HCC: EAGER: Trust and Collaboration in 3D Virtual Communities

这项潜在的变革性研究将调查大型多人在线（MMO）游戏中的玩家-专注于社交挑战，制作和交易-如何使用信任来完成任务并与其他玩家合作。这是第一次对此类游戏进行评估。大多数已被研究的MMO，例如《魔兽世界》和《无尽的任务》，评估的是参与战斗或战斗计划的玩家的信任和合作，而不是和平和建设性的目的。 这项研究采用了一个成熟但相当独特的游戏，主要关注广泛的社会挑战和测试。它被称为“沙漠中的故事”（ATITD），其中每个玩家控制一个古埃及人的化身。ATITD是这项研究的理想选择，因为游戏中固有的强大的社会方面。由于游戏开发者同意合作，并且ATITD包含了数据库，例如不断更新的人口普查和关于所有玩家及其重叠组成员身份的广泛信息，因此研究将获得玩家行为，聊天以及公会，婚姻和官僚机构成员身份的细粒度数据。从分析哪些数据的初始假设开始，研究团队将能够在早期发现的基础上迭代选择更多数据。为了解决人与智能体交互中涉及的问题，信任和协作的研究是非常重要的。在这项研究中获得的信息可以用于在未来的工作中创建代理与人类玩家在ATITD和其他虚拟环境中进行交互。除了游戏中的日志数据外，这项研究还将收集个人玩家的标准心理测量，使用自愿问卷，包括大五量表中的外向量表，信任-怀疑量表和共情商数。 特别感兴趣的是学习心理因素是否能预测个人在游戏中与其他玩家的互动程度。游戏数据将被分析，以确定与信任和合作的中心主题相关的特定行为模式，反之亦然，背叛和竞争。 该研究还将从ATITD收集关于玩家如何相互信任和合作的数据，使用数据挖掘技术，对玩家进行访谈，并检查玩家创建的wiki。研究3D虚拟社区中的信任和协作的性质将对游戏设计者以及计算机介导环境的研究社区产生极大的兴趣。从这项研究中获得的信息，我们将是详细的建议，如何提高信任和协作的MMO的基础。从ATITD收集的数据将有助于创建与人类玩家互动的代理，并设计教育活动，利用虚拟世界（如沙漠故事）提供的独特机会进行学生合作。

This potentially transformative study will investigate how players in a Massively Multi-player Online (MMO) game - specializing in social challenges, crafting, and trading - use trust in order to accomplish tasks and collaborate with other players. This is the first time a game of this kind has been evaluated. Most MMOs that have been studied, such as World of Warcraft and EverQuest, evaluate trust and collaboration of players engaged in battles or battle planning, rather than peaceful and constructive purposes. This research employs a well-established but rather unique game that primarily focuses on a wide array of social challenges and tests. It is called "A Tale in the Desert" (ATITD), in which each player controls the avatar of an ancient Egyptian. ATITD is the ideal choice for this research because of the strong social aspect inherent in the game. Both because the game creators have agreed to cooperate, and because ATITD incorporates databases such as a constantly updated census and extensive information about all players and their overlapping group memberships, the research will have access to fine grained data of players' actions, chats, and memberships in guilds, marriages and bureaucracies. Starting with an initial set of hypotheses of what data will be analyzed, the research team will then able to iteratively choose more data on the basis of early discoveries. To address the issues involved in human-agent interaction, this study of trust and collaboration is very important. Information obtained in this study can be used in future work to create agents to interact with human players in ATITD and other virtual environments. In addition to log data from the game, this research will also collect standard psychological measures of individual players, using a voluntary questionnaire, including the Extroversion scale from the Big Five Inventory, the Trust-Suspicion Scale, and the Empathy Quotient. Of particular interest will be to learn if the psychological factors predict how well individuals interact with other players in the game. Game play data will be analyzed to identify specific behavioral patterns related to the central themes of trust and collaboration, and, conversely, betrayal and competition. The research will also gather data from ATITD about how the players trust and collaborate with each other, using data mining techniques, interviews of players, and examination of wikis created by players. Studying the nature of trust and collaboration in 3D virtual communities will be of great interest to game designers, as well as to the research community of computer-mediated environments. The information gained from this study we will be the basis for detailed suggestions on how to improve trust and collaboration in an MMO. Methods also will be developed to detect untrustworthy behavior happening in the game and flag it. Data gathered from ATITD will be useful for creating agents that interact with human players, and for designing educational activities that exploit the unique opportunities for student collaboration offered by virtual worlds like A Tale in the Desert.