Online video games support the development of social relationships through gameplay, however, gamers often cannot cultivate and maintain relationships based on social factors such as personality when using in-game matchmaking services. To address this, teammate matching sites external to games have emerged and enable gamers to offer to play games with others in exchange for payment. The affordances of these services are different from other existing gamer social sites, e.g., live streaming. Interviews were conducted with 16 dedicated users on Bixin, one of China's largest paid teammate matching sites, to examine user motivations, practices, and perceptions. The interviews found that gamers selected paid teammates on Bixin using different criteria compared to in-game matchmaking services and emphasized the importance of real-life characteristics such as voice. To maintain connections, paid teammates often also extended communication to external communication services such as WeChat. Although most gamers expected to communicate with paid teammates as if they were friends, very few reported building real friendships with their matched counterparts.
CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → Human computer interaction (HCI); Empirical studies in HCI .
The COVID-19 outbreak has resulted in a worldwide public health crisis. In such times of crisis, access to relevant and accurate information is critical. For many people in China, domestic social media platforms such as WeChat and Weibo have become dominant sources of COVID-19-related information and news. People have to evaluate the trustworthiness of COVID-19-related information and make sharing decisions using platforms that have to contend with government censorship policies, astroturfers, and other government interventions. We interviewed 33 Chinese WeChat users to understand how individuals were seeking COVID-19-related information and how they identified and evaluated specific COVID-19-related misinformation. This work exposes how COVID-19-related content with "positive energy" was prevalent on social media in China. A significant number of interviewees exhibited a willingness to prioritize information valence over veracity when evaluating and sharing content with others. Further, the work revealed how Chinese citizens' understanding of information ecosystems played an important role in their attitudes towards censorship and official media, and also influenced their evaluation of domestic and international information during a global crisis.
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