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Social Interaction in Games: Measuring Physiological Linkage and Social…

- - - - Can be used as a measure of the intensity of the interaction between participants
      - Emerges when people are intensively interacting with each other (Hatfield et al., 1994). The linkage is also related to a theory called emotional contagion.
      - Pros:
        
        Physiological linkage is especially suitable to varying requirements of social interaction research, as it is not confined to any particular media. (Flexible)
        
        Furthermore, the psychological linkage is not refined to any particular social interaction as it occurs during a wide range of social interactions ranging from collaboration to more hostile interactions. (Which makes it hard to measure, one of the cons of this method)
    - - Correlation measures can be used to quantify and characterize linear coupling in a physiological activity.
      - Coherence measures switch from the temporal domain to the frequency domain, which allows determining whether two signals oscillate at the same frequency.
      - Many psychological processes are nonlinear dynamical systems. In this case, the (linear) methods described previously are not usable. However, a viable approach is to measure if several nonlinear systems are synchronized, that is, the extent to which two signals oscillate together. The following are two main approaches to investigate this:
        
        In phase synchronization (Lachaux, Rodriguez, Martinerie, & Varela, 1999), signals will be considered as synchronized when their phase difference remains constant.
        
        In generalized synchronization (Stam, 2005), the method searches for co-occurrence of generalized states, instead of operating directly on the signals.
        
        Unfortunately, the expected distributions of both synchronization measures are unknown, and thus, it is not possible to assess the level of significance using standard statistical tests. (Harder to measure.)
        
        One solution to this problem is to use surrogate data testing to determine significance (Lachaux et al., 1999; Stam, 2005) at the cost of computational complexity.
- - - - The Game Session defines the premises of the social interaction in terms of game structure and the participants’ socioemotional context.
      - The game session is the situation that players and spectators share and, each from their own point of view, personally experience. (E.g. Watching Live stream together. Playing co-op games online. Play party games in a room.) Two factors can be considered here: The game itself and the players.
      - The game rules define the structure of conflict between players. (E.g. Cooperative / Competitive)
      - In addition to the conflict structure, the game and the environment provide a structure of communication. (E.g. Text message, Voice chat, Limited information sharing) Quick News: LOL is banning overall chat because of toxic players.https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/game-updates/disabling-all-chat/
      - On a third level, we can identify that players bring a broader socioemotional context into the social setting of play: their existing relationships, personalities, current moods, cultural differences, and so on.
      - These three factors contribute to the emergent interaction: the interaction between the participants as it manifests itself at the game session. (E.g. Co-action, coordination, similar experience and so on.)
    - - Social presence (Biocca, Harms, & Burgoon, 2003) offers a theoretical framework for interpreting the shared experiences.
        Biocca et al. (2003) propose that social presence is composed of three dimensions.
        
        Copresence is the sense of being in touch with another person, whether sensory or mental representation. (E.g. I can see that person too / I can imagine the other person. Take my own experience, I can understand or even foresee what my friend is going to do in a game.)
        
        We view co-presence as facilitating the psychological and behavioral involvement of participants.
        
        Psychological involvement refers to the level of personal understanding, perceived emotional engagement, and attention between participants. It relates to the level of emotional and mental connectedness between people, but is also influenced by the participants’ subjective evaluations of the situation (E.g. I can understand your feelings. I can feel the same when you accomplish brilliant moves during the game.)
        
        Psychological involvement addresses the game as stimulus and includes emotional contagion that operates mainly by theory of mind principles and relies on social judgments.
        
