Towards Understanding the Importance of Co-Located Gameplay

Abstract

Analyzing the social context present in a gameplay environment and its effect on player experience can provide insights informing the design and social value of games. We investigate the influence of social condition (cooperative or competitive play with a human player versus computer-controlled character) on player experience. The study controlled for co-presence by ensuring that another individual attending to the same stimulus was present in all conditions. Although physiological measures were not significant, subjective measures of arousal and pleasure were significantly different under varying conditions.

Robo Ludens

“…Multiplayer games have been chosen, since they have been less explored in HRI studies. Research has shown that players react differently when playing with other human players as compared to artificial agents [74], and the overall multiplayer gaming experience produced higher pleasure and perceived arousal [91], as well as more fun and less boring experiences in players [47].…”

Streaming VR Games to the Broad Audience: A Comparison of the First-Person and Third-Person Perspectives

“…Considering the overall popularity of game streaming, the motives and experiences of spectators have been of ongoing interest to the games user research community [21,43,50]. Instead of just focusing on the experience of the active player, a variety of work has broadened the research scope by explicitly investigating the spectator experience [4,11,13,28,44] and the motivations for viewers to spend their free time watching others play [10,18,24].…”

Evaluating singleplayer and multiplayer in human computation games

“…Research on co-location in games validates that players respond di erently when playing with or against other human players, compared with singleplayer experiences or play against an arti cial agent. For example, Wehbe and Nacke [31] investigate the e ect of co-location on players, nding that players demonstrated higher pleasure and perceived arousal in co-located multiplayer conditions than singleplayer conditions. Similarly, Mandryk and Inkpen [18] report that players found co-located multiplayer play with a friend more engaging (i.e., more fun, less frustrating, less boring) than the same (singleplayer) experience against an arti cial opponent.…”

“…Whether these results hold true for networked play is unknown, though we can speculate given that singleplayer Gwario is functionally similar to a naïve, networked implementation, as both omit any means of direct communication between players (and traditionally, networked HCGs do not permit direct player communication). Similarly to other studies of co-location [18,31], our study was conducted in a lab environment. While we took steps to mitigate the encumbrances of a lab environment and provide a non-intrusive, comfortable space for play, we acknowledge this may not have been the most natural space for gameplay.…”

“…Traditionally, HCG players are isolated (i.e., prohibited from real-time communication during play) to prevent collusion that may impact results. On the other hand, co-located multiplayer experiences have been shown to be strongly-engaging for players [31] and also in domains such as education (where games are intended to both teach and engage) [12,22]. Ultimately, we want to understand if co-located gameplay mechanics, based on their success in other dual-purpose domains, might generalize to HCGs while verifying if, and how, collusion may negatively impact human computation task results.…”