Interpersonal Relationships in Group Interaction in CSCW Environments Yang Cao, Golha Sharifi, Yamini Upadrashta, Julita Vassileva University of Saskatchewan, Canada

Outline Introduction Game design Rules Experiments Results Conclusions Future work Link to workshop questions

Introduction Social factors in multi-user environments –user motivation, attitudes to others, personal relationships and social networks –emerging, self-organizing social dynamics –how environment mediates is important We are interested to find out how people develop and change their attitudes of liking or disliking other people how the motivation influences attitude change how the design of the environment influences attitude change and the emergent social fabric of the group Tool: a new multi-user web-based computer game

The game

Game design (1/2) Goal: To send a packet to a given other player with minimum loss. Game Description: A player chooses a destination player and sends to him/her a signed packet It can send it only by passing it to one of the other players. The selected player can (depending on whether s/he dislikes or likes the originator of the packet). destroy it completely take away a part of the packet and pass it to another player leave it untouched and pass it to another player

Game design (2/2) This continues until the packet reaches the destination or is destroyed. After each round the player can : see if his/her packet has arrived entirely or partially (proportion of 100). see a system generated rough representation of the attitudes of other players towards him/her (system model) change his/her attitudes to the other players.

Animation Sender (A) Destination (D) Send this to D (B) (C) I like B more than C, so I send it through B This has to go to D I like A, so I won’t destroy her packet and I Don’t dislike D so I send the packet to D The packet reach the destination (End of round) Scenario 1:I don’t like A, so I will destroy her packet. (End of round) Scenario 2:I like A, so I won’t destroy her packet and I like D more than C, so I send the packet to D Scenario 3:I like A, so I won’t destroy her packet but I like C more than D, so I will send the packet to C This has to go to D T he packet reach the destination (End of round) “A” sends a packet to destination “D”

Implementation Web-based (Apache Tomcat) Multi-Agent Architecture (FIPA)

Rules (1/3) A Personal Agent (PA) represents each player in the game The PA maintains a list of attitudes {a 1,…, a k } of the player towards the other k players, a i  {1,2,3,4,5},where 1 means "dislike" and 5 means "like" PA sents the packet to the agent of the most liked player M | a M = max i {a 1, a 2, …, a k }

Rules (2/3) The PA cannot send its packet to an agent that is strongly disliked by the user (a i =1) The PA of the player who originate the packet cannot send its packet directly to the destination If the player dislikes strongly the originator R of the package (a R = 1), the PA will destroy the packet and the packet will not be passed further. –Otherwise, the PA takes away n parts of the package where n = 5 – a R and a R  {2,3,4,5}

Rules (3/3) The round finishes when the packet reaches the destination player or is destroyed. The player that has accummulated a highest score of passed packages wins the game. The PAs do not reveal the attitudes of their users to either other agents or to the system. Players can view their own attitudes towards the others at any time (player model). At the end of the round, each player can see the system model, which is computed by observing the passing of the package.

Using the game as a tool to study attitude formation The initial attitude-setting in a group How significant is the impact of individuality in attitude change The impact of different system feedback and visualization The impact of different user motivations

Hypotheses Individuals react differently, but consistently to success and failure when changing their attitudes to the other people involved in the situation; People reciprocate the attitudes of other people, when they become aware of them; The feedback about other people’s attitudes is given plays a role in the way people reciprocate and in the dynamics of the attitudes.

Two experiments with 2 versions Text feedback version 6 participants played 50 rounds Questionnaire in the end Emoticon version 7 participants played 40 rounds 45 minutes, 5-6 players at any given time Players had different gender, age, ethnic background (ignored) Players did not know who is who (aliases used in the game). The players were given a general introduction about the basic rules.

Results: how people choose initial attitudes to another player? Level of liking % participants

Results: dynamics of attitude change

Examples of attitude evolution

Another example of evolution

Typical reactions Drastically reducing level of liking as a result of failure / partial failure in a game- round –Frequent for particular players –Targeted towards one most liked player –Targeted towards all most liked players

More typical reactions Reciprocation –Changing ones own attitude to another player to match the attitude of the other player –Comparing the mutual liking evolution curves for pairs of users  pattern of delayed reciprocity –Example –Pronounced difference between the two versions An average of 43.7% (median 50%) reciprocating changes across the players in the text feedback version and An average of 77% (median 73%) of reciprocating changes in the emoticon version.

Discussion Individuals react differently, but consistently to success and failure when changing their attitudes to the other people involved in the situation; People reciprocate the attitudes of other people, when they become aware of them; The way feedback about other people’s attitudes is given plays a role in the way people reciprocate and in the dynamics of the attitudes.

Conclusions Multi-player games offer a tool for studying the social dynamics of a group Individuality plays a significant role –It is possible to define typical reactions More work needs to be done to generate constructive results that can guide system design

How the paper addresses the WS questions: 1: Taxonomy of Circumstances Requiring Affective and Attitude User Modeling - in multi-user virtual environments, collaborative or not - the social experience is the determining factor for success 2: Existing methods of Constructing Affective/Attitude User Models - modelling relationships / attitudes among users 3: Validation and Evaluation - through the use of social (multi-player) games 4: Guidelines for model use - adapting the feedback and visualization

Future work The impact of the user motivation for participation (e.g. Win the game vs. Play the game) will be investigated Experiments with more participants by opening the game to players on the web To ease data analysis, synchronous rounds will be used To pinpoint the reason for changing attitude, user interviews and video observations, think aloud protocols will be used The role of the amount and the presentation of feedback information on the attitude formation of the user will be investigated further

Interpersonal Attitudes Not necessarily reciprocal So, each relationship is subjective, uni-directional

Player Model & System Model (textual feedback version)

Player Model & System Model (animated emoticon version)

Reciprocation example Text feedback version Emoticon Feedback version