Reward-Mediated Individual and Altruistic Behavior
This research addresses the problem of moderating social behavior in games for applications in education, health, and economics, but it is incremental as it builds on existing work in social dilemmas.
The study investigated how different reward systems influence individual versus altruistic behavior in a two-player video game, finding that players' strategies and self-reported motives varied significantly based on the reward attribution system used.
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.