December 19, 2006

***PLEASE NO OPEN CHAT IN THE GROUP***

One of the nice features of most MMOs is their variety of broadcast chat channels. With them, you can send a text message to everyone in your guild, your current zone, or even your entire server. Such broadcast channels are an excellent means for meeting up with acquaintances or complete strangers and obtaining answers to specific questions. Even when you solo, you can still maintain a peripheral awareness of your social world by monitoring these broadcast channels, especially your guild chat.

Of course, the downside of broadcast channels is their misuse for "spam" (excessive or offensive messages). To discourage spam, fellow players tend to publicly rebuke the accused spammer and threaten to put him or her on "ignore." Social control is even easier within guild chat since members who repeatedly spam the guild can be easily kicked from it. But overall, broadcast chat channels, especially guild chat, tend to be used for good rather than evil. Take the following bit of banter which shows how guild chat can work well...

01 26:26 Di says to the guild,"Hi all"
02 26:40 Ae says to the guild,"hi di"
03 26:47 Di says to the guild,"all day long in trader and I sold 1 damn butterfly"
04 26:55 Bo says to the guild,"lol"
05 27:03 Bo says to the guild,"sorry to hear that"
06 27:21 Ta says to the guild,"awwwww did you enjoy your dinner?"
07 27:55 Wo says to the guild,"everyone buys on the day after Thanksgiving -
08 just have a sale"
09 28:25 Ta says to the guild,"LOL"
10 28:27 Me says to the guild,"Night All"
11 28:30 Di says to the guild,"LOL just might have to do that sale thing"
12 28:36 Di says to the guild,"Night Me"
13 28:39 Bo says to the guild,"night"
14 28:53 Di says to the guild,"Dinner was a complete success"
15 29:03 Guildmate: Me has logged out.
16 29:09 Wo says to the guild,"night"
17 30:42 Di says to the guild,"anything going on tonight?"
18 31:23 Ka says to the guild,"if you find something let me know...pretty quiet"
19 32:08 Bo says to the guild,"well if you two want to do something i am sure me
20 an In will tag along"
21 20:32:19 Or says to the guild,"Is there an access quest for the Tomb of Valor?
22 and what is a good level to head in there?"
23 32:26 Bo says to the guild,"just trying to get him to ding real fast"
24 34:15 Di says to the guild,"lets clean some up"
25 34:22 Di says to the guild,"errr MT"
26 41:42 Ka says to the guild,"Tha you need any help in SH?"
27 42:13 Tha says to the guild,"Ad and Or are grouping for some random stuff"
28 42:37 Ka says to the guild,"I have a few alts in that level if you needed any help"

Here we see players greeting (lines 01-02) and saying farewell (lines 10, 12, 13, 16) to each other, sharing their experiences (lines 03, 14), knowledge (lines 07-08, 21-22), and laughs (lines 09, 11). They're also using the guild chat channel to find things to do together (lines 17, 18, 19-20, 26, 27, 28). Guild chat is the way players stay in touch with their online families.

So what's the deal with Second Life?

Unlike most other MMOs, Second Life provides only one kind of broadcast chat channel, "Group IM." Second Life "groups" have a special chat channel for broadcasting messages to the entire group. In other words, a kind of guild chat. But while group IM is very similar to guild chat in form, the ways it is used by players are surprisingly different. Contrast the following bit of group chat (for a group associated with a popular bar) with the guild chat above...

01 [11:32] AB: hey everyone im slightly bored........... wondering if anyone
02 has any ideas of something that will give me a good time?
03 [11:32] CT: come to my gig
04 [11:32] HF: me too :)
05 [11:32] FZ: getting screwed lol
06 [11:33] SM: me!! lol
07 [11:33] HF: oops. spam.
08 [11:33] Second Life: SM has left this session.
09 [11:33] KB: don't spam the group god!
10 [11:33] Second Life: KB has left this session.
11 [11:33] Second Life: FZ has left this session.
12 [11:33] JH: the bouncy castle outside
13 [11:33] PP: Ok, keep off the group channel please folks
14 [11:33] HJ: RL alcohol - its the ponly way to go
15 [11:33] TC: who is the group god?
16 [11:33] SF: oh i have a few ideas but it will take a partner;)
17 [11:33] KC: enough on the group channel
18 [11:33] WH: Im always here for you SF :P
19 [11:33] Second Life: JH has left this session.
20 [11:33] MM: thanks for the spam really not annoying at all
21 [11:33] Second Life: HF has left this session.
22 [11:33] Second Life: TC has left this session.
23 [11:33] SF: sorry KC
24 [11:33] Second Life: KC has left this session.
25 [11:33] Second Life: SF has left this session.
26 [11:33] JH: hahaha
27 [11:33] KC: :) did you need tp HF?
28 [11:33] Second Life: WH has left this session.
29 [11:33] Second Life: JH has left this session.
30 [11:34] Second Life: MM has left this session.
31 [11:34] AA: ehm?
32 [11:34] JS: hm?
33 [11:35] Second Life: JS has left this session.
34 [11:35] Second Life: AB has left this session.
35 [11:43] Second Life: HJ has left this session.
36 [11:43] Second Life: CT has left this session.

