviours to achieve these goals. They concentrate on personal performance and are not competitive in nature. They are mostly are not athletic and set regular activities as goals (such as walking). Moreover, they fear social pressure and negative views of others on their activities therefore they do not influence  others by sharing their step count.
Active Buddies: These players have a small group of friends with whom they interact and enjoy activities on regular basis. Therefore, they can influence each other towards positive reinforcement. They enjoy a friendly competition among themselves.
Social Experience Seekers: These players are motivated more towards the sharing of their activities and profiles with friends and classmates. Since, with this system they could modify their avatars with no relation to their physical activity, they did not concentrate on their step count. However, we did see in the Ubigreen system that this can be used to motivate such players. They have the ability to influence others, because they promote themselves and their activities.
Team Players: These players are motivated by a sense of belonging to a team. They kept track of the schools progress with other schools. They shared their participation with the teachers and were very enthusiastic towards their goals.
Freeloaders: Freeloaders are people who participate just not to feel left out or get the secondary benefits from participating(e.g a t-shirt, free lunch). Therefore, they do not care about the physical activity or the schools performance. They have negative influence on the groups motivation.

The paper gave suggestions on how to influence the low participating players into more active participation. For example, for social experience seekers, if they could buy things for their avatars based on increase in step counts. Moreover, there should be preference setting for players to share step count information.



No real time communication between players and no real time feedback - only when to login to the website .

Response: This is Not a One-Horse Race

Summary:

The purpose of this paper, was to examine how individual people play games within the context of a large group. The game chosen was a health-based game that depended upon pervasive technologies and was targeted at youth in schools. After the completion of a large field-trial, they found five player types that existed when individuals played their game. These types (achievers, active buddies, social experience seekers, team players and freeloaders) highlighted the precocious nature of individual vs. group rewards and that the balance depends on the user/player.

Response:

To me, this paper was about designing games that balance (or in some cases, leverage) the “me. vs everyone else” aspect. Their findings suggested a wide range of behavior, with personal health being a motivating factor. It would have been interesting to see a different game played for the trial, which had a potentially more imbalanced “me vs. everyone else”, that could have involved toys or candy (for example). Would there have been such a wide range of behavior? Would the game even matter at all if the reward was the focus? In these questions, a larger question comes to mind as well, namely, does the gameplay, or the game itself truly matter, if the outcome surpasses it?

Re: Understanding Player Types in Multiplayer Pervasive Health Games for Youth

This paper describes the diversity of individual participation styles in multiplayer health games, based on an evaluation of a large-scale field trial of a pervasive technology-based health game for youth. Their findings highlight concerns and cares of youth participating in health games, and the impact of group-based competition on individual players. The research identified the five distinctive player types that emerged during interactions with this game: achievers, active buddies, social experience seekers, team players, and freeloaders. In addition to describing genres of players, they also present design suggestions for integrating group-based mechanisms effectively in health games for youth, among others.

Commentary

Games differ from utility software in some key characteristics: In games, the purpose is to have fun and enjoy playing the game. Learning to play the game, solving problems, or discovering new motivations is part of that experience. It is the prerogative of game designers to create the content and define goals that the players should strive to reach. Therefore, games have the potential to be intelligently adapted, as flexible media experiences, based on varying models and motivations of the players interacting with them. This adaptive approach to games has the potential to provide a powerfully individualized experience to game players, which, in turn, can achieved a targeted change in behaviour among users.

Summary Response Week 10: Games

CPSC 601.24 Week 10 Part 2

Papers

In this response I will discuss two papers, one which examines player types in health games and another which talks about variations in games.

Games

Games design is an interesting topic, a designer has to create a game that will challenge people while playing it keeping it interesting but not so challenging that it becomes frustrating. Some modern video games fully of glitzy graphics are essentially no different as games then early RPG shooters. Other simplistic games, such as Mario Brothers, are still fun to play even with a hokey style.

If game design is really about a set of rules (maybe a stretched definition) then we can think of variations to the rules as modifications to the design, like knocking down a wall is a modification to the design of a house. Consider a game like tic-tac-t0, a horrible game because it's entirely determined by the ordering of the players - provided that nobody plays the centre first. So rules of the game make it boring. Simply adding a new rule to the game might have a complex outcome that isn't obvious, the free-parking bonus in Monopoly, for example, makes the game last far longer because people are less likely to go bankrupt.

