Paper Abstract - Nicolas Nova

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ABSTRACT

Awareness Tools: Lessons from First-Person Shooter Games

Nicolas Nova

Awareness can be defined as "the up-to-the-moment understanding of another person's interaction with a shared workspace" (Gutwin and Greenberg, 1999). Thus, Awareness Tools (from now on called AT in this paper) enable users of a virtual environment to provide them information about presence ("is anyone in the workspace?"), identity ("who is that?"), location, ("where is somebody?"), action ("what is somebody doing?") and so on.

This paper focuses on which cutting-edge AT provided by first-person shooters (FPS) can be transferred to Computer-Supported Collaborative Work/Learning CSCW/CSCL. These findings are drawn from a variety of sources, including hardcore gamers interview, games observation and game guides reading.

Awareness Tools in FPS

In FPS, the workplace is a restricted arena in which players perform various tasks (deathmatch, flag capture, hostage rescues…) AT are designed to enable communication and collaboration between players. Being and staying aware of each others players is a crucial issue. Therefore team play is meant to be a key for success.

AT are divided as follows:

Direct AT: no tools strictly speaking, basically information remains visual and auditive which bring perceptual clues to the players (weapon noise, footstep noise, etc)
Indirect AT: like radar-map (players' location and identity, weapon used), cpu messages (that sums up recent events), tags (by pointing a player, one can get information about him), scripts (allow players to configure their own AT)
Communication AT: team chat (only with team-mates), chat (with all players, direct communication

From FPS to CSCW/L

Video-games should be considered as a driving force in the field of Human-Computer Interaction. FPS AT like radar have already been transferred to CSCW. Therefore these findings provide hints about what kind of information can be displayed: work progress for example (score, number of captured flag, etc.). In CSCL, an evaluation workflow may be very important for students' tracking and motivation. As video games provide tools to gather a team for playing together, one could imaging a similar way for people to work on a same task in groupware. Such a tool (based on gathering team-mates' profiles) could allow employees to find the right participants to work together. Moreover, as Quake scripts enables players to trigger events allowing peoples to configure their own AT that trigger the right awareness information they want may be interesting too. The use of auditory cues and direct communication (with microphone and headphone) may also be useful to work on.

Reference

Gutwin, C. & Greenberg, S. (1999). "A Framework of Awareness for Small Groups in Shared-Workspace Groupware". Technical Report 99-1, Department of Computer Science, University of Saskatchewan, Canada

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