Building SYMLOG profiles with an online collaborative game

2017

With technological advances, it is now possible to use games to capture information-rich behaviours that reveal processes by which players interact and solve problems. Recent problem-based games have been designed to assess and record detailed interactions between the problem solver and the game environment, and thereby capture salient solution processes in an unobtrusive way (Zoanetti, 2010; Bennett et al., 2003; Shute & Wang, 2009). The Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills project used an innovative approach to capture these processes through responses (activities and communication patterns) within collaborative games (Griffin & Care, 2015). Game player response patterns are identified as behaviours that are indicative of skills and are captured in real-time game play within time-structured log files. The analysis of these log files allows for inferences to be drawn in regard to the efficiency and quality of player performance. A concern with this approach is that game d...

Our research work deals with the development of new learning environments, and we are particularly interested in studying the different aspects linked to users' collaboration in these environments. We believe that Games-based Learning can significantly enhance learning. That is why we have developed learning environments grounded on graphical representations of a course. These environments allow us to set up experiments with students in our university. The emergence of online multiplayer games led us to apply the metaphor of exploring a virtual 3D world, where each student embarks on a quest in order to collect knowledge related to a learning activity. In the environment, each part of the world represents a place, sometimes a collaborative place, where students are supposed to acquire a particular concept. Learning objects, artefacts or collaborative tools may be present in each location and a correct answer to specific exercises gives a key to the students, allowing them to access other activities.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2014

There is not much research on team collaboration in digital entertainment games, nor is there much evidence for the efficacy of game-based team training or the validity of game-based team assessment. This is a shortcoming because of an increasing pervasiveness of serious games in organizational life, e.g. for operational training, management and leadership. Is it possible to establish marked relationships between psychometric constructs that measure 'team composition and performance' and 'analytics' that unobtrusively measure gameplay performance? If so, what are the implications for gamebased team research and assessment? The authors conducted explorative, quasi-experimental (field) experiments with the multiplayer serious game TeamUp. One field experiment was conducted with 150 police officers as part of task-specific two-day team training. Research data were gathered through pre-game and post-game questionnaires on team constructs such as 'psychological safety' and 'team cohesion'. A large quantity of in-game data was logged to construct indicators like 'time needed to complete the task', 'speak time' and 'avoidable mistakes' to measure team performance. The conclusion of the analysis is that 'team cohesion' and 'psychological safety' correlate moderately and significantly with in-game performance indicators. Teams with an unequal individual game performance speak the most, while teams with an equally low or equally high individual performance spend significantly less time speaking. The indicative findings support the need to further develop validated analytics and game-based environments for team research and assessment.

This paper describes a preliminary study where a multiplayer location-based game's logfiles were used for the assessment of the overall practice of teams. We explore the use of activity metrics previously introduced and applied to CSCL settings. We argue that these metrics, if adapted in a meaningful way, will provide insight of the progress of a location-based gaming activity and its quality regarding the score. Moreover, this can be achieved in an automated way. A small set of activity metrics, related to game characteristics and player activity, is applied to a set of gaming activities. The results are analyzed regarding team performance and score. The paper proposes a way to analyze group activity in the context of location-based games while taking into account the characteristics of successful collaborative activities. Future work is proposed towards the development of automated metrics for the analysis of location-based gaming activities with emphasis on collaboration and group dynamics.

Designing multiplayer serious games that support collaborative learning has become a promising area of education techniques. Player should play a game with a proper level of ability and skills. Current approaches to adapt game make it possible for different elements to adjust to the player. However most of these approaches can adapt one single player; so we need to find ways to aggregate all users input and history into some potential information that can be used for the adaptation mechanism, we believe that user's profiling respond to these need by providing a detail analysis of player's performance. The goal of our research is to provide a novel approach for game adaptation correlated to a user's profile that guided by two concerns: player skill levels and social interaction between players. To achieve this, we present a conceptual user's profile.

2009

Abstract Advanced communication technologies enable strangers to work together on the same tasks or projects in virtual environments. Understanding the formation of task-oriented groups is an important first step to study the dynamics of team collaboration. In this paper, we investigated group combat activities in Sonypsilas EverQuest II game to identify the role of player and group attributes on group formation. We found that group formation is highly influenced by playerspsila common interests on challenging tasks.

Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining 2017

Online games provide a rich recording of interactions that can contribute to our understanding of human behavior. One potential lesson is to understand what motivates people to choose their teammates and how their choices lead to performance. We examine several hypotheses about team formation using a large, longitudinal dataset from a team-based online gaming environment. Specifically, we test how positive familiarity, homophily, and competence determine team formation in Battlefield 4, a popular team-based game in which players choose one of two competing teams to play on. Our dataset covers over two months of in-game interactions between over 380,000 players. We show that familiarity is an important factor in team formation, while homophily is not. Competence affects team formation in more nuanced ways: players with similarly high competence team-up repeatedly, but large variations in competence discourage repeated interactions.

Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 2013

Team collaboration in multi-player online games provides opportunities for players to interact with each other. Facilitating teams has become one of the main design principles to increase social activities. However, there is no research evidence that collaborating on tasks in game teams can produce the desired relational outcome. This paper examines more than half a million solo and team activities during a week in Dragon Nest, an MMO game. We measure the degree of team engagement using the percentage of time played in teams and the percentage of play with repeated teammates, and we then identify different types of players using this. The results show that solo players and team players are two distinct populations and they are highly predictable based on players' in-game status. Moreover, we find that spending more time in teams does not always lead to more social interactions. The interviews with players are conducted to validate the findings.

2015

Multiplayer online battle arena games provide an excellent opportunity to study team performance. When designing a team, players must negotiate a proficiency-congruency dilemma between selecting roles that best match their experience and roles that best complement the existing roles on the team. We adopt a mixed-methods approach to explore how users negotiate this dilemma. Using data from League of Legends, we define a similarity space to operationalize team design constructs about role proficiency, generality, and congruency. We collect publicly available data from 3.36 million users to test the influence of these constructs on team performance. We also conduct focus groups with novice and elite players to understand how players' team design practices vary with expertise. We find that player proficiency increases team performance more than team congruency. These findings have implications for players, designers, and theorists about how to recommend team designs that jointly pri...

2010

The Human Dynamics research group at the MIT Media Laboratory has demonstrated that wearable technology can be used to characterize face-to-face interactions, measure individual and collective patterns of human behavior, and automatically map out a company's de facto organizational chart . This capability can be an extraordinary resource for studying group behavior, group performance and team formation processes.