The researchers of the 'remix and play' paper create a taxonomy for rules by 'mining' a set of variants for poker. They then apply this taxonomy to rules for Halo2 variants. They find out that some rules are 'spoiling' and others 'satisfying'. But more interestingly they bring up how some variants - because of the limits of customizability of Halo2 - require that people voluntarily submit to the rules. Because the set of people playing has no social relationship, a huge set of enforcement and trust issues are brought up. This issues have been thoroughly studied in game theory and economics and psychology.

This paper is bad, not because the claims they make are not valid or their methodology is flawed, but because they have nothing to say. The research questions that we could ask and the studies that could be performed is effectively infinite. To be good the research must be interesting, but the conception of this paper is boring, nothing interesting could have even possibly come out of this research.

The second paper discusses the player types in multiplayer health games which are, unfortunately, a thing. The researchers review a specific example of such a system which was deployed at low-income schools in the United States. They found through interviews and quantitative analysis that each of the users could be categorized into a certain type based on their behavior. What was interesting is how affected some of the participants seemed to be by their relative status - or the idea that they would be shamed because they caused their team to lose. Without considering this a designer might have simply 'exposed' the steps every student in the system to try to encourage them. The freeloader problem seems like it could be solved by having 'real-world' intervention followed up by removal from the program.

Boundary Regulation in Social Media

This paper focuses on how people manage context and privacy between different groups of friends on social media sites- known as Boundary Regulation.  The researchers found that people achieve Boundary regulation through multiple profile management(MPM) on the social media sites. Following are the motives behind multiple profile creation:

1)Privacy: People use multiple profiles to disclose different behaviour on different profiles. For example, a person created a different profile to socialize with peers so that professional image is not effected.
2)Identity Management: People create a different profile to manage different identities. For example, a journalist has a different profile where he raises issues and discussions as a journalist.
3)Utility: People use separate profiles to manage different information with a specific target audience that are not necessarily friends, for example, a Marketing person has created a profile to promote a restaurant.
4) Propriety: People used multiple profiles to facilitate the social boundary that exists in real life. For example, its appropriate if a boss joins your professional profile but not the personal profile.

The Researchers identified methods used for Boundary Regulation:
Regulation by Site: People create separate profiles on the same site to manage the motives described above. Another method is to manage privacy settings on the same profile. Or create different profiles on different sites.
Regulation by Linkage: People can link their different profiles to show that they are the same person in different contexts. Or they try to make sure that an account doesn't give any access or indication of another.

Profiles can be categorized based on the nature of disclosure from Hidden to completely Public:
Pseudonymity: The separate identities are not linked to your personal self and not linked to one another.
Practical Obscurity: Separate identities that are public or personal but are unlinked on purpose.
Transparent Separation: Identities are public and the person purposefully links them.

Review: I feel that this paper did a good job in looking at how people are trying to manage the above mentioned motives through multiple profiles. This is something that social media sites need to look into. However, it would have been more supportive if the paper had put in comments from the users regarding how much effort goes into maintaing multiple profiles. That could be one of the reason why people keep their profiles completely transparent and restrict themselves in participating on the site. We can study how we manage faces in our normal communication. However, social media sites are providing means for any individual to reach large audiences, which wasnt possible before. Therefore, we need to study how famous people manage faces, for e.g Politicians, Actors, etc.

Response: Boundary Regulation in Social Media

Summary:

In this paper the authors investigate the motivations of people in using separate accounts for social networks. They compare different usage patterns ranging from fully open transparent connection of accounts and networks using real names to disconnected hidden accounts using pseudonyms. They also look at the motivation for peoples behavior using these systems, finding that there interest is more than just that of privacy, but also utility, identity management and social behaviour.

Response:

I was surprised at first by the findings of the authors, especially that privacy was not the only reason people chose to use multiple accounts to manage their online identity. On further reflection though I am less surprised, especially when looking at the divisions the authors selected, which I would argue are mostly types of privacy preservation. Whether the reasons are you don't want your boss to see what you do, you don't want your mother to see what you do or you don't want people who don't know who you are what you do, there are all aspects of the same concept.

The utility argument is more interesting to me in that it is caused largely by the lack of control people have over these types of services. Sadly they did not include and google plus users in their study. It would have been interesting to see what having the ability to decide which sections of your audience receives your posts does to the concerns about having professional and private accounts.

Summary Response Week 10: Social Networking

CPSC 601.25 Week 10 Part 1

Papers

In this response I will discuss two papers, one which examines 'boundary regulation' in social networking and another which discusses the personality of popular facebook users.

