Understanding gaming motivations is important given the growing trend of incorporating game-based mechanisms in non-gaming applications. In this paper, we describe the development and validation of an online gaming motivations scale based on a 3-factor model. Data from 2,071 US participants and 645 Hong Kong and Taiwan participants is used to provide a cross-cultural validation of the developed scale. Analysis of actual in-game behavioral metrics is also provided to demonstrate predictive validity of the scale.

Examining how in-game behavior preferences map onto real world demographics provides important empirically-derived insights into how to match game-based mechanisms to target demographic segments. Using behavioral and demographic data from 1,037 World of Warcraft players, we use multiple regressions to provide this mapping. Given current interest in "gamifying" applications, we believe these findings are relevant for both gaming and non-gaming research.

Buying virtual currencies with real money from a third-party often violates the terms of use of online games. This study quantitatively investigates players who buy in-game gold from a third-party in World of Warcraft. A cross-cultural survey dataset of 2865 players reveals that differences between Asian and Western players are negligible compared to differences across genders, job categories, and play motivations. Our findings have implications for the design and study of interactions between players and virtual currencies.

Personality inference can be used for dynamic personalization of content or system customization. In this study, we examined whether and how personality is expressed in Virtual Worlds (VWs). Survey data from 1,040 World of Warcraft players containing demographic and personality variables was paired with their VW behavioral metrics over a four-month period. Many behavioral cues in VWs were found to be related to personality. For example, Extraverts prefer group activities over solo activities. We also found that these behavioral indicators can be used to infer a player's personality.

Studies in the Proteus Effect have shown that users conform to stereotypes associated with their avatar's appearance. In this study, we used longitudinal behavioral data from 1,040 users in a virtual world to examine the behavioral outcome of conflicting gender cues between user and avatar. We found that virtual gender had a significant effect on in-game behaviors for both healing and player-vs-player activity.

We analyze mechanisms of player retention and commitment in massively multiplayer online games. Our ground assumptions on player retention are based on a marketing model of customer retention and commitment. To measure the influence of gameplay, in-game sociality, and real-life status on player commitment, we use the following metrics: weekly play time, stop rate and number of years respondents have been playing the game. The cross-cultural sample is composed of 2865 World of Warcraft players from North-America, Europe, Taiwan, and Hong-Kong who completed an online questionnaire. We differentiate players in terms of demographic categories including age, region, gender and marital status.

World of Warcraft (WoW) is a massively multiplayer online game (MMO) supporting complex social interactions among over 12 million players. While the "lone gamer" stereotype still persists, there is little data on gaming with other players with whom one shares a "real life" (RL) social relationship. Our work departs from previous studies in focusing on the hybrid of online and offline sociality, rather than only one or the other. We provide perhaps the first systematic quantitative characterization of MMO play with RL friends, family and other social connections. A large online survey collected data from 2865 WoW players from the US, Europe, Hong Kong and Taiwan. The findings overwhelmingly support the view that playing WoW may often serve to enhance, not diminish, RL social interactions. In addition, we present benchmark results on demographics and WoW play practices in world regions previously not studied. The consistency of the patterns of findings across East/West and gender groupings suggests fascinating issues for further research.

While a lot of technical data is available on the Web, conveying information about detailed procedures for the assembly and repair of complex machinery has so far been limited mostly to 2D drawings and textual content. In this paper we describe the technology behind our 3D Wiki, a system meant to address this problem. By blending the functionality of virtual worlds (3D visualization and navigation) with the benefits of social software (editability, traceability, and hyperlinking), the 3D Wiki can help users tasked with the remote maintenance and repair of technical equipment. Our environment provides a kind of “living technical manual”, seamlessly blending spatial and textual content.

An increasingly large number of users connect to virtual worlds on a regular basis to conduct activities ranging from gaming to business meetings. In all these worlds, users project themselves into the environment via an avatar: a 3D body which they control and whose appearance is often customizable. However, considering the prevalence of this form of embodiment, there is a surprising lack of data about how and why users customize their avatar, as well as how easy and satisfying the existing avatar creation tools are. In this paper, we report on a study investigating these issues through a questionnaire administered to more than a hundred users of three virtual worlds offering widely different avatar creation and customization systems (Maple Story, World of Warcraft, and Second Life). We illustrate the often-surprising choices users make when creating their digital representation and discuss the impact of our findings for the design of future avatar creation systems.

This paper presents a context-aware mobile recommender system, codenamed Magitti. Magitti is unique in that it infers user activity from context and patterns of user behavior and, without its user having to issue a query, automatically generates recommendations for content matching. Extensive field studies of leisure time practices in an urban setting (Tokyo) motivated the idea, shaped the details of its design and provided data describing typical behavior patterns. The paper describes the fieldwork, user interface, system components and functionality, and an evaluation of the Magitti prototype.

One of the main challenges in building multi-user mobile information systems for real-world deployment lies in the development of scalable systems. Recent work on scaling infrastructure for conventional web services using distributed approaches can be applied to the mobile space, but limitations inherent to mobile devices (computational power, battery life) and their communication infrastructure (availability and quality of network connectivity) challenge system designers to carefully design and optimize their software architectures. Additionally, notions of mobility and position in space, unique to mobile systems, provide interesting directions for the segmentation and scalability of mobile information systems. In this paper we describe the implementation of a mobile recommender system for leisure activities, codenamed Magitti, which was built for commercial deployment under stringent scalability requirements. We present concrete solutions addressing these scalability challenges, with the goal of informing the design of future mobile multi-user systems.

Media research has shown that people enjoy watching television as a part of socializing in groups. However, many constraints in daily life limit the opportunities for doing so. The Social TV project builds on the increasing integration of television and computer technology to support sociable, computer-mediated group viewing experiences. In this article, we describe the initial results from a series of studies illustrating how people interact in front of a television set. Based on these results, we propose guidelines as well as specific features to inform the design of future “social television” prototypes.

Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) can be fascinating laboratories to observe group dynamics online. In particular, players must form persistent associations or "guilds" to coordinate their actions and accomplish the games' toughest objectives. Managing a guild, however, is notoriously difficult and many do not survive very long. In this paper, we examine some of the factors that could explain the success or failure of a game guild based on more than a year of data collected from five World of Warcraft servers. Our focus is on structural properties of these groups, as represented by their social networks and other variables. We use this data to discuss what games can teach us about group dynamics online and, in particular, what tools and techniques could be used to better support gaming communities.

Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) currently represent the most widely used type of social 3D virtual worlds with millions of users worldwide. Although MMOGs take face-to-face conversation as their metaphor for user-to-user interaction, avatars currently give off much less information about what users are doing than real human bodies. Consequently, users routinely encounter slippages in coordination when engaging in joint courses of action. In this study, we analyze screen-capture video of user-to-user interaction in the game, City of Heroes, under two conditions: one with the game's standard awareness cues and the other with enhanced cues. We use conversation analysis to demonstrate interactional slippages caused by the absence of awareness cues, user practices that circumvent such limitations and ways in which enhanced cues can enable tighter coordination.

Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) routinely attract millions of players but little empirical data is available to assess their players' social experiences. In this paper, we use longitudinal data collected directly from the game to examine play and grouping patterns in one of the largest MMOGs: World of Warcraft. Our observations show that the prevalence and extent of social activities in MMOGs might have been previously over-estimated, and that gaming communities face important challenges affecting their cohesion and eventual longevity. We discuss the implications of our findings for the design of future games and other online social spaces.

Social network-based systems usually suffer from two major limitations: they tend to rely on a single data source (e.g. email traffic), and the form of network patterns is often privileged over their content. To go beyond these limitations we describe a system we developed to visualize and navigate hybrid networks constructed from multiple data sources - with a direct link between formal representations and the raw content. We illustrate the benefits of our approach by analyzing patterns of collaboration in a large Open Source project, using hybrid networks to uncover important roles that would otherwise have been missed.

With the rapid growth of personal computer networks and the Internet, sharing files has become a central activity in computer use. The ways in which users control the what, how, and with whom of sharing are dictated by the tools they use for sharing; there are a wide range of sharing practices, and hence a wide range of tools to support these practices. In practice, users' requirements for certain sharing features may dictate their choice of tool, even though the other affordances available through that tool may not be an ideal match to the desired manner of sharing.In this paper, we explore users' current practices in file sharing and examine the tools used to share files. Based on our findings, we unpack the features and affordances of these tools into a set of dimensions along which sharing tools can be characterized. Then, we present the set of user interface features we have prototyped in an interface called a sharing palette, which provides a platform for exploration and experimentation with new modalities of sharing. We briefly present the tool as a whole and then focus on the individual features of the sharing palette that support reported styles of sharing.

This paper presents a descriptive account of the social practices surrounding the iTunes music sharing of 13 participants in one organizational setting. Specifically, we characterize adoption, critical mass, and privacy; impression management and access control; the musical impressions of others that are created as a result of music sharing; the ways in which participants attempted to make sense of the dynamic system; and implications of the overlaid technical, musical, and corporate topologies. We interleave design implications throughout our results and relate those results to broader themes in a music sharing design space.

This paper reports on the results of studies of task management to support the design of a task list manager. We examined the media used to record and organize to-dos and tracked how tasks are completed over time. Our work shows that, contrary to popular wisdom, people are not poor at prioritizing. Rather, they have well-honed strategies for tackling particular task management challenges. By illustrating what factors influence task completion and how representations function to support task management, we hope to provide a strong foundation for the design of a personal to-do list manager. We also present some preliminary efforts in this direction.

Playing computer games has become a social experience. Hundreds of thousands of players interact in massively multiplayer online games (MMORPGs), a recent and successful genre descending from the pioneering multi-user dungeons (MUDs). These new games are purposefully designed to encourage interactions among players, but little is known about the nature and structure of these interactions. In this paper, we analyze player-to-player interactions in two locations in the game Star Wars Galaxies. We outline different patterns of interactivity, and discuss how they are affected by the structure of the game. We conclude with a series of recommendations for the design and support of social activities within multiplayer games.

Email has come to play a central role in task management, yet email tool features have remained relatively static in recent years, lagging behind users? evolving practices. The Taskmaster system narrows this gap by recasting email as task management and embedding task-centric resources directly in the client. In this paper, we describe the field research that inspired Taskmaster and the principles behind its design. We then describe how user studies conducted with ?live? email data over a two-week period revealed the value of a task-centric approach to email system design and its potential benefits for overloaded users.

E-mail, far from being a poor, technically limited substitute for face-to-face communication, has some unique and compelling properties that make it ideally suited for talking about objects. In this article we show how e-mail users have evolved new forms of electronic deictic references to refer to work objects and have taken full advantage of the fluid boundaries between the different roles that e-mail can assume. We also illustrate how e-mail users draw on the persistence of the medium to make sense of the objects being talked about and sometimes even transform the conversation itself into an object of conversation. We conclude with several design suggestions for future electronic mail software based on these findings.

In this paper, we describe FLANNEL, an architecture for adding computational capabilities to email. FLANNEL allows email to be modified by an application while in transit between sender and receiver. This modification is done without modification to the endpoints---mail clients---at either end. This paper also describes interaction techniques that we have developed to allow senders of email to quickly and easily select computations to be performed by FLANNEL. Through, our experience, we explain the properties that applications must have in order to be successful in the context of FLANNEL.