Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 7
Social Presence and Artificial Opponents
André Pereira, Rui Prada and Ana Paiva
You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in
a year of conversation.
Plato
Abstract
In this paper, we argue that playing board games is a form of entertainment
that provides participant's with rich social interactions. However, when we try to
replace one of the players with an artificial opponent, the social interaction between
players is negatively affected by the social inability of nowadays artificial opponents.
Currently, the social presence that human players attribute to artificial opponents is
quite low. In order to tackle this problem, we investigate the topic of social presence,
its definitions and which are its contributing factors. Also, we looked at nowadays
social interactions with artificial agents and how these kind of agents deal with long
term interactions. This related work along with some previous studies contributed to
the development of a set of five guidelines intended for improving social presence in
board game artificial opponents. Finally, in order to illustrate how one can implement
such guidelines, we give an example of how we implemented them in a scenario
where a digital table is used as an interface for a board game and a social robot plays
Risk against three human opponents.
Keywords
Social presence
·
Board games
·
Artificial opponents
7.1
Introduction
Evidence of the existence of board games date back to at least 3100 BC where a
variation of the game Senet, probably the oldest game in the world, was found (see
Fig.
7.1
). This type of game has always been associated with rich social environments.
Playing board games is generally a social event where family and friends get together