Social Realities

In the early days of "social networking" your online identity seldom matches your real world identify. Your online friends were friends you knew online or often through the site itself. Sites like MySpace and Nexopia followed this practice. This lack of connection with a real world identity seemed to date back to the architecture chosen for the internet itself. But when Facebook emerged it made a specific emphasis on representing real world relationships digitally. This was perhaps what set Facebook apart from it's competitors, this direct connection gave it numerous advantages, since people are more interesting in their real world friends, which leads them to spend more time on the site. More real world data means more real world advertising dollars as well.

But this change had some serious consequences. People who presented themselves to different people differently now had all of their relationships collected into one bag. Who would they present themselves as?

The researchers of the boundary regulation conducted an interview study of people who solved this by created multiple profiles. They pompously turn this phenomenon into technical jargon by calling it multiple profile maintenance and giving it the acronym MPM. The research find exactly what you'd expect. Some people (but not even close to a majority) respond to the problem described earlier by just creating multiple profiles. The differences between the profiles range from completed disconnected to basically obvious or transparent. People provided exactly the reasons you'd expect for this. Mostly they want privacy, to limit their posts and social networking activities to a selected set of people. They also are afraid that people will judge them for these sites, which are sometimes (but not usually) accessible to outsiders. Otherwise it's just an explicit attempt to appear to be a different person in the eyes of different groups. One suspects that this kind of a system might become awkward if someone discovered you kept different profiles which they were explicitly not included in.

A much more interesting subject is why people are adding certain groups of people. Probably most people are not purposely duplicitous with their actual friends. It's more likely that people wish to present a public front to bosses, coworkers and acquaintances. It's possible that people are now feeling a social obligation to add these people to social networking and then feel the need to screen or manager boundaries with them.

Popular People

Another paper about popular Facebook users attempts to correlate the number of Facebook friends users have to some personality traits (and other variables). Interestingly the researchers use the results of a Facebook application ... which is presented on the users profile as input for their analysis. They claim that they use 'quality metrics' to remove people who are answering randomly or unseriously. They do not seriously address whether people are answering this questions in a specific way to get a specific outcome. They show a selection of statistical correlations between these personality types and the number of Facebook friends.

A more interesting study would be to examine communication versus social networking. Tools exist that allow users to monitor who they communicate most often with and these could be accompanied with other tracking metrics. This might let researchers compare this tighter social network to the people who are listed as friends on a social network.

Response: The Personality of Popular Facebook Users

Summary:

This paper examined the potential linkage between the personality of a user of FB and their relationships (examined by the number of contacts they had. They selected a large sample of people from the United States, primarily because the personality test used was designed for US culture. Nevertheless, they utilized a Facebook application called “myPersonality” to measure the 5 personality dimensions – Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism. They reasoned that utilizing this application to survey users instead of pen/paper resulted in a higher quality of results, because personal incentives (accurate description of their personality) were a highly motivating factor. Upon receiving the results from the users, they researchers found that people who self-monitor themselves do not correlate with a high number of Facebook “friends”. They conclude, from their study, that knowing this information can lead to more targeted advertisements (and scams).

Response:

I will begin this response by stating that I am an individual who HATES Facebook. Now that I have made that statement, my initial response to this paper and its findings are exactly what the final statement is “The street finds its own uses for things”. Everyone is different, and thus, everyone uses Facebook differently, simply. What is consistent however is the representation of ourselves on Facebook is never truly what we are. The statement in the paper made by Jaron Lanier, who said, “The most effective young Facebook users…are the ones who create successful online fictions about themselves”, is entirely true to me. I simply can’t believe that you can measure personality at all on Facebook, when it is a tool to present oneself fictitiously. In addition, there are many users who simply have contacts they do not communicate with consistently. These weak relationships should not be considered at all if a friend count is being used to determine personality traits. If I added everyone I knew in high school to my Facebook account, and took this test, I would be an extrovert (or anyone else for that matter). All in all, Facebook is not a good tool to measure personality, when everyone tries to look “good” on Facebook J

Re: Equal Opportunities: Do Shareable Interfaces Promote More Group Participation Than Single User Displays?

Summary

This paper investigated the viability of using shareable interfaces—that are designed for more than one user to interact with— which can facilitate more equitable participation in co-located group settings compared with single user displays. The authors developed a conceptual framework that characterizes what they referred to as Shared Information Spaces (SISs), in terms of how they constrain and invite participation using different entry points. They also conducted an experiment which compared three different SISs: a physical-digital set-up (least constrained), a multitouch tabletop (medium), and a laptop display (most constrained).

