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Nonverbal Communication in Virtual Worlds: Understanding and Designing Expressive Characters
Abstract
Over the last 20 years there has been an expansion of network mediated social activities, and an accompanying explosion of research interest into the poetics of networked communication. Of particular interest is the rise of what have come to be known as “virtual worlds”: persistent graphical environments populated (and often partially authored) by large communities of individual users. Interactors in these worlds are embodied as avatars: digital puppets or representations through which the user exerts his or her will on the environment. It is this virtual embodiment that makes today’s virtual worlds so interesting. With virtual embodiment comes a host of new and important communicative possibilities, and an assortment of new challenges and literacies including a wide range of nonverbal communication behaviors and non-linguistic social signaling options.
In this book, we begin the work of articulating the challenges and possibilities for non-verbal communication in virtual worlds. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines and perspectives, we consider the past, present, and future of human communication online.
Supplementary resource (1)
... Social experience is one of the central motivators for play in online games (Taylor 1999;Steinkuehler and Williams 2006;Nardi and Harris 2006;Ducheneaut, Moore, and Nickell 2007;Afonso and Prada 2009;Xu et al. 2011;Trepte, Reinecke, and Juechems 2012;Dimas and Prada 2013;Crenshaw and Nardi 2014;Tanenbaum, Seif El-Nasr, and Nixon 2014;O'Connor et al. 2015). Research on social believability focuses on designing NPCs that function as social agents to cultivate a social experience for players in both single-and multi-player games. ...
Previous research demonstrates that social experience is a key motivation for continued play in online games. We argue that there is an untapped potential for NPCs to act as social mediators in online games by stimulating social interaction between players. For example, a social mediator NPC could ask in chat, “How is everyone’s day?” to encourage conversations between players. We suggest two potential applications for social mediator NPCs in online games by examining social experiences in two contemporary massively-multiplayer online role-playing games (MMOs): Guild Wars 2 and World of Warcraft.
... While investigating the most important channels humans use for signaling affect, psychology studies have revealed that bodily expressions play a role as important as facial expressions in the communication of emotions and affect [1] and that human observers easily recognize affect expressed in body movement [2]–[4]. Simultaneously, the domain of computer character animation has established that the quality of the interaction and the level of engagement of a user with a virtual agent depends highly on how believable the animated character is perceived [5]. And it is the portrayal of affect through movement that makes a virtual character to be perceived as believable [6]. ...
Virtual characters capable of showing emotional
content are considered as more believable and engaging. However,
in spite of the numerous psychological studies and machine
learning applications trying to decode the most salient features
in the expression and perception of affect, there is still no
common understanding about how affect is conveyed through
body motions. Based on findings reported by the psychology
research community and quantitative results obtained in the
computer animation domain during the last years, we propose to
represent affective bodily movement through a low-dimensional
parameterization consisting of the spatio-temporal trajectories of
eight main joints in the human body (hands, head, feet, elbows
and pelvis). Using a combined evaluation protocol, we show that
this low-dimensional parameterization and the features derived
from it are a compact and sufficient representation of affective
motions that can be used for automatic recognition of affect and
the generation of new affective-expressive motions.
In this article I explore the relationship between digital place and disability through an ethnographic study of disability experience in the virtual world Second Life. I discuss how forms of landscape and interface shape disability experience, how building relates to “being-inworld” in digital place, and how proximity and collaboration relate to disability embodiment in a virtual context. “Participant building” on a virtual island created for this research, “Ethnographia,” complements participant observation and other methods to investigate these questions of digital place. Through these lines of analysis, I develop a notion of “digital topography” to illuminate the implications of digital place for disability and human experience more generally. This allows for differentiating digital places from digital media and thus forging conceptual frameworks that reflect how the internet is not a unitary entity. It also allows for considering digital emplacement as related to, but distinct from, digital embodiment. This helps draw attention to questions of digital placemaking alongside the better-known phenomena of avatars. Avatars are important, but it is crucial to highlight the virtual geographies without which the emplacement of those avatars would be impossible. These materials speak to broad questions regarding embodiment, ability, the digital, and the real.
