TY - JOUR
T1 - Does Winning or Losing Change Players' Engagement in Competitive Games? Experiments in Virtual Reality
AU - Ventura, Roni Barak
AU - Richmond, Samuel
AU - Nadini, Matthieu
AU - Nakayama, Shinnosuke
AU - Porfiri, Maurizio
N1 - Funding Information:
Manuscript received February 3, 2019; revised May 4, 2019; accepted July 9, 2019. Date of publication July 16, 2019; date of current version March 17, 2021. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant CMMI-1433670, Grant CBET-1604355, and Grant CBET-1547864. The work of R. B. Ventura was supported in part by a Mitsui USA Foundation scholarship. (Corresponding author: Maurizio Porfiri.) R. B. Ventura, S. Richmond, M. Nadini, and S. Nakayama are with the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, New York University Tandon School of Engineering, Brooklyn, NY 11201 USA (e-mail: rbv215@nyu.edu; sr4742@nyu.edu; mn2415@nyu.edu; sn2286@nyu.edu).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 IEEE.
PY - 2021/3
Y1 - 2021/3
N2 - Engagement is a key element in game design, and competition is frequently used to enhance players' engagement. However, it is presently unclear how winning or losing might influence players' engagement. We hypothesized that users in a competitive game will increase their level of engagement when they are losing. To test this hypothesis, we created a game in virtual reality in which each user competed against a virtual opponent that was programmed to either underperform, tie with, or overperform the user. We conducted a series of experiments on 72 volunteers who played four rounds of the game, with three rounds against each of the potential virtual opponents and one round alone. We found that user engagement increased when the virtual opponent outperformed the user, compared to when they played alone. A similar increase in user engagement was not registered when the user played against an underperforming or equally performing virtual opponent. To further elucidate the effect of the virtual opponent on user engagement, we applied the information-theoretic notion of transfer entropy, which offers a model-free approach for the inference of causal relationships between dynamical systems. Our findings provide insight into technology-mediated competition and its impact on engagement, thereby opening the door for targeted system interventions to modulate human response.
AB - Engagement is a key element in game design, and competition is frequently used to enhance players' engagement. However, it is presently unclear how winning or losing might influence players' engagement. We hypothesized that users in a competitive game will increase their level of engagement when they are losing. To test this hypothesis, we created a game in virtual reality in which each user competed against a virtual opponent that was programmed to either underperform, tie with, or overperform the user. We conducted a series of experiments on 72 volunteers who played four rounds of the game, with three rounds against each of the potential virtual opponents and one round alone. We found that user engagement increased when the virtual opponent outperformed the user, compared to when they played alone. A similar increase in user engagement was not registered when the user played against an underperforming or equally performing virtual opponent. To further elucidate the effect of the virtual opponent on user engagement, we applied the information-theoretic notion of transfer entropy, which offers a model-free approach for the inference of causal relationships between dynamical systems. Our findings provide insight into technology-mediated competition and its impact on engagement, thereby opening the door for targeted system interventions to modulate human response.
KW - Competition
KW - engagement
KW - human behavior
KW - transfer entropy
KW - virtual opponent
KW - virtual reality (VR)
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U2 - 10.1109/TG.2019.2928795
DO - 10.1109/TG.2019.2928795
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85075807948
VL - 13
SP - 23
EP - 34
JO - IEEE Transactions on Games
JF - IEEE Transactions on Games
SN - 2475-1502
IS - 1
M1 - 8764501
ER -