AB attempts to use Group IM, much like Di above (line 17), to find something to do (lines 1-2). She receives several proposals of things she could do (lines 03, 05, 06, 12, 14, 16, 18), most of them playful and suggestive like her query itself. However, in addition, she receives a few harsh rebukes for talking on the group channel in the first place (lines 09, 13, 17). While only a few members openly chastise her, fifteen group members respond simply by leaving the session. Hardly a sociable environment. A couple of other interesting responses are the self-chastising by HF (line 07) and the dissent by MM (line 20) that AB's query constitutes an unwelcome intrusion. It's probably safer not to say anything to your group at all.

In fact, when one joins a new group in Second Life, one is often warned not to use the group chat channel, for example:

"***PLEASE NO OPEN CHAT IN THE GROUP***"
or

"Please do not use open group chat. Especially to get on there and say something stupid like "Want to play". Everyone that is against spam, please e-mail the Lindens support and ask that they make us able to disable open group chat within the groups. If it were possible, I would have done it already. Anyone using open chat will be kicked from the group from this point on. Thank you. :)"

or an exception

"Can somebody help me? Yes they can... Welcome to SL! Welcome to Help Me!, this group is to chit chat as much as you like, nobody is to be accused of SPAM here lol."

So why is using group chat in Second Life considered such a crime? Why aren't Second Lifers using group chat to stay in touch with their online families like players in other MMOs?

I believe the answer is simply a matter of poor user interface design. In Second Life, IM messages (personal and group messages alike) are displayed in an IM window which the player can open, close and tab through (see screenshot, upper left). However, all IMs are ALSO plastered across the player's field of view in a transparent text box over which players have no control (see screenshot, lower left). They cannot turn it off, minimize it nor filter it. Therefore all IM messages are highly intrusive for the player. To make matters worse, the system publicly reports whenever a group member leaves a group IM session, which contributes to the flood of messages across the player's field of view. Finally, there is also a very noticeable audio alert for all members whenever someone starts a new group session. So receiving IMs that are personally directed to you are disruptive enough to your gameplay experience, but IMs and system messages broadcast to an entire group are just a nuisance. (As far as I can tell, there is no way to change these features to minimize disruption.) Consequently the shared practice is to avoid using group IM channels for personal questions or frivolous comments, but to reserve it for more official group announcements (although there is a separate feature specifically for group announcements).

In contrast, in most MMOs, the user interfaces handle messages differently. Guild chat messages are contained in a chat box that can be resized and sometimes collapsed. Players can often set up tabs and filters in order to hide their guild chat when they don't want to be distracted. In addition, while one-to-one messages, or "tells," usually trigger an audio alert, broadcast messages do not. As a result of this UI design, guild chat and other types of broadcast chat can be easily ignored. The design principle here appears to be: messages that are directly addressed to the recipient should be more noticeable than those that are not.

To fix this, the above player suggests adding a feature to "Disable open group chat" all together. Instead, I would suggest simply adding the following features (as defaults):

Hide on-screen IM
Disable IM alerts for Group IM
Disable "member left session" alerts

Post by Bob

Posted by at 09:06 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

March 20, 2006

A nod's as good as a wink to a blind bat!

The facial expression of avatars at the Black Sun nightclub, social hotspot in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992), was so natural and nuanced, that it was "just as good as a face-to-face." Unfortunately today's metaverses (i.e., MMOGs) have a loooooong way to go before they approach that kind of sophistication.

There does not currently seem to be any consensus among game developers regarding the best way to implement facial expression. Different games employ different approaches. Yet each approach seems to grapple with the same basic problem: avatars' facial expressions are usually hard to see. (Another basic problem is how to control them easily, but I'll save that for another post.) The reason for this is that although avatar features and proportions tend to reflect those of real human bodies, the player's visual perspective usually does not. Players tend to play from a perspective that is at least several feet behind and slightly above their avatar's head. In other words, the player's viewpoint is disembodied. This unnatural distance makes it hard to see the expressions on avatars with realistically proportioned heads and faces.

