Collaboration in a multi-user game: impacts of an awareness tool on mutual modeling

Abstract

This paper presents an experimental research that focuses on collaboration in a multi-player game. The aim of the project is to study the cognitive impacts of awareness tools, i.e., artifacts that allow users of a collaborative system to be aware of what is going on in the joint virtual environment. The focus is on finding an effect on performance as well as on the representation an individual builds of what his partner knows, plans and intends to do (i.e., mutual modeling). We find that using awareness tools has a significant effect by improving task performance. However, the players who were provided with this tool did not show any improvement of their mutual modeling. Further analysis on contrasted groups revealed that there was an effect of the awareness tool on mutual modeling for players who spent a large amount of time using the tool.

Plato

“…Third, we will determine whether the framework scales well to larger coordinated episodes with more players. Fourth, because the framework specifies only the coordination requirements of an episode, and not the ways that players might satisfy those requirements, we will add guidelines for managing awareness information [1,6,17].…”

“…Researchers have examined coordination in team raids [14] or in larger-scale interaction patterns [ 2,24]. Others have considered coordination in real-time distributed games [14], and have focused on the awareness information that is necessary to support fast coordination of activity [16,17]. Other studies have looked at the coordination problems caused by network delays, showing that delays of even 100ms can have substantial effects on people's ability to coordinate tightly-coupled actions [8].…”

Partner modeling is mutual

“…However, within the experimental group, the pairs who intensively used the awareness tools obtained a significantly higher MM accuracy (for more details, see Nova et al, 2006). In order to compare M (A,B) and M (B,A), we computed intraclass correlation as described by Kenny et al (1998) from the answers to the crossquestionnaires.…”

“…The availability of an awareness tool was our independent variable. The main results have been published in (Nova, Wehrle, Goslin, Bourquin, Dillenbourg, 2006). We focus here on the question addressed in the introduction, that is the relation between the modeling performed by each user or the relation between M (A,B) and M (B,A).…”

Research on Awareness Language for Creating Group-Oriented Large-Scale Cooperation Environment

“…Some research efforts pay attention to special awareness tool and user interface, while other efforts focus on awareness facilities [5] . With these research activities, more advanced topics have coming into being, for example, effect of cooperative awareness for cooperation has been the emphases in these two years [ 6] [7] . In e-Learning, the research on CSCL has also been a hot research area, for example, there are researches on providing augmented group awareness tools to promote cooperative efficiency of a group [8] , some other researches aim to provide awareness of Learning Object Evolutions in e-Learning for more high usability of learning resource [9] , and further more, some researches try to create awareness facilities related to knowledge and information within eLearning system for effective learning [ 10][11] [12] .…”