Collaborative Video Game Research Articles

Social Presence Awareness Visualization in a Collaborative Videogame

The awareness information in collaborative systems supports the interaction between people. However, traditional awareness systems are limited to mechanisms that display data often isolated from the context of social interaction and do not fully reflect the individual relevance of a person (social presence) in the collaborative activity. Therefore, proposing more dynamic and efficient tools to facilitate the acquisition and presentation of social presence information is convenient. This research proposes a social presence visualization system and its conceptual architecture and develops a user-centered prototype. The prototype integrates functions that let the user select different representations of social presence (pictogram, bar chart, donut chart, and radial). We used the prototype in a collaborative video game (AssaultCube-CX) to study the effects of social presence visualization on users’ performance. We studied the social presence of 12 Mexican volunteers by recording their activities during the tests to analyze their social presence. The social presence quantitative analysis indicates that the visualization of social presence during the collaborative activity increase awareness of social presence and improves team performance in most cases.

Collaborative Video Game Design as an Act of Social Justice

This research is about bringing social justice art education into classrooms through the medium of video games and exploring the ways in which video game design can be a learning tool that can make contributions to and engage in social justice work. Drawing from a case-study research project with a small group of middle school students, through the lens of critical pedagogy informed by recent work by Dipti Desai, this project examines how learning happens through dialogue and knowledge weaving. Findings have led me to consider the potential of this type of video game design as a site of resistance and transformation in art education.

Global Game Jam in Latin-America, a Collaborative Videogame Learning Experience

Videogame production events, particularly the Global Game Jam (GGJ), is an activity par excellence aimed at the development of the world’s largest games, enhancing the form of personal expression, critical thinking, and appropriation of new media through collaborative work. The general objective is to explore the development process within the context of the GGJ, calculating the correlation between level of education and source of inspiration, the correlation between level of education and purpose of the game to be designed in the Global Game Jam and the correlation between level of education and skills. The main source of inspiration is defined by game genre, game mechanics, or other video game, in addition the purpose of the game is mainly due to learning a technical skill, enjoy doing it, and generate satisfaction in the players. Finally, the skills that prevail are 2D Design, Programming, and 3D Design. People with a high level of knowledge have the same passion as those who have just started in the multidisciplinary field of the development of video games motivated by creating an original game that has a good script and provides them a life experience.

Playing well with others: The role of opponent and intergroup anxiety in the reduction of prejudice through collaborative video game play.

Playing well with others: The role of opponent and intergroup anxiety in the reduction of prejudice through collaborative video game play.

Transmedial Worlds with Social Impact: Exploring Intergenerational Learning in Collaborative Video Game Design

This article’s focus is the creation of intergenerational game design experiences supported by phygital video games (i.e., games that feature both digital and physical elements) for children 8–12 years of age and elders 65 years and over living in Paris and Bagnolet, France. The purpose of the article is twofold: first, to give an account of our protocol activity to highlight the implementation difficulties associated with this kind of intergenerational gameplay, and second, to inspire researchers, educators, and caregivers to include innovative uses of transmedia world building and collaborative game design as tools to connect different generations and foster community participation in intergenerational programs.

Team Gaming for Team-building: Effects on Team Performance

Teams rapidly form and dissolve in organizations to solve specific problems that require diverse skills and experience. For example, in the information systems context, cross-functional and project-based teams that comprise a mix of personnel who temporarily work away from their usual functional groups (best perform agile software development (Barlow et al., 2011; Keith, Demirkan, & Goul, 2013). These newly formed work teams need to become productive as quickly as possible. Team video gaming (TVG) has emerged as a potential team-building activity. When new teammates play a collaborative video game, they engage in cooperative and challenging goals while they enjoy the games. Although research has shown that video games can promote learning and recreation, it has not investigated the effects of commercial video games on subsequent work-team performance. Better understanding this issue will provide insights into how to rapidly develop cohesion among newly formed work teams and, thus, lead to greater team performance. We examined this issue through a laboratory experiment. We found that teams in the TVG treatment demonstrated a 20 percent productivity improvement in subsequent tasks (in our case, a team-based geocaching scavenger hunt) over teams that participated in traditional team-building activities.

Studying Social Interactions in Groupware Systems

Groupware Systems (GS) support groups of users to, via cooperation, coordination, and communication, achieve a common goal. Technological advance has caused the users requirements become more demanding for the GS, being required for the GS to include social interactions for improving the collaboration of users in a better way. Thereby, it is necessary to find techniques for enhancing and performing tasks in collaborative work. In this paper, we present a review about the works related to the interaction models. In addition, we present the results of an experimental study with 30 users aimed to evaluate the social interactions of a GS (a collaborative videogame - First Person Shooter). The results obtained show that the social interactions can still be improved in such systems, whereby we propose a conceptual model of social interactions to support the collaboration of users. In order to validate our approach we propose a prototype based on Multi-Agent Systems.

A Pilot Study with a Novel Setup for Collaborative Play of the Humanoid Robot KASPAR with Children with Autism

This article describes a pilot study in which a novel experimental setup, involving an autonomous humanoid robot, KASPAR, participating in a collaborative, dyadic video game, was implemented and tested with children with autism, all of whom had impairments in playing socially and communicating with others. The children alternated between playing the collaborative video game with a neurotypical adult and playing the same game with the humanoid robot, being exposed to each condition twice. The equipment and experimental setup were designed to observe whether the children would engage in more collaborative behaviours while playing the video game and interacting with the adult than performing the same activities with the humanoid robot. The article describes the development of the experimental setup and its first evaluation in a small-scale exploratory pilot study. The purpose of the study was to gain experience with the operational limits of the robot as well as the dyadic video game, to determine what changes should be made to the systems, and to gain experience with analyzing the data from this study in order to conduct a more extensive evaluation in the future. Based on our observations of the childrens’ experiences in playing the cooperative game, we determined that while the children enjoyed both playing the game and interacting with the robot, the game should be made simpler to play as well as more explicitly collaborative in its mechanics. Also, the robot should be more explicit in its speech as well as more structured in its interactions.Results show that the children found the activity to be more entertaining, appeared more engaged in playing, and displayed better collaborative behaviours with their partners (For the purposes of this article, ‘partner’ refers to the human/robotic agent which interacts with the children with autism. We are not using the term’s other meanings that refer to specific relationships or emotional involvement between two individuals.) in the second sessions of playing with human adults than during their first sessions. One way of explaining these findings is that the children’s intermediary play session with the humanoid robot impacted their subsequent play session with the human adult. However, another longer and more thorough study would have to be conducted in order to better re-interpret these findings. Furthermore, although the children with autism were more interested in and entertained by the robotic partner, the children showed more examples of collaborative play and cooperation while playing with the human adult.