Motivations for playing

In the blog Mission Groupware there was a blog post “What makes online games successful?” – why people play online games and what is the motivation.

I would like to present Nick Yee’s model of player motivations in online games. In his model there are three main factors which motivate players. These main components are still divided into 10 minor subcomponents. According Yee, it is common that many of these factors can be motivating the player at same time.

Achievement:

• Advancement: Gamers who enjoy gaining power, reaching goals, leveling quickly and gather in-game resources.
• Mechanics: Gamers have an interest in analyzing the underlying numerical mechanics of the system in order to optimize the game character performance.
• Competition: Gamers who like to challenge others and compete with others gamers.
  

Social:

• Socializing: Gamers who enjoy knowing other gamers, helping them and chatting with them.
• Relationship: Gamers who are interested to form longer, meaningful relationships with others.
• Teamwork: Gamers who get satisfaction from being part of a group and achieve goals together.
  

Immersion:

• Discovery: Gamers who like to explore game world or things what most other gamers may not know.
• Role-Playing: Gamers who enjoy creating a game character with a background story.
• Customization: Gamers who enjoy customizing the appearance of their characters.
• Escapism: Gamers who use the game world as a place to relax or escape from the real life.
  

References:
[Yee, 2007] Nick Yee, Motivations of Play in Online Games. CyberPsychology & Behavior, 9, 772-775.

IRC, substitute for Babble?

Last lecture mentioned "Babble", a CMC-prototype by Erickson et al [1]. I found it to be interesting concept and decided to read the paper about it. I found out that many features it has somehow bring IRC into mind.

Users list and private chats are quite self-explanatory so I won't go deeper into them. Different topics in Babble are almost the same as channels in IRC, and "Get Info"-fuctionality in Babble seems to give almost the same information as /whois in IRC. "The spot" in Babble is functionality commonly found in IRC-clients, althought instead of having separate windows for it, they usually just flash their minimized window when something happens in a channel.

Of course, one key feature of Babble is missing from IRC: the Social Proxy.
You could mimic it somehow by using idle-information from /whois, but it wouldn't be the same as Babble's Social Proxy. Interesting visualization-idea for IRC nevertheless.

The paper also mentioned that users of Babble expressed concern about unwanted visitors joining in Babble. This problem could be solved in IRC by using password protected channels for sensitive topics.

Persistence of conversations was one merit of Babble mentioned in paper and this could be achieved in IRC by using screen to run your client. That way you can read the conversations that happened when you weren't there.


References:

[1]Erickson, T., Smith, D.N., Kellogg, W.A., Laff, M.R., Richards, J.T. , and Bradner, E. (1999). "Socially translucent systems: Social proxies, persistent conversation, and the design of 'Babble'," Proceedings of CHI '99 (Pittsburgh, PA May 15-20), ACM, New York.

Crtitical Success Factors of Groupware Implementation

CSCW (or groupware) tools and the research about them has been around for decades already. Today it is hard to even find a work community that would not utilize these tools at least to some extent. Still, comprehensive use of groupware is limited to special fields. I wanted to know, what are the reasons for the successful or unsuccessful implementation of groupware? Hung-Pin Shih's article Predicting Groupware Use from the Perspectives of Workflow, Information and Coordination gave me an excellent framework.

There are widely recognized benefits in the use of groupware, but also unintended consequences. In this paper Shih explores groupware implementation and goes through several other studies that relate to his work. He suggests that group members are most likely to achieve high outcome quality of groupware use in cooperative work through work-flow routinization, information integration and coordination fit. In other words, groupware should offer ways to reduce repetitive activities in order to save the energy for more creative work.

While the conclusions from Shih's own research are pretty predictable, his findings from other research are interesting and provide answers to my question. These are also managerial issues: the implementation of a new groupware can be a critical move.



Table references:
[15] J. Grudin, “Why CSCW applications fail: Problems in the design and evaluation of organizational interfaces,” Proceedings of the Computer-Supported Cooperative
Work, Portland, Oregon, USA, 1988, pp. 85-93.
[17] J. Grudin, “Groupware and social dynamics: eight challenges for developers,” Communications of the ACM 37(1), 1994, pp. 92-105.
[22] H. Karsten, “Collaboration and collaborative information technologies: a review of the evidence,” Database for Advances in Information Systems 30(2), 1999, pp. 44-65.
[23] S. Kelly and M. Jones, “Groupware and the social infrastructure of communication,” Communications of the ACM 44(12), 2001, pp. 77-79.
[31] W.J. Orlikowski, “Learning from Notes: organizational issues in groupware implementation,” Proceedings of the Conference on computer Supported Cooperative
Work, ACM, New York, 1992a, pp. 362-369.
[38] A.M. Townsend, A.R. Hendrickson, and S.M. DeMarie, “Meeting the virtual work imperative,” Communications of the ACM 45(1), 2002, pp. 23-26.
[46] C. Yu and D.C. Yen, “Extranet and groupware,” Journal of Computer Information Systems 40(4), 2000, pp. 32-40.