Now one solution might simply be to force first-person perspective, at least in certain circumstances. Nick's data suggests that some players, especially women, actually prefer first-person perspective. However this solution creates different interactional problems. First, in first-person perspective, it's often difficult to notice other players and mobs unless you're looking right at them. The reason for this is that standard computer monitors don't allow for peripheral vision. A player's view of the game world is much narrower than it is in the physical world (see Hindmarsh et al. 2001). So the "disembodied," and usually zoomable, viewpoint in most games helps mitigate this lack of peripheral vision by increasing the player's field of view.

A second problem with first-person perspective is that when in it, you don't really know what your avatar is doing. If you can't see your avatar, you can't be sure, for example, that it waved, bowed, shrugged, pointed, etc. as you intended. The reason for this is that games don't simulate proprioception, the sense of the position of one's limbs that is independent of sight and touch. Indeed we are all like the unfortunate "Disembodied Lady" documented by Oliver Sacks (1986) when it comes to controlling our avatars. So forcing first-person perspective could hinder players' ability to use avatar gesture in sophisticated ways (e.g., for RP).

So given the low visibility of avatar faces in third-person (or first-person-zoomed) perspective, how are game developers handling facial expression? Here are a few approaches:

No facial animation - some games, like World of Warcraft and EverQuest Online Adventures (PS2), don't animate facial expressions at all. WoW has slash commands for things like /smile, /frown, and /wink, but they merely produce text emotes, e.g., "Bob smiles at Eric." EQoA doesn't even provide text emotes. So orcs always look pissed off, even when they're happy.

Facial animation + text emote - other games, like Star Wars Galaxies and Second Life, provide some nice facial animations that are accompanied by corresponding text emotes. So for example in SWG, when you type /smile your avatar smiles and you get the message, "Bob smiles at Eric." Typing /wink makes your avatar wink and you also get the message, "Bob winks suggestively at Eric" (apparently you can't wink non-suggestively). Similarly in SL, a simple text emoticon, such as :-) :-D :-( ;-) or :-P, accompanies the facial animation. Now although facial animations in SWG and SL are rather detailed, from my own experience, I find that I usually orient to the text emotes instead. Again, when my viewpoint is zoomed out, avatar faces just are hard to see.

Body animation + text emote - now in EverQuest II, the devs took a creative approach. They gave up on trying to animate the face (in most cases) and instead tried to translate common facial expressions into gross bodily gestures. So for example, /smile produces the text emote, "Bob smiles at Eric," plus an odd swing of a curled arm with a fist, but no smile. Or /wink produces, "Bob winks at Eric," plus a couple of nudges with the elbow, but no wink. Now these body animations are indeed much more noticeable than facial animations, and I tend to notice them rather than their corresponding text emotes. However, while I applaud the devs' effort, the animations in EQ2 just don't feel like an adequate substitute for facial expressions. Perhaps if they used more appropriate body animations, ones that people actually do when they smile or wink in an exaggerated way (and also included the facial animations), it might work better.

Automatic positioning of avatars - another creative approach to the problem of seeing facial expressions can be found in There. There solves the problem by automatically rearranging avatars in the supposedly optimal configuration: a semi-circle. When an avatar steps into a chat group, all the avatars are automatically shuffled to make room in the semi-circle. With this configuration, the player can see every avatar easily, including faces. (In addition, the text commands - 'wink, 'smile, 'frown - appear in the chat bubbles in case you miss the animations themselves.) Another benefit of this approach is that you can see your avatar from the front and thus can see your own avatar's facial animations. None of the other approaches enable this. Now while this is indeed a clever and effective solution, I personally don't like the system pushing my avatar around. If I had to choose between control over my avatar's position and orientation and a clear view of facial expressions, I might pick the former.

Other possible approaches...

Close-up view - one simple, although perhaps not so elegant solution, would be to create a small close-up window of the face of your target. That way you could easily see the facial animations of the avatar you're looking at but also the gross embodied gestures of your own and others' avatars in the main view. While two disconnected views of the other's avatar may not be ideal, it might be worth experimenting with.

Amplified animations - another approach might be to amplify avatars' facial expressions making them bigger in size. I once heard Raph Koster suggest borrowing the style from anime in which characters are drawn with disproportionately large heads and eyes. This certainly make facial expressions more noticeable from a distance. I think another interesting technique in anime is that of super deformed ("super-D") emotes. When characters express an extreme emotion, their face and bodies become radically morphed for a few moments. For example, in Teen Titans, when characters get angry, their heads grow huge and menacing for a moment; when scared, they shrink to a tiny, baby-like form; or when overtaken by love, their heads balloon and their eyes turn into hearts. This use of super-D really feels a lot like an emote in an MMORPG to me since it is abrupt and lasts for only a few moments. I can easily imagine super-D versions of /rofl, /OMG, /cheer, /mad, /scared, or /goggleeyes. However, I'm not sure how well it would work for the more subtle, basic expressions like winks, smiles, or frowns. Also, while these kinds of techniques would feel "natural" in an anime-themed world, I'm not sure how well they would work in Norrath or a galaxy far far away (they might work better in the ever-humorous Azeroth).

