[Research] Communication between collocated players in a shooting game
Last update: 2-Feb-2016
Games are fun, and they are more fun if played together with others. Multiplayer games typically fall into one of the following 4 categories:
Games are fun, and they are more fun if played together with others. Multiplayer games typically fall into one of the following 4 categories:
- Collocated and Collaborative (e.g., Gears of War split-screen co-op)
- Collocated and Competitive (e.g., Street Fighter)
- Distributed and Collaborative (e.g., Rocket League vs CPU)
- Distributed and Competitive (e.g., Halo networked versus mode)
Setup of the study. Two collocated players sat in front of a projected screen and played the co-op mode of two games. They were free to use any method to communicate with each other.
We invited groups of two players to play a short section of two popular shooting games: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Gears of War 2. We chose these two games as they used a similar control scheme, and they represented two different kinds of time-critical shooting games: first-person shooters (FPS), and third-person shooters (TPS).
We collected video and audio data during the gameplay sessions, and used Affinity Diagramming method to establish emerging themes. We identified two main forms of between-players interaction to maintain mutual grounding: Communication Channels and Awareness Cues.
Communication Channels refer to the activities carried out by a player to notify the other. This include: verbally warn the other about an enemy at a certain position, use deliberate movements in the game world to locate items, and physically point to the screen to suggest a route.
Awareness Cues refer to visual and audio bits used by a player to stay aware of what's happening to the other player's avatar. This include: noticing the split-screen of the other player turning red (low health), sounds or utterances made by the other player or their avatar.
We collected video and audio data during the gameplay sessions, and used Affinity Diagramming method to establish emerging themes. We identified two main forms of between-players interaction to maintain mutual grounding: Communication Channels and Awareness Cues.
Communication Channels refer to the activities carried out by a player to notify the other. This include: verbally warn the other about an enemy at a certain position, use deliberate movements in the game world to locate items, and physically point to the screen to suggest a route.
Awareness Cues refer to visual and audio bits used by a player to stay aware of what's happening to the other player's avatar. This include: noticing the split-screen of the other player turning red (low health), sounds or utterances made by the other player or their avatar.
We observed that because of the constant-attention required by the shooting games, players rarely engaged in face-to-face interaction, which was a common way of communication in day-to-day situations. Instead, they used a variety of ways to quickly and succinctly interact. We also observed that in-game cues (e.g., mini-maps, arrows) were crucial in maintaining mutual grounding.
This study was a rather short project (wasn't particularly funded at that time), but was pretty fun. Nowadays with more attention paid towards game design, and company spending big bucks on this form of entertainment, I hope one day we can extend this work in the following directions:
This study was a rather short project (wasn't particularly funded at that time), but was pretty fun. Nowadays with more attention paid towards game design, and company spending big bucks on this form of entertainment, I hope one day we can extend this work in the following directions:
- Compare the strategies used with scenarios where control mechanisms other than gamepad are used, such as full-body gestures, or in a virtual world
- Compare the strategies used between experts and novices to the genre
- Other game categories and how they affect the proportions of the between-player interactions
Related publication:
[1] Cheung, V., Chang, Y.-L., Scott, S.D. (2012). Communication Channels and Awareness Cues in Collocated Collaborative Time-Critical Gaming. Proceedings of CSCW 2012: ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Seattle, WA, February 11-15, 2012, pp. 569-578.
[1] Cheung, V., Chang, Y.-L., Scott, S.D. (2012). Communication Channels and Awareness Cues in Collocated Collaborative Time-Critical Gaming. Proceedings of CSCW 2012: ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Seattle, WA, February 11-15, 2012, pp. 569-578.
