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Entertaining the Whole World pp 115–135Cite as

Social Presence and Artificial Opponents

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Part of the book series: Human–Computer Interaction Series ((HCIS))

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 howone 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.

You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.

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Acknowledgements

The research leading to these results has received funding from European Community’s Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement no 215554, supported by national funds through FCT—Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, under project PEst- OE/EEI/LA0021/2013, the PIDDAC Program funds, and a scholarship (SFRH/BD/41585/2007) granted by FCT.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. INESC-ID and Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

    André Pereira, Rui Prada & Ana Paiva

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  1. André Pereira
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  2. Rui Prada
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  3. Ana Paiva
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Correspondence to André Pereira .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Mixed Reality Lab, City University London, London, United Kingdom

    Adrian David Cheok

  2. University of Twente Human Media Interaction Group, Enschede, The Netherlands

    Anton Nijholt

  3. Universidade Nova de Lisboa Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia, Caparica, Portugal

    Teresa Romão

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Pereira, A., Prada, R., Paiva, A. (2014). Social Presence and Artificial Opponents. In: Cheok, A., Nijholt, A., Romão, T. (eds) Entertaining the Whole World. Human–Computer Interaction Series. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-6446-3_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-6446-3_7

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