So which approaches did I leave out? Which is the best?

Post by Bob

Posted by at 03:34 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack

February 27, 2006

Hearing waves and bows

Gesturing in MMORPGs is an unusual experience. On the one hand, avatar gestures can appear impressively realistic (e.g., EQII or SWG), and in some cases may even be created through motion-capture of real human bodies. So when I type "/wave" my avatar performs a pretty realistic-looking hand wave. On the other hand, whenever my avatar performs such a gesture, the system also generates a public text emote describing the gesture (exceptions are SL and There). So typing "/wave" also generates a message like, "Bob waves to you." In other words, gesturing in most MMORPGs is multi-modal with both visual and textual components.

So essentially these systems simulate a world in which when people gesture, they also simultaneously announce what they are doing. When I shrug at you, I also say, "Bob shrugs at you." Imagine if we did this in real life. You would not only see people gesture, you would hear them gesture (since reading text is the correlate of hearing voice in most games). This totally changes the organization of gesture in interaction.

You would not necessarily need to coordinate a gesture so that the recipient could see it. As long as you knew he or she could hear it, that could be enough. In fact, in such cases, you wouldn't even need to perform the visual part of the gesture at all. I approach Nic from behind and say, "Bob waves to Nic" without bothering actually to wave. Nic doesn't even turn around but simply returns, "Nic waves to Bob." (There's a cheesy commercial or SNL skit in here somewhere, I'm sure.)

This is basically my experience of gesturing in virtual game worlds. Despite the impressive sophistication of the gesture animations, players tend to rely more on the text emotes instead. The result is a player experience that is more like a text-based MUD, than a three-dimensional, avatar-based world.

For example, take the following interaction from Star Wars Galaxies. In this encounter, Atac is in the player city in which she lives on Naboo, and she heads toward the player association hall to see if anyone is around.

[Star Wars Galaxies: Unseen Waves: Atac's perspective]

01 00:00 ((Atac rounds the corner of the PA hall))
02 00:00* Sin'thea waves to Teli Tubbi.
03 01:04* Sin'thea nods at Kimon Calari.

As Atac rounds the corner of the PA hall (line 01), she sees two text emotes, "Sin'thea waves to Teli Tubbi" and "Sin'thea nods at Kimon Calari." The text emotes alert her to the fact that her friend, Sin'thea, is nearby even though she cannot see the actual avatar animations with which they correspond. In fact, she cannot even see any other avatars from her current vantage point.

04 05:21 ((Atac mouses over Sin'thea's avatar))
05 07:02 ((Atac selects sin'thea's avatar))
06 07:14 Sin'thea: is that Teli I see?
07 10:12* You wave to her.

As she approaches the entrance to the PA hall, Atac catches sight of Sin'thea and mouses over her avatar to double check the name (line 04). Although she is still some distance away and Sin'thea is facing away, Atac nonetheless waves to her friend (line 07). Although Sin'thea most likely cannot see Atac's avatar and although it does not even actually wave (because the waving animation is overridden by the walking animation), she can still see the text emote, "Atac waves to you" (line 07).

08 16:20 Kimon Calari nods at Sin'thea.
09 18:00 ((Atac approaches Sin'thea from behind))
10 19:30* Sin'thea waves to you.
11 ((Sin'thea's avatar automatically spins around
12 and waves))
13 21:06 Goldtooth greets you.
14 22:24 Sin'thea: ATAC!!!
15 22:34 Atac: hiya
16 ((Atac's avatar waves automatically))
17 23:22 Sin'thea gives you a hug.
18 ((Sin'thea's avatar automatically gives half a hug))

Atac stops on the steps behind Sin'thea just in time to receive a return wave (line 10) and the two friends continue their greetings (lines 14-18). So in this case, the two players rely almost entirely on the text emotes that accompany gestures in achieving mutual orientation rather than on their avatars. In such cases, which are not uncommon, the text emotes render the avatars more or less irrelevant.

In a similar vein, gesture text emotes can also destroy some of the subtlety and indirection in interaction by making actions overly explicit. For example, in EQII, your avatar will do a series of sexy modeling-like poses if you type "/flirt." But it also announces in text that "You flirt shamelessly with X" thus categorizing your action explicitly as "flirting." So much for the subtle dance of seduction! Similarly in SWG, if you type "/wink" (more a facial expression than a gesture really), your avatar winks, but the system also produces the message: "You wink suggestively at X." I found this very problematic because often when I tried to wink at someone to indicate that I was joking, it came off instead as a come on due to the verbiage of the text emote. In real life, embodied gestures afford much more strategic ambiguity.

