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players. These guidelines and the reported scenario presented in this paper provide
useful information on how to develop the next generation of board game opponents
that aim to be socially present.
7.2
Related Work
Humans consider many media devices as social beings (Reeves
1996
). Social agents
or artificial opponents can be examined as one instance of this effect. In this section,
we start by analysing the concept that measures the extent in which such effect
occurs, the concept of Social Presence. Following, as research in artificial opponents
is still very scarce in terms of social behaviour, in order to tackle the social deficits
of existing artificial opponents, we will look at research in socially intelligent and
embodied agents.
7.2.1
Social Presence
Techniques for representing others in order to evoke social presence have an ancient
history that dates back to the first stone sculptures (Biocca et al.
2003
). More re-
cently, many science-fiction movies or topics include characters such as intelligent
computers, robots, and androids that also provoke the same kind of social responses
from the audience or the reader (Lombard and Ditton
1997
). With the evolution of
technology, new interactive media have been progressively designed to evoke the
same social responses from its users. With this new type of media, an increasing
number of quasi-social relationships are being established with computers, robots
and intelligent virtual agents. These kinds of relationships are still quite unexplored in
traditional sciences, but some researchers already assessed how individuals interact
and relate to these entities.
In 1950, the “Turing Test” (Turing
1950
) launched the debate on the potential that
modern computers have to mimic humans. Later in 1996, Reeves and Nass (Reeves
1996
) demonstrated that computer interfaces can generate strong and automatic social
responses from minimal social cues, and that most of the times these responses occur
with the user being quite aware that he is facing a machine and not a social being.
This phenomenon seems to exist even with today's less sophisticated computers, but
it appears stronger when computers use natural language, interact in real time, have
an embodiment, or exhibit a believable social behaviour.
People treat media entities in social manners, while knowing that these entities
do not have real emotions, ideas or bodies. They could ignore these entities as they
are not real, but they do not because they attribute social presence to them. Studying
social presence can contribute to the understanding of human social behaviour while
using these types of technologies and achieving a sense of social presence is the
design goal of many types of hardware and software engineering. Social presence