        Behavioral involvement refers to the amount (number and extent) of dependency between people’s actions. (E.g. People performing similar actions, Imitations, and having conversation)
        
        Behavioral involvement, on the other hand, corresponds to game-related coordinated action and coaction.
  - - - It can be used to compare playing contexts and determine the level of social presence in different forms of social play. (E.g. How strong will the physiological linkage be in a multiplayer online game context compared to physical presence co-play.)
      - As it can also be assumed that player types respond diversely to different social contexts, psychological linkage provides tools for exploring how and why different players prefer different types of social play. (For this implementation, I can't really imagine how to use this method to understand how and why different players prefer different types of social play. Any examples?)
    - - According to emotional contagion theory, the sequences could help to identify who is the player who originates an emotion and who is contaminated by it later.
      - More generally, it can give insights into the bidirectionality of interaction and reveal, for example, whether all players are equal or whether the interaction is being steered by dominant individuals.
      - An example here, again thinks about the LOL problem right now. The toxic behavior and radical texts by players will often ruin other players' experiences, causing a chain of anxiety. If we examine the sequences of physiological reactions during these related situations, we may explore some way to address this problem.
    - - First, as much research on linkage has been conducted in face-to-face situations, it is still unclear to which extent linkage operates in mediated environments. (As the online games now are almost all taking place online, this unaddressed assumption limits the value for the method.)
      - Furthermore, it is unclear to which extent measures of synchrony can be used predictively, which is particularly important if the physiological linkage is to be used for validating game design choices. The researchers have already found that psychophysiological measures outperform self-report as predictors of long-term gameplaying for single-player games, which supports the predictive validity of psychophysiological measures in general. And some work has been done to validate the estimating value of this method on team performance.
    - - The choice of method is to some extent guided by the signal type.
        
        For example, using a traditional correlation measure for EMGs is a possibility, but would not make sense for EEGs due to their frequency properties and their nonlinearity.
        
        Similarly, to compute linkage in respiration, it is possible to use the correlation value and the coherence. In the first case, linkage will be high when the people are respiring together, while with coherence, the linkage will be high when they are respiring at the same rate. In those two cases, linkage has a completely different meaning.
        
        Therefore, it is not possible to define any single measure of linkage that always performs better in the detection of physiological linkage. (Again!!)
      - Currently we do not have enough data to conclusively outline the interpretation of various linkage measures. (Work must be done ^^'')
        
        Particularly, more studies are needed to better understand the link between a particular form of physiological linkage and the subcomponents of social presence. Therefore, linkage should be complemented by other methods, such as self-report, as is common practice within psychophysiological methodology in general.
        
        In cases where previous studies are unavailable or inconclusive, we recommend to compute linkage with several methods and interpret the results carefully, taking into account the properties of each individual measure. (Which is walking on the ice, I have to say. This would consume a lot of time and revenue)
      - The use of linkage also depends on the game structure.
        
        The interaction structure will, for instance, determine whether communication behaviors can be periodic or not, that is, whether recorded behavior will exhibit a pattern of repetition.
      - Furthermore, as physiological activity from two people sharing the same stimuli will often be significantly correlated, it is important to separate this effect from the assumed effect of social interaction under investigation.
        
        For these reasons, the choice of a method should be done for each specific case, according to the knowledge of the game or the application. For example, a formal analysis of game conflict and communication structures may be useful as part of the experiment setup.
      - Limitation: Finally, while social presence provides a useful conceptualization of the involvement between players in a social gaming situation, it does not sufficiently cover all aspects of social interaction in the game experience (see de Kort, IJsselsteijn, & Gajadhar, 2007).
        
        It is clear that social aspects are not a factor that can be separated from the individual experiences, but need to be considered in a joint relationship to them.
        
        On the other hand, the social relationships that players bring to the situation may interact with some, but not all of the underlying functions of linkage. For example, emotional contagion is not influenced by, for example, friendship, whereas social judgment certainly is. （Which should also be considered when measuring linkage）
- - - - And for this reason, the researchers might need to incorporate the analysis with other data (triangulation), which again increases the difficulty of the analysis process. And for the huge amount of data, the quantitative method can use methods to quickly gather and analyze data in numerical ways. Whereas this kind of method, faced with this large amount of data, is super hard to analyze, it would usually need people to process the data, instead of the computer.