So should developers dispense with the text emotes that automatically accompany gestures animations?

YES... but perhaps not until they fix other problems with gesturing in virtual game worlds. Text emotes currently serve as a kind of Band-Aid for gesture systems that are broken. Without text emotes, players are much more likely to miss gestures directed to them. In real face-to-face, performing a gesture successfully requires making sure the intended recipient can see it. This involves seeing where the recipient is looking and holding (or prolonging the duration of) the gesture until the recipient has displayed some sign of recognition and understanding. This is not possible in most current avatar systems. They don't indicate to you when the other player has detached his view from his avatar's orientation (i.e., by panning and zooming); they don't indicate when the other player's view is obscured by menus (e.g., maps; except in There); and they don't allow you to control the duration of your gestures (see #1, #6 & #8 of my 10 thing about avatar interaction). So until such features are implemented, we may have to make due with systems telling us about gestures rather than better enabling us simply to see them.

Posted by Bob

Posted by at 03:21 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

February 16, 2006

Devs'll find work for idle avatars

Ever think character avatars in MMORPGs look a bit spaced out? Just standing there, kind of alive but completely entranced? Whether avatars appear stiff or lively certainly impacts our ability to mistake them willingly for living beings and lose ourselves in the fiction of the game world.

Now one strategy that game developers use to try to breathe some life into avatars, is to use "idles," or animations of autonomic behaviors, such as breathing, blinking and swaying that are activated when the avatar is idle. For example, the idles in EverQuest II are especially subtle and realistic, while those in World of Warcraft are highly stylized and cartoonish. In both cases, they make the avatars seem more like animate objects.

While idles indeed do a nice job of livening up avatars to a certain degree, there's still something missing. In public, people don't just breathe and blink, they do things. Things that are responsive to the particular social setting and to the particular people on the scene. Take people at a bus stop, for example. They glance at their watches and stare off in the direction of the awaited bus, displaying to everyone around that they are doing "waiting for the bus." They may step inside the bus but not feed the coin machine immediately, instead projecting this action by visibly rummaging through a purse. They crack a book or jump on their mobile phone, displaying a reduced availability for small talk to fellow passengers. And so on. This tacit level of communication is not yet implemented in virtual game worlds.

In games, much of the time when avatars are "idle," players actually are not. They are busy with a whole array of personal (in-game) activities, similar to those in real life, such as rummaging through backpacks, consulting maps, searching spell books or directories, reviewing skill trees, chatting privately, and more (see earlier post). So players are already engaging in embodiable activity that is appropriate to the situation. Simply animating this would go a long way in terms of making avatars appear more like living, competent beings than spaced-out zombies. Characters could actually look "busy" and do so in a way that is socially meaningful and appropriate to the situation, rather than canned.

Now animating such personal activities not only makes avatars appear more lively by enabling others to make sense of what they're doing, it also provides important cues for achieving coordination. Hiding player activity from public view, on the other hand, can cause slippage. For example, in the following excerpt, two players in Star Wars Galaxies are doing a set of missions together to gain access to Jabba the Hutt's palace. They have just completed one objective, killing a kaadu, and are about to travel by speeder to the next (note: double parentheses mark transcriber's descriptive notes).

[Star Wars Galaxies: Jabba's Missions; Atac's perspective]
01 01:38 ((Nike runs past Atac toward speeders))
02 02:44 Atac: is that it?
03 03:10 ((Atac turns around and looks in Nike's direction))
04 04:16 ((Atac begins to follow Nike))
05 09:34 ((Atac mouses over an empty slot in her toolbar))
06 12:06 ((Nike mounts his speeder and begins turning it))
07 13:46* Atac: wait
08 13:52 ((Nike stops turning speeder))
09 15:15* ((Atac opens inventory))
10 17:24 ((Atac opens backpack within inventory))
11 20:52 [GroupChat] nike: did you get it?
12 28:48 ((Nike turns speeder))
13 29:46 ((Nike begins to move forward))
14 30:24 [GroupChat] atac: get what?
15 31:56* ((Nike passes Atac on his speeder))
16 32:16 ((Atac mouses over and inspects some stimpacks))
17 37:28 ((Atac drags stimpacks))
18 38:54 ((Atac drops stimpacks onto empty slot in toolbar))
19 40:18 ((Atac closes backpack))
20 41:00 ((Atac turns around to look for Nike))
21 42:12 [GroupChat] nike: the kaadu egg...

