Overview

FPS teams coordinate their actions primarily through the audio channel, and this is particularly interesting because it shares similarities to other important scenarios, like how firefighters need to communicate and coordinate. If we can learn how FPS players do this, we can design better technologies for people like firefighters.

We're conducting this research using two methods: survey, and observation.

Survey

The survey is here: http://hcitang.org/surveys/index.php?sid=53799

Details

The goal of this research is to collect data about how users coordinate their actions in distributed computer-based collaboration occuring in a 3D virtual environment. The data set would provide both general and specific information about how users employ verbal references in-game to coordinate their activities (e.g. "I am over here," vs. "I am near the truck"), and how other media are used to communicate these references to newcomers, or when new environments are encountered (i.e. when users users are unfamiliar with the environment). Our specific context for study will be video gamers that play first-person shooter (FPS) games: in these fast-paced games, players' actions are highly-coupled, and so they need to rapidly coordinate their actions against enemy teams.

We will collect this data using two methods: a broadly targeted survey questionnaire, and a set of in-situ observations as teams engage in collaboration. A link to the survey questionnaire will be posted on internet-based forums (and sent out via word of mouth) explaining our objectives, and asking gamers to participate and complete the survey. This will form the survey participant pool. We will also approach gamer "clans" (groups of gamers that play together in-world) explaining our objectives and methods. With their consent, we observe and record a 1-2 hour video gaming session as they play in their home environment. The focus of the recording will be the game screen and the audio communication between the player and his teammates. We will follow this recording with a brief interview.

3D collaborative virtual environments (CVEs--such as SecondLife) are notorious for two core problems: (1) the difficulty of repositioning and reorienting in the space (i.e. navigating to the correct location, and looking in the right direction), and (2) the difficulty of coordinating actions between collaborators (because it is challenging to communicate what to look at). In the physical world, these issues are not as evident as we can easily establish shared perspective by gesturing/pointing, and by glancing at one's conversational partner to see where s/he is looking. A considerable body of literature has examined how to address this problem in CVEs by using visualizations of others' perspectives, but these ideas are created by researchers and generally tested in usability sessions rather than in the real world.

Players of FPS games need to overcome this challenge all the time. They operate within a CVE, and they have a shared goal that requires continually repositioning and reorienting themselves in the environment. In many cases, these games are designed such that a well-coordinated /team/ will be more successful than a group of individuals operating without any sort of meaningful coordination. Succinctly, successful FPS players (and teams) need to solve the problems we outlined earlier every time they play. We are therefore interested in: (1) how it is that they communicate location and orientation to teammates in real-time--this is often of oncoming enemies, or of how to coordinate attacks on enemies that are holding down another location; (2) how teams communicate these ideas to newcomers, and (3) how this language and vocabulary is established when teams need to work in new environments.

The questionnaire survey will be used to gather baseline, general information about how users learn to coordinate their actions in an FPS game. We hope to use this information and correlate it against the in-situ observation recordings. Finally, the interviews that we conduct at the conclusion of the in-situ observations will be used as a means to provide clarification and a lens for interpreting the observation recordings.

More Information

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