Discussion

The aim of this research was to investigate how groups use different kinds of shareable interfaces when collaborating on a task. This objective, in many ways, is similar to the other co-located groupware technologies e.g., multitouch tabletops. Nonetheless, the researchers tried to operationalize the context of their research through the concept of entry points: the layout of the physical room (e.g., use of tables, walls), the display interfaces, the input devices, and the type of physical or digital information to be interacted with. This concept emphasizes the role of size, position, direction of the displays in the placement of input devices, and how these factors could be configured to reduce barriers and to encourage participation. According to the authors, a main finding of the research was that the physical–digital condition, that is, the one designed with the most tangible and accessible entry points, invited an evenly distributed participation in terms of verbal contributions. The tabletop condition was shown to have the most equitable collaboration in terms of physical interaction with the digital information on display. On the other, the control condition provoked the most utterances.

The findings of this research are indeed pointing in a similar direction as related developments in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, emphasizing the importance of entry points; how many entry points to provide and in what form? As is the case when designing any interface, what type of task, and in what context? It remains to be seen how far the use of these concepts and metaphors will actually carry. In the end, these are empirical questions that have to be answered by future research.

Equal Opportunities: Do Shareable Interface Promote More Group Participation Than single User Displays?

The main focus of the paper was to justify the use of digital surfaces for collaborative work by providing qualitative and quantitative proof. One additional concept added was that tabletops provide equal opportunity to the participants in order to contribute to the task. Equal opportunity is provided through the use of multi-touch enabled screens that allow simultaneous manipulation by multiple users from all sides of the tabletop.
Background Analysis: It was found that users needed to be encouraged to familiarize with and make use of a shared display. Additionally, small groups are more comfortable with tabletops than vertical displays. It was also clear that with the use of tangible objects, actions of others are more visible.

The researchers studied collaborative work in three situations: 1) Single Entry Small Laptop. 2)Equal Opportunity Tabletop 3) Equal Opportunity Tabletop with tangibles.
Quantitative Analysis: According to the first analysis less time was taken to complete the task in the laptop and the tangible tabletop case. The researchers then did further analysis on 1) the verbal and non-verbal communication 2)and level of participation of each person in the verbal communication and in manipulating the system. According to the analysis of the verbal communication, it was the highest in case of the laptop. Similarly, according to the results of the equal level of participation of each person in the group, it was less in case of the laptop in both verbal and physical participation.  The researchers suggest that providing accessible entry points lead to equal verbal participation from all, however  may not result in equal physical participation.

Qualitative Analysis:  The researchers were able to clarify the results of the quantitative analysis through these analysis. According to the results, in case of the laptop, the person who spoke the most, used the system the most. Moreover, verbal communication was more incase of the laptop because the person manipulating the mouse was giving running commentary or asking clarifications from the team members, Whereas, incase of the tabletop with the tangibles, the person who spoke the least contributed more physically. Some interesting finding were that, turn taking becomes awkward in single entry shared space. And tabletop with tangibles encouraged the division of labour and personal space. According to the comments of the users, people liked the use of tangibles because it clearly show the available options. Incase, of the laptop people got frustrated with not being able to present their own ideas themselves.
  
Review: Though this study wasn't necessary to obtain these results. However, the study did point out the advantages and reasons to design groupware applications. The most important reason being the need to provide equal opportunity for contribution by each team member.  I was wondering if a system was specifically designed to prompt input from each user (turn by turn), what will be the results.

Response to Equal Opportunities: Do Shareable Interfaces Promote More Group Participation Than Single User Displays?

In this paper the authors study three different modes of CSCW, a laptop mode, the table top mode and physical mode of interaction, comparing the quality and quantity of interactions of several groups of participants. While the results of the study are useful, they do not quite provide information to help design better systems for collaborative work in general.

Here the authors investigate these three different modes for one task. The results they produce provide a overview for that one task and however general that task may be it doesn't reflect the real world tasks that people would do using these different types of interaction. As such it is difficult to say how well their findings hold up to the real world. It would be beneficial to see a study like this taken out to where people do need to do interactive work this we and compare how the different modes affect the outcome of the work.

The authors also focus a great deal on the amount of communication necessary between the participants. In the general case this informative, but it is more a measure of an input to the system (of collaboration) than it is a measure of the output. Again if the authors were to turn to real world problems they might find more informative aspects of collaboration to measure.

In the discussion the authors mention affordances especially for collaborators who are less likely to take on leadership roles and ensuring that entry points are provided equitably. While this is good again for the general case, and is an important consideration it does not again allow for the real world considerations of such a system deployed in a work situation.