May 8, 2012 @ 09:30, Room: 18AB
Chair: Steve Feiner, Columbia University, USA
Martian Boneyards: Can a Community of Players be a Community of Practice? - Long Case Study
Contribution & Benefit: Case study of Martian Boneyards, an MMO-based science-mystery game designed to foster collaborative inquiry. Demonstrates how designers can shape an evolving game narrative, responding to players’ activities and accumulating knowledge.
Abstract » Martian Boneyards is a prototype game run in a massively-multiplayer online environment designed to entice gamers to partake in collaborative scientific inquiry. This case study examines the steps designers took to foster a community of inquiry within the game. Designers played characters in the game, allowing them to be responsive to players’ activities and accumulating knowledge. Players were drawn to the narrative and close relationships they developed with the designers’ characters and other players. An informal and communal reward system was used to further nurture collaboration among the community. Findings suggest games like this one show promise for fostering science identity and scientific inquiry.
Athletes and Street Acrobats: Designing for play as a Community Value in Parkour - Paper
Contribution & Benefit: We developed a mobile community service for the Parkour community. We discuss how the successful design relied understanding the culture as a 'fun community', valuing play over achievement and competition.
Abstract » Participatory design methods face challenges when designing for a widespread youth community. In such projects, it is not enough to design in collaboration with a few selected individuals; one must also strive to understand the community at a deeper level and incorporate its values and practices into the design solution.
We report on our process of designing with, and for, an identified youth group: the Parkour and Freerunning community. We show how the successful design relied not only on employing methods of participatory observation and participatory design, but also on acquiring an understanding of the practice as a "fun community", valuing play over achievement and competition.
ACMWe report on our process of designing with, and for, an identified youth group: the Parkour and Freerunning community. We show how the successful design relied not only on employing methods of participatory observation and participatory design, but also on acquiring an understanding of the practice as a "fun community", valuing play over achievement and competition.
Communication and Commitment in an Online Game Team - Paper
Contribution & Benefit: Describes an experiment on inducing communication in online game groups. Examines the influence of communication topic and communicator role on group commitment. Extends our understanding of commitment in online groups.
Abstract » Theories about commitment in online settings and empirical evidence from offline environments suggest that greater communication in online groups should lead members to become more committed and participate longer. However, experimental evidence is sparse, in part because of difficulties inducing communication online. Moreover, previous work has not identified the route by which communication leads to increased commitment. In this paper, we investigated whether task versus social communication modeled by a leader versus a peer influenced the amount that group members talked and their willingness to continue participating in the group. We conducted an experiment within ad hoc groups in the online game World of Warcraft. Results suggest that communication early in a group�s history causes members to talk more later on and that the early communication increases their commitment through its influence on group atmosphere rather than through increased member participation. Social communication by a peer is especially valuable in increasing commitment.
ACMTwiage: A Game for Finding Good Advice on Twitter - Paper
Contribution & Benefit: Examines the feasibility of crowdsourcing the identification of "useful advice" on Twitter through a Game with a Purpose (GWAP) called Twiage.
Abstract » Millions of recommendations, opinions and experiences are shared across popular microblogging platforms and services each day. Yet much of this content becomes quickly lost in the stream shortly after being posted. This paper looks at the feasibility of identifying useful content in microblog streams so that it might be archived to facilitate wider access and reference. Towards this goal, we present an experiment with a game-with-a-purpose called
\\emph{Twiage} that we designed to determine how well the deluge of content in �raw� microblog streams could be turned into filtered and ranked collections using ratings from players. Experiments with Twiage validate the feasibility of applying human-computation to this problem, finding strong agreement about what constitutes the ``most useful'' content in our test dataset. Second, we compare the effectiveness of various methods of eliciting such ratings, finding that a �choose-best� interface and Elo rating ranking scheme yield the greatest agreement in the fewest rounds. External validation of resulting top-rated twitter content with a domain expert found that while the top Twiage-ranked �tweets� were among the best of the set, there was a tendency for players to also select what we term �weak spam� -- e.g., promotional content disguised as articles or reviews, indicating a need for more stringent content filtering.
ACM\\emph{Twiage} that we designed to determine how well the deluge of content in �raw� microblog streams could be turned into filtered and ranked collections using ratings from players. Experiments with Twiage validate the feasibility of applying human-computation to this problem, finding strong agreement about what constitutes the ``most useful'' content in our test dataset. Second, we compare the effectiveness of various methods of eliciting such ratings, finding that a �choose-best� interface and Elo rating ranking scheme yield the greatest agreement in the fewest rounds. External validation of resulting top-rated twitter content with a domain expert found that while the top Twiage-ranked �tweets� were among the best of the set, there was a tendency for players to also select what we term �weak spam� -- e.g., promotional content disguised as articles or reviews, indicating a need for more stringent content filtering.