Here Atac tries to coordinate two activities: replenishing the stimpacks in her toolbar (used for healing in combat) and traveling with Nike to their next destination. When Nike appears to be about to leave the scene on his speeder (line 06), Atac types "wait" (line 07) and then opens her inventory about 1.5 seconds later (line 09). However, there is no avatar animation or public signal to Nike that she has done so. As a result, he can't see what he's waiting for. So he takes a guess, "did you get it?" (line 11) referring to a quest item from the dead kaadu. Nike then starts to drive off (lines 12-13) as Atac requests clarification by saying "get what?" (line 14), which shows that, that was not in fact the reason for the waiting. Nike drives off (line 15) and Atac selects some stimpacks and drags them to her toolbar (lines 16-19). She thus fails to get Nike to wait for her while she rummages through her purse. This may seem like a minor slippage in coordination, but it can have more major consequences if, for example, you lag behind your group mates in a dungeon while you search for an item or a spell and a mob pops and kills you (this has happened to me on a few occasions). In general, such slippages make the avatar-interaction system feel awkward and clunky.

Now game developers are not entirely unaware of the social importance of animating personal activities. In There for example avatars don goggles when the player opens a web page or a headset when the player opens an IM window. In WoW, avatars bend over when opening a chest, showing everyone who is going for the loot. EQII does a nice job of animating the various types of harvesting: avatars bend over when "gathering," squat slightly when "trapping," chop with an axe when "foresting," and swing a pick when "mining." This not only displays publicly what a player is up to when lurking about in the bushes, but also displays to other would-be harvesters that he or she is indeed going for the insidious root, instead of the nearby lithic stone. And of course, most games have long had combat animations that show group mates that the tank is starting to pull or the healer is starting to heal. All of these avatar manifestations of player actions greatly enhance players' ability to interpret what each other is doing and tightly coordinate their actions, as well as make our virtual bodies seem more alive. Developers should expand the use of these kinds of personal animations. (Raph, please give us more!)

Imagine that whenever you type /time or click on the in-game clock, your avatar looks at his or her watch (hourglass, sundial, whatever). Now when it's 3:00am and I finally need to ditch my group, I can forecast my departure a bit more subtly than simply typing, "I gotta go to bed." Instead my group mates can draw the inference, "you gettin tired or something?" Or imagine that whenever you open your map, your character also opens and studies a map. Not only does this display to your group mates that you're not ready to start the next attack and the like, but it also enables passersby to notice what you're doing and offer assistance ("Are you lost?"). Such seemingly small mechanisms will create a more intricate texture of the social fabric in future virtual worlds.

Now players might argue that they don't want others to see that they're consulting a map ("I don't want to look like a noob!"). That may be true, but is the reduced exposure really worth sacrificing a whole layer of social life? Due to the limitations of MMOGs to date, we have become accustomed to an odd sense of public privacy in which we can hide much of what we're doing while in the virtual presence of others (e.g., we can even "talk behind someone's back" right in front of their face). But a fundamental part of human sociality is seeing others and being seen by them, incompetences and all.

Posted by Bob

Posted by at 04:08 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

February 08, 2006

Why players adopt 3rd party VoIP apps

One reason, although certainly not the only reason, players of MMORPGs use 3rd party VoIP applications, such as TeamSpeak or Ventrilo, is that standard text chat is often too slow and cumbersome for many activities that require tight coordination between players, such as raids or PvP. While text chat is good for certain kinds of activities in games (e.g., chatting across zones, advertising wares), it is not so good for real-time joint activities (e.g., traveling together, fighting together). There are of course a few different reasons for this, most of which Pavel Curtis pointed out years ago. One is that the typing itself is somewhat slow (especially compared to speaking). Another is that text chat increases the burden on the users' hands, with which they may also be wanting to do other things at the same time, such as firing off a spell or navigating their avatar. Yet another reason is that most games (with the exception of There) implement standard text chat in which the composition of turns is kept private. In other words, turns are posted on a message-by-message basis (rather than a word-by-word or character-by-character basis). This creates interactional lag...

Now although players can be quite good at managing this interactional lag, it can at times cause slippages that impact their joint activities. If we look at avatar interactions under a "microscope," we can see how this slippage occurs. The following transcript (or annotated chat log) comes from a screen-capture video collected from EverQuest II. It begins as Ataca and Rattington are roaming around outside the gates of West Freeport looking for some animals to hunt together for xp. (Note: double parentheses mark transcriber's notes and italics mark system-generated messages.)

