GDC: The Social Dimensions of Digital Gaming
10:00: Blast off. Justin Hall tried to tackle me at the bagel and coffee stand, but luckily I deflected his move with two fists to the forehead. He's had a haircut: all hair over the eyes and bald at the back, frontal lobe very protected.
First up: the all-day tutorial, The Social Dimensions of Digital Gaming, which has an all-star social gaming lineup: T.L Taylor, Julian Dibbell, Eric Zimmerman, Nick Yee, Raph Koster, Constance Steinkuehler and about 15 more otherwise I'd type out everyone's name. Justin and I found a wall plug, but there's no wifi except in the very central main area, so updates will be on an as-and-when basis.
Can't wait for the days of blanket wifi - how our grandchildren will laugh at us when we try to explain "footprint".
12:30: Two sessions done. Straight in at the deep end of academia for the first session, with lots of cognitive psychology references and talk on amoral relationships, reciprocity, distributed cognition. For a jetlagged, just-had-breakfast person, it did not particularly compute, but I'm hoping it'll come out in the wash over the full day. The second session was more practical - a how-to do research, tips on quantitative research, etc.
Some interesting snippets: introduce VoIP, and people like each other less but have deeper relationships. It's more "real". Plus, do real life social dynamics translate across into second life dynamics?
Answer: Yes.
Brilliant!
And just how can you tell if two avatars are maintaining eye contact?
Posted by: WandringSoul | March 21, 2006 at 09:39
Seems a bit hard to do in third person, certainly since your actual "eyes" are basically a few feet above the avatar's head. In first person it'd make more sense.
The first point is great though, very interesting. :)
Posted by: Pixel Kill | March 21, 2006 at 09:43
Some games include eye contact based on where your cursor is, and fully poseable head motion etc. SWG and SL are two I can think of. If you're zoomed in on someone's head in SL, your eyes are looking straight into theirs....
Alice, is this research being done at PARC?
Posted by: Jez | March 21, 2006 at 14:08
The orientation of an avatar's head is a pretty good proxy for eye gaze when your view is zoomed out and faces are hard to see. For example, in SWG and EQII, clicking on another player's avatar makes yours "look at" it. Although you may not see eyes, the turning of heads feels like "eye contact."
Also in EQII, whenever your avatar comes within a certain radius of another (PC or NPC), the avatars automatically "make eye contact." It's very cool. It really brings the NPCs to life and even feels pretty natural with player characters (when someone steps into your personal space in real life, your reflex is to look at them).
Jez - the research on the slides is NOT being done at PARC, but we ARE doing work on avatar interaction using screen-capture video analysis. Check it out http://blogs.parc.com/playon/archives/data/avatar_interaction/index.html.
Posted by: Bob | March 21, 2006 at 23:59
The head posing is interesting, but I don't believe it's analogous of eye contact. Just because you've clicked someone doesn't mean you're talking to them or even paying them any attention beyond the cursory examination you originally gave them.
Eye contact is not a valid metric when conversations are textual or in teamspeak. These create conversation planes that have no relationship to the physical game world.
Posted by: Fred | March 22, 2006 at 22:32
Thanks, Bob! I remember your talk at the Austin Game Conference -- interesting stuff.
Posted by: Jez | March 23, 2006 at 15:32