The importance of interpersonal and group communication has been studied and recognized for thousands of years. With recent technological advances, humans have enabled remote interaction through shared virtual spaces; however, research is still needed to develop methods for expressing many important non-verbal communication cues. Our work explores the methods for enhancing the communication spectrum in collaborative virtual environments. Our primary contribution is a machine learning framework that maps human facial data to avatars in the virtual world. We developed a synthetic training process to create labeled data to alleviate the burden of manual annotation. Additionally, we describe a collaborative virtual environment that can utilize both verbal and non-verbal cues for improved user communication and interaction. Finally, we present results demonstrating the success of our method in a sample collaborative scenario.
Designing and controlling virtual characters endowed with expressive gestures requires the modeling of multiple processes, involving high-level abstract representations to low-level sensorimotor models. An expressive gesture is here defined as a meaningful bodily motion which intrinsically associates sense, style, and expressiveness. The main challenges rely both on the capability to produce a large spectrum of parametrized actions executed with some variability in various situations, and on the biological plausibility of the motion of the virtual characters. The goals of the paper are twofold. First we review the different formalisms used to describe expressive gestures, from notations to computational languages. Secondly we identify and discuss remaining challenges in the generation of expressive virtual characters. The different models and formalisms are illustrated more particularly for theatrical and sign language gestures.
In applying traditional game theory to multiplayer computer games, not enough attention has been given to actual player practice in local settings. To do this, the author describes a team of players in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft. This motley group learned how to defeat an end-game dungeon through collaborative improvements on communication and coordination. It focused on sustaining and building player relationships and learning together rather than the accepted norm of obtaining magical items. Trust was forged through a desire to ``hang out and have fun'' and was evidenced by the joviality of their communication. The group's ability to reflect and be consistent about its desires for camaraderie allowed it to recover from a poor performing night, which threatened to disband the group. The team's success depended on its ability to define and retain a coherent group identity and establish shared social incentives rather than individual incentives for participation.
Massively multiplayer games (MMOs) are immersive virtual three-dimensional fantasy worlds in which people cooperate and compete with each other, as well as with the computer-generated denizens of that particular game world. Although typically seen as games, their strong social aspect suggests that they are a form of online communication tool, with which players interact to form friendships, create communities, and work together to accomplish a variety of goals. After an introduction to MMOs, this review explores how social aspects of the game imitate the real world in terms of choices that players make when interacting with others. Furthermore, player-to-player interactions are examined in terms of in-game group formation and how efficient communication is imperative for goal achievement. The review also explores how leadership skills learned in-game may be transferred to real-world scenarios. The reasons why people play MMOs are examined in terms of player motivations and how aspects of game play may have both positive and negative consequences for a player's well-being. The latter half of the review describes how MMOs are used as afterschool virtual teaching environments where students can use aspects of game play to learn, for example, leadership qualities. The review concludes with recommendations for using MMOs as virtual laboratories to explore aspects of human behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Developing from David Sudnow's accounts of expertise, this article examines the gameplay of Counter-Strike, a popular online game. Although Counter-Strike at first may seem an unsophisticated pursuit, players display remarkable dexterity developed through many hours of play. Through participating in the game and analyzing videos of gameplay, we examine Counter-Strike as an example of expert technology use. As players move beyond the mere physical prowess of chaining their movements with the environment, they develop a sense of the terrain of play as a contingent tactically oriented understanding, rather than as static spatial knowledge. Relatedly, we provide the beginnings of an alternative account of both games and expertise which brings out something of what it is to play a specific game, as opposed to games in general. Moreover, rather than presenting a disengaged general model of skill, the article considers how we might access and describe the situated skills of gameplay.
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The actual meanings computer game modders attach to their actions and practices remain heavily underresearched. This article takes a look at the attitudes and everyday practices of the people who make game modifications, with special focus on the forms and consequences of collaboration between hobbyists. The case discussed in the article is the shooter-game Operation Flashpoint (OFP) and the modding scene around it. The article proposes that there is no such thing as an average computer game modder. It is suggested that the distinctions can be drawn based on the objective of projects (missions, add-ons, mods), modder motivations (playing, hacking, researching, self-expression, cooperation), and notions on the ownership and potential commercialization of their work. Given the forecasts concerning the growing significance of player-made content, this study can offer some down-to-earth findings from the long established tradition of game modding.