[Hunting Armadillos: EverQuest II; Ataca's perspective]
01 07:38:16 ((Ataca stops running))
02 07:38:54 ((Ataca targets an armadillo))
03 07:41:38 ((Rattington stops next to Ataca))
04 07:41:38 Ataca points at a banded armadillo.
05 ((Ataca's avatar points)
06 07:43:06 ((Ataca rearranges icons in her toolbar))
07 07:50:00 ((Ataca mouses over an attack spell))
08 07:51:00 ((Ataca mouses over armadillo))
09 07:54:16 ((Ataca initiates an attack by clicking a
10 spell icon in her toolbar & her avatar begins
11 a spell-casting animation))
12 07:57:42 You surround A young armadillo with arcane chains!
13 07:58:18* Rattington says to the group, "I see two that
14 are grouped but I think we could take them."
15 08:00:10 ((Ataca clicks another spell icon))
16 08:01:58 Rattington hits banded armadillo for 4 points of
17 crushing damage.
18 08:03:34 You strike A banded armadillo with a storm of lightning!
19 08:04:08 Rattington hits a banded armadillo for 3 points of
20 crushing damage.
21 08:05:02 Ataca says, "hehe"

In this episode, Ataca approaches some banded armadillos, selects them and "points" to them (lines 01-05) by clicking on a toolbar icon for "pointing." In this context, such an action can be seen as a proposal to attack the armadillos, although the more standard practice is to "hail" them by selecting them and pressing the H-key. Rattington can observe Ataca's pointing by virtue of an avatar animation (line 05) and a text emote (line 04). Ataca then privately rearranges icons on her toolbar (line 06) for about 8 seconds, while Rattington appears to do nothing. Ataca then proceeds to initiate an attack on the armadillos with a click of a spell icon on her toolbar (lines 09-11). Rattington can observe this by virtue of a spell-casting animation of Ataca's avatar, an alert sound, and eventually a text message after the spell is cast (line 15). But then an interactional slippage becomes apparent. Four seconds after Ataca has initiated the attack Rattington says, "I see two that are grouped but I think we could take them" (lines 13-14). In other words, he offers his assessment about whether the armadillos are suitable targets; however, it appears too late to be consequential for the attack due to the interactional lag caused by the chat system. He almost certainly started typing his turn before Ataca initiated the attack, but she could not see his turn unfold in real-time. Rattington then joins in the attack (line 16), and Ataca chuckles at their apparent lapse in coordination (line 21).

These two low-level characters do in fact eventually defeat the two perturbed armadillos without much difficulty. However had this been a 60-person raid against an epic dragon or a PvP encounter against an opposing team of players, this kind of lapse in coordination can have greater consequences. In such situations, having a real-time medium for talking with your teammates, like voice (VoIP or co-presence) or even word-by-word chat, is a distinct advantage. Tighter coordination between players can be achieved when avatars, which move in real-time (or nearly real-time), have voices to match.

Of course, VoIP does not magically solve everything. It creates interactional issues of its own, but that's a topic for a future post. Some of these issues will no doubt be discussed at the panel on "Community and Communications in Massive Multi-Player Online Games" at VON 2006, Tuesday, March 14, 2006, 1:00pm - 2:15pm in which Nick Yee and I will be participating.

Posted by Bob

Posted by at 11:41 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

November 04, 2005

10 Things About Conversation in Virtual Worlds...

Here's a synopsis of the talk I gave recently at the Austin Game Conference on avatar-to-avatar communication...

Bob Moore, Nic Ducheneaut & Eric Nickell. "10 Things About Conversation in Virtual Worlds that Remind Me that I'm NOT in the Real World: Improving Interactional Realism in Massively Multiplayer Persistent Worlds." Austin Game Conference, Austin, TX, October 28, 2005.

Although massively multiplayer virtual worlds have made great strides in achieving visual realism (i.e., through detailed 3D models, lighting and physics simulation, motion capture, etc.), they are much less sophisticated in terms of interactional realism, or the simulation of face-to-face interaction. Developers of MMOs are starting to grapple with fundamental questions of how ordinary conversation works as a system and how it should be modeled.

Human bodies doing ordinary activities

Which activity is this player doing? (EQ2)

As a player of MMORPGs and virtual worlds, I routinely experience a state of immersion and connection when interacting with other players. However, there are many occasions on which this immersion is broken when the system seems to do the wrong thing. There is some slippage or awkwardness in the interaction that draws attention to the limitations of the system and reminds me that I'm not in a real-life conversation. The following are 10 features of avatar interaction systems that reduce interactional realism, plus 10 tips for increasing it.

