Carlos Martinho

Tomás Alves, Samuel Gomes, João Dias et al.

Throughout the years, social norms have been promoted as an informal enforcement mechanism for achieving beneficial collective outcomes. Among the most used methods to foster interactions, framing the context of a situation or setting in-game rules have shown strong results as mediators on how an individual interacts with their peers. Nevertheless, we found that there is a lack of research regarding the use of incentives such as scores to promote social interactions differing in valence. Weighing how incentives influence in-game behavior, we propose the use of rewards to promote interactions varying in valence, i.e. positive or negative, in a two-player scenario. To do so, we defined social valence as a continuous scale with two poles represented by Complicate and Help. Then, we performed user tests where participants where asked to play a game with two reward-based systems to test on whether the scoring system influenced the social interaction valence. The results indicate that the developed reward-based systems were able to foster interactions diverging in social valence scores, providing insights on how factors such as incentives overlap individual's established social norms. These findings empower game developers and designers with a low-cost and effective policy tool that is able to promote in-game behavior changes.

Samuel Gomes, Tomás Alves, João Dias et al.

Recent research has taken particular interest in observing the dynamics between altruistic and individual behavior. This is a commonly approached problem when reasoning about social dilemmas, which have a plethora of real world counterparts in the fields of education, health and economics. Weighing how incentives influence in-game behavior, our study examines individual and altruistic interactions, by analyzing the players' strategies and interaction motives when facing different reward attribution strategies. Consequently, a model for interaction motives is also proposed, with the premise that the motives for interactions can be defined as a continuous space, ranging from self-oriented (associated to self-improvement behaviors) to others-oriented (associated to extreme altruism behaviors) motives. To evaluate the promotion of individual and altruistic behavior, we leverage Message Across, an in-loco two-player videogame with adaptable reward attribution systems. We conducted several user tests (N = 66) to verify to what extent individual and altruistic reward attribution systems led players to vary their strategies and motives orientation. Our results indicate that players' strategies and self-reported orientation of interaction motives varied highly significantly upon the deployment of individual and altruistic reward systems, which leads us to believe on the suitability of applying an incentive-based strategy to moderate the emergence of individual and altruistic behavior in games.

Samuel Gomes, Carlos Martinho, João Dias

Nowadays, big effort is being put to study gamification and how game elements can be used to engage players. In this scope, we believe there is a growing need to explore the impact game mechanics have on the players' interactions and perception. This work focuses on the application of game mechanics to lead players to achieve certain types of social interaction (we named this type of mechanics social interaction mechanics). A word matching game called CrossAnt was modified so that it could dynamically generate different social interaction mechanics. These mechanics consisted in different key combinations needed to play the game and were aimed to promote what we think are three important types of social interactions: cooperation, competition and individual exploration. Our evaluation consisted on the execution of several sessions where two players interacted with the game for several levels and had to find for themselves how to perform the actions needed to succeed. While some of the levels required the input from both players in order to be completed, others could be completed by each player independently. Our results show that cooperation was perceived when both players had to intervene to perform the game actions. However, longer interactions may still be needed so that the other types of interactions are promoted.