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in this case is not to build games that can support various social roles. Instead, the
challenge consists of endowing artificial opponents with the capability of simulating
such roles.
Examples of social roles in board games are:
Helper
—actively helping another
player perform actions in the game;
Dominator
—trying to influence other players
to perform specific actions for the player's own in-game benefits;
Negotiator
—
negotiating between two other players; and
Exhibitionist
—performing actions in the
game to gain the other players' attention.
During the length of a single board game, players constantly change between
social roles. A player that is displaying the social role of helper towards one player
can later on adopt the social behaviour of dominator towards that same person.
Concurrent social roles can also happen while playing board games. Players can,
for example, exhibit both the social role of negotiator and dominator to try to in-
fluence players using external negotiation. Such social roles should be taken into
consideration when developing artificial opponents for board games.
7.4
Scenario
We developed a scenario where an artificial opponent plays the Risk board game
against three human players. The goal of this artificial opponent is to be able to
socially interact with multiple humans and still be socially perceived for extended
periods of time. The human players use a digital table as the game's interface and
Risk was chosen because it is a game where face-to-face interactions, social actions
and strategic social reasoning are important components of the interaction.
In this section, we go through the guidelines presented on the previous section
and explain how we chose to implement them.
7.4.1
Physical Embodiment and Face-to-Face Interaction
In our scenario, over one side of the table stays the social robot that interacts with
three other players on the three other sides of the table (see Fig.
7.2
). With the use of
a digital table, human players are able to freely communicate between them and still
be aware of the game state as it happens in Eriksson et al. (
2005
). By using a digital
table as compared to a vertical display, multiple players can more easily be engaged
with both the game and by each other (Rogers and Lindley
2004
). This includes the
robot that inhabits the same physical space.
We have built a custom digital table and we are using a robotic head to embody
our artificial opponent. By using a social robotic head, our board game opponent is
able to engage in face-to-face interaction with multiple participants. For embodying
our social Risk opponent we are using a social robotic head, the EMYS (EMotive
headY System) robotic head (Ribeiro et al.
2011
). EMYS is a “turtle” type head
