Inclusive esports: Sense of Agency and Fairness through Pre-Training-Based Assistive Methods

Several assistive technologies for users’ operations have been recently developed. A user’s sense of agency (SoA) decreases with increasing system assistance, possibly resulting in a decrease in the user’s sense of fulfillment. This study aims to provide a design guideline for an assistive method to maintain and improve the sense of fulfillment with SoA. We propose a mathematical model describing the mechanisms by which the assistive method affects SoA and SoA induces a sense of fulfillment. The experience in the flow state is assumed to be a sense of fulfillment. The assistance effect on the skill-challenge plane in flow theory is defined as an increase in skill and decrease in challenge. The factor that separates the two effects from attribution theory is the locus of causality, which is matched to the judgement of agency (JoA) from the two-step account of agency. We hypothesized that the assistance increases the perception of skill and sense of fulfillment is greater when the locus of causality is internal, rather than external. To verify this hypothesis, a game task experiment was conducted with assistance that varied with the ease of recognition. We hypothesized that a player’s JoA is internal for hard-to-recognize assistance, resulting in a high sense of fulfillment. Experimental results supported this hypothesis.

When playing inter-personal sports games remotely, the time lag between user actions and feedback decreases the user’s performance and sense of agency. While computational assistance can improve performance, naive intervention independent of the context also compromises the user’s sense of agency. We propose a context-aware assistance method that retrieves both user performance and sense of agency, and we demonstrate the method using air hockey (a two-dimensional physical game) as a testbed. Our system includes a 2D plotter-like machine that controls the striker on half of the table surface, and a web application interface that enables manipulation of the striker from a remote location. Using our system, a remote player can play against a physical opponent from anywhere through a web browser. We designed the striker control assistance based on the context by computationally predicting the puck’s trajectory using a real-time captured video image. With this assistance, the remote player exhibits an improved performance without compromising their sense of agency, and both players can experience the excitement of the game.