A Framework for Research in Gamified Mobile Guide Applications using Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs)

Ioannis Doumanis, Serengul Smith
2015 International Journal of Serious Games  
Mobile Guides are mobile applications that provide players with local and locationbased services (LBS), such as navigation assistance, where and when they need them most. Advances in mobile technologies in recent years have enabled the gamification of these applications, opening up new opportunities to transfer education and culture through game play. However, adding traditional game elements such as PBLs (points, badges, and leaderboards) alone cannot ensure that the intended learning outcomes
more » ... will be met, as the player's cognitive resources are shared between the application and the surrounding environment. This distribution of resources prevents players from easily immersing themselves into the educational scenario. Adding artificial conversational characters (ECAs) that simulate the social norms found in real-life human-to-human guide scenarios has the potential to address this problem and improve the player's experience and learning of cultural narratives [1] . Although significant progress has been made towards creating game-like mobile guides with ECAs ([2], [3] ), there is still a lack of a unified framework that enables researchers and practitioners to investigate the potential effects of such applications to players and how to approach the concepts of player experience, cognitive accessibility and usability in this context. This paper presents a theoretically-well supported research framework consisted of four key components: differences in players, different features of the gamified task, aspects of how the ECA looks, sound or behaves and different mobile environments. Furthermore, it provides based on this framework a working definition of what player experience, cognitive accessibility and usability are in the context of game-like mobile guide applications. Finally, a synthesis of the results of six empirical studies conducted within this research framework is discussed and a series of design guidelines for the effective gamification of mobile guide applications using ECAs are presented. Results show that an ECA can positively affect the quality of the player's experience, but it did not elicit better player retention of cultural narratives and navigation of routes. This means that the GUI elements (and thereby the underlying IA) should support the completion of tasks in a limited number of user actions. Without IAs that minimize the user's actions and maximize the system output, the supporting GUIs become unnecessarily complicated. To address the above limitation, a number of mobile systems already offer information aggregation services. This means that the mobile system aggregates content from multiple resources on the World Wide Web (WWW) and pushes them to the user, formatted in a single presentation medium, with minimal user intervention. For example, in Siri [5] participants with the click-of-a-button can query in natural language information from multiple web resources simultaneously. To aid the user Siri provides categories of common queries that it understands. The output is usually formatted in short natural language sentences augmented with multimedia content (e.g., text and videos). This simplified IA (supported by natural language processing) enables collaborative completion of tasks as easily as working with another human being. In recent years, mobile designers in an effort to make mobile applications more playful and engaging to use have started integrating game mechanics and game design thinkingalso known as gamification. Although, gamification has been used in several types of mobile applications (e.g., Waze [6] and Mobee [7]), the focus of this paper is on mobile applications that offer location and cultural information services to users. Adding gameplay to these applications opens up new opportunities to transfer education and culture in a more effective and efficient manner than the traditional learning methods (e.g., an audio guide). For example, the Ghost Game [8] is a mobile cultural heritage application that uses missions and quests in addition to photographs of actors with medieval dressing to connect visitors of the Wartburg castle in Germany with the past history. Gaming creates an immersive experience for visitors of the castle to connect with the people who lived in the medieval times. However, adding game design elements and mechanics alone in mobile guide applications does not guarantee that the intended learning occurs. This is because the dynamic nature of the player's situation in mobile environments rapidly affects their ability to process, store and respond to information. For example, the light and noise levels in outdoor environments may have a detrimental impact on the player's ability to complete a mission required to achieve a specific learning outcome. Therefore, there is a strong need for additional communication modalities in order to ensure player comprehension and understanding. The latest generation of mobile devices offer a plethora of sensors (e.g., ambient light sensors, accelerometers, gyroscopes, array of microphones, HD cameras) to enable multimodal communication with mobile applications. Embedding multimodal communication in gamified mobile guide applications can enable the creation of learning experiences close to game quality where players immerse deep in the educational scenario. A standard feature used by games to immerse players in a scenario is artificial Non-Playable Characters (NPCs) who have a central role in the game's storyline. Those NPCs can utilize multiple communication modalities (body gestures and facial expressions, emotional recognition and reaction, etc.) and natural language to provide an embodied metaphor for implementing various gameplay mechanics (e.g., increasing task challenge through dialogue, narrate a story that helps gameplay, give the player a goal, etc.). Therefore, augmenting gamified mobile guide applications with a similar to games embodied metaphor (named Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs)) could potentially result in enhanced learning by immersing players deeper into the educational scenario. ECAs are already a reality for the latest generation of mobile devices (e.g., [9] ) and more projects are on the way for more technological breakthroughs (e.g., [10] [11] ). However, insufficient attention has been paid to the empirical evaluation of such interfaces. The direct consequence is that there is limited evidence on the potential impacts of ECAs on the players of gamified mobile guides. Given this lack of knowledge, there is a potential risk associated with the introduction of ECAs in gamified mobile applications. If the ECA does not actually enhance the application or it is not appropriate for the particular situation, the player may perform poorly, become distracted and the entire interaction may collapse. The research framework presented in this paper provides researchers and practitioners with a common pillar to accumulate compare and integrate results from different studies. Although the framework focuses on the domain of gamified mobile guide applications, it can be useful to researchers in other domains where player learning is important and gamification using ECAs can be applied (e.g., mobile apps to support the development of literacy and maths skills).
doi:10.17083/ijsg.v2i3.79 fatcat:qq5jqyspirfindl3eqajx3nayu