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

这项可能具有变革性的研究将调查大型多人在线(MMO)游戏中的玩家如何使用信任来完成任务和与其他玩家合作。MMO游戏专门从事社交挑战、制作和交易。这是第一次对这样的游戏进行评估。大多数已经被研究的MMO，如魔兽世界和EverQuest，评估的是参与战斗或战斗规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)，每个玩家控制着一个古埃及人的化身。ATITD是这项研究的理想选择，因为这款游戏具有很强的社会性。这既是因为游戏创建者已经同意合作，也因为ATITD纳入了数据库，如不断更新的人口普查和关于所有玩家及其重叠的群组成员的广泛信息，研究将能够访问关于玩家的行为、聊天以及在工会、婚姻和官僚机构中的成员资格的细粒度数据。从分析什么数据的一组初始假设开始，研究团队将能够在早期发现的基础上反复选择更多数据。为了解决人-智能体交互所涉及的问题，对信任和协作的研究是非常重要的。这项研究中获得的信息可以在未来的工作中用于创建代理，以便在ATITD和其他虚拟环境中与人类玩家交互。除了游戏中的日志数据，本研究还将使用自愿问卷收集个体玩家的标准心理测量，包括五大问卷中的外倾量表、信任-猜疑量表和移情商数。尤其令人感兴趣的是了解心理因素是否能预测个人与游戏中其他玩家的互动情况。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，背叛和竞争。这项研究还将从ATITD收集有关玩家如何相互信任和合作的数据，使用数据挖掘技术、对玩家的访谈和对玩家创建的维基进行检查。研究3D虚拟社区中信任和协作的本质将是游戏设计者和计算机中介环境研究社区的极大兴趣。从这项研究中获得的信息，我们将成为关于如何改善MMO中的信任和合作的详细建议的基础。还将开发方法来检测游戏中发生的不可信行为并对其进行标记。从ATITD收集的数据将有助于创建与人类玩家互动的代理，并用于设计教育活动，利用虚拟世界提供的独特机会进行学生合作，如《沙漠中的故事》。

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.