Avatars...
1. Stand and do nothing
2. Don't speak in real time
3. Use telepathy
4. Look the wrong way
5. Stare at each other
6. Hide the player's gaze
7. Lack free gesticulation
8. Gesture for fixed durations
9. Don't tightly coordinate gestures and talk
10. Lack usable facial expressions

Avatars could...
1. Display embodied actions
2. Speak in real time
3. Give IM busy signals
4. Look at the speaker
5. Look away when speaking
6. Reveal player's gaze
7. Gesticulate freely
8. Hold gestures
9. Tightly coordinate gestures and talk
10. Have visible facial expressions

Each of these points are elaborated below.

Avatars...
1. Stand and do nothing: Many ordinary activities--looking through a bag, consulting a map, reading a book, trading items, talking with a friend remotely--are hidden from the public eye. This makes avatars appear lifeless even when the player is quite active. It also makes it difficult for players to manage these private activities with joint activities (e.g., looking through a bag and leaving the scene together with another player).
2. Don't speak in real time: Text-chat systems in virtual worlds, with the exception of There, hide the composition of a turn from the public eye. As a result, players cannot predictably achieve one-speaker-at-a-time, one-topic-at-a-time, or tight coordination (minimal gap and overlap between turns).
3. Use telepathy: Players can chat with anyone in the world at anytime. At times a player can be bombarded with multiple messages at the same time ("tell hell"). There's no way for a remote "caller" to know it a recipient is already engaged in a conversation(s).
4. Look the wrong way: Some interaction systems don't enable avatars to turn their heads semi-independently of their shoulders. Consequently avatars cannot be made to use eye contact in a multiparty conversation in a natural way.
5. Stare at each other: In the better eye gaze systems (e.g., EverQuest II), avatars tend to make eye contact at the right times, but they also tend to stare at each other. (In real life, people stare at each other in order to either threaten or flirt.)
6. Hide the player's gaze: Most avatar systems enable the player to decouple her view from the avatar's. The players can zoom out and pan 360-degrees. While this helps mitigate problems with the lack of peripheral vision, it also means that you never know what another player can see or where she is looking. This can make the coordination of gestures difficult.
7. Lack free gesticulation: All avatar systems I've seen in games implement gesture by giving players a list (short or long) of pre-defined gestures from which to choose. As a result, some forms of gesture are not possible, such as, those that are used to describe objects by simulating their shape, spatial relationships, and motion ("iconics"). Also, long lists of gestures are hard for players to learn.
8. Gesture for fixed durations: All avatar systems I've seen in games limit the duration of the pre-defined gestures to a fixed period. This makes it difficult for players to coordinate gestures with other players. They cannot "hold" a gesture until they can see that the recipient has seen it and has understood.
9. Don't tightly coordinate gestures and talk: In current avatar gesture systems, most gestures and text chat must be done as separate turns. As a result, gestures cannot be precisely timed to coincide with particular keywords in the chat. While this is not a problem for gestures that can perform an action on their own ("emblems" such as waves, nods, and shrugs), it makes gestures that are dependent on talk for their meaning difficult to perform. These include gestures used for referring or pointing ("deitics"), emphasizing ("beats"), and describing ("iconics").
10. Lack usable facial expressions: Some avatar systems implement no facial expression at all. Others offer a wide array of facial animations; however, these are often too difficult to see because players tend to zoom out their view. Yet zooming out itself is critical since it is the only way to really know what your avatar is doing.

Interactional realism in current MMOs could be increased by having avatars...
1. Display embodied actions: player opens bag, avatar looks through a bag; player opens map, avatar studies a map...
2. Speak in real time: post chat on a word-by-word or character-by-character basis (There is the model)
3. Give IM busy signals: when player is in a conversation, private messages from new speakers receive an automatic "busy" message
4. Look at the speaker: player clicks on other avatar to establish eye contact (as in Star Wars Galaxies or EverQuest II)
5. Look away when speaking: when typing, avatar looks at recipient(s) only intermittently
6. Reveal player's gaze: "not looking" indicator appears when player's view is too divergent from avatar's
7. Gesticulate freely: real-time motion capture using a camera enables players to use their own bodies to gesticulate freely
8. Hold gestures: player can 'hold' a pre-defined gesture by holding down the enter-key upon executing the gesture (user-controlled duration)
9. Tightly coordinate gestures and talk: player can tie a gesture to a particular word in the chat
10. Have visible facial expressions: a close-up view of an avatar's face appears when selected

For more on the organization of talk, gesture, eye gaze, and facial expression in real-life face-to-face interaction, see the following scholars: Paul Ekman, Charles Goodwin, Gail Jefferson, Adam Kendon, David McNeill, Harvey Sacks, and Emanuel Schegloff.

Posted by Bob

Posted by at 05:10 PM | Comments (13) | TrackBack