Response: Family Portals

Summary:

Communicating with family and close friends, who live far away, was the focus of this paper. The researchers examined methods in which close-knit families could interact with each other intimately and still be in their respective locations. The examination was done by their implementation “Family Portals”, which allowed for video conferencing, messaging and a shared whiteboard. While each of these features itself is not unique, framing it for a family environment was. This system was tested in 2 different “triads” or family groups for 8 weeks total, and they found several interesting results. The results seemed to indicate that a lot of real world communication patterns transferred to the digital domain. Solitude, for instance, was further enhanced in some cases, because seeing but not being able to communicate was frustrating for one of the mothers in the triad. Further, it also allowed users to be selective (just like in real life), by physically placing the system in their ideal locations, so that family could not always see what they were doing. Overall, the paper and its finding suggested that communication in a family (or close-knit) group requires a strong need for communication amongst all the parties and that if proper adoption is done, relationship dynamics can be enhanced or created. Generalizing these results to larger families however, would be a challenge, as stated towards the end of the paper.

Response:

This was an interesting paper to me, because of the focus on long-distance family communication. Many of the primary communicators in the system were young and able to adopt the system easily. I know in my case, for some overseas family members, adopting such technology would be extremely difficult, because it would not fit socially. The most interesting result for me, in this paper, was the changed relationships because of the system. They used the whiteboard more; they were more involved in each other’s lives and most likely felt closer. In this respect, the system was a success. On the flipside, the system also allowed for family members to be “more annoyed” with each other, by not answering the “knocks”, for example. In some respects, this is limited in real life because they do not see each other ALL the time, but a constant connection removes that. I would have liked to a longer study on the system and the change in relationship dynamics. Additionally, testing the system on budding relationships would be an interesting experiment, to see if relationships can form FROM the system itself.

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.