How the use of groupware improved our innovative thinking

I was a part of a group who tried several innovation techniques. We used the same techniques during both face-to-face meetings, and meetings through msn/google docs.
I noticed that the amount of innovative ideas increased during the use of google docs. This was mainly because we just wrote certain ideas up by ourselves, without explaining them to others. Then after someone else saw the written idea, it was easier to come up with some iterative innovation when you didn't have the same starting point that the person originally writing it had. That meant that by taking someone else's idea without actually hearing what the other person meant by it, increased the chance that you read it and came up with something totally different than what the original writer had thought of.

I think this partly because of the use of google docs platform, which doesnt allow for too much discussion during writing. I believe that the same results could have been met by creating ideas and then just swapping papers face-to-face, but it's not to say anything about your ideas when your doing it over the internet.

Maybe this kind of use of groupware could be studied more, since we never have too much innovation.

Group Tools for Writing Together in Praxis

Group Tools for Writing Together in Praxis

At the lesson n:o 7. Saila Ovaska explained about the tools for working together. I just have an experience about group writing and I like to analyze it shortly here.

This Group Writing project, which I like to speak here, took place in an international device development project. The tool for writing was Google group tools,
Member comes from France, Spain, Switzerland, Cyprus and German.

The purpose of the writing project was to define excellent specification to a high end electrical devise and later apply development funding from European Commission for it.

After wards, when I see the project writing history, the use of group writing deviates into three phases.

The ordinary plane was to make the application paper ready as normal group writing method. We taught that we do the writing together from beginning to the end with same writing code principles.

The writing of the paper began very well and after half year the nice “skeleton” was ready. The final writing the phase, where we start to write “meet around bones” begins.

During this writing process writers did well, but when the latest version of the application paper came closer to the final version the number of different versions increased so much, that no one of writers did not knew exactly are the handling the latest version of the paper.

The third phase of the writing project started, when the consortium management decided to stop the group writing. The next step was that the consortium management group nominated one person for responsible person (Author) for finalized the application paper.

During this very final writing “turning” of the paper all writers sent their latest modifications to the Author and he fitted all latest modifications together.

During this third phase of writing the amount of modification grew three times higher, what it was during the second phase of writing. This was somehow confusing. The Author managed to handle all changes and modifications very well.

At the end the modifications started to be very little details of the project. The Author decided to frees to final version and not aloud any more changes.

The Author sent the latest version to members of the consortium for approval.

My conclusion after the project was that group writing is good tool for developing ideas. As well it is great tool for developing new ideas.

When writing project goes to details and it takes official forms the code of group writing have to define accurately and the writing discipline have to be very tide.This means, that to allow new changes to document must be very difficult at the end of group writing project.

Erkki

How does group identity relate to new social media

Last week I wrote about group identity in MMO's, and especially looked at group identity theory, which consist of:
- Cognitive component, which represents person response to his own identity and how he categorizes himself as a part of a group.
- Affective component, which represents the group's attractiveness from the person's viewpoint and the group's ability to help the person to reach his goals.
- Behavioral component, which represents the group's dependancy on each other and it's ability to coordinate activities towards common goal.

All of these could be identified in groups found in MMO's, but can these same categories be applied to other new social media like Facebook?

First let's take a look at the cognitive component. Clearly each person in Facebook has certain idea of their own identity and they represent this with their profile page. They can also feel a part of a group, be it their group of friends or certain groups of people with similar ideas. The way I see it, cognitive component is quite strong in Facebook.

Then what about the affective component? Group's attractiveness is a difficult subject to cover. Could it be measured by the amount of comments a person sends to a group? I won't be going any deeper into that subject, but I think it's something that could be studied more.
Then the other part of affective component, group's ability to help a person to reach his goals. What kinds of personal goals are there in Facebook? Do people aim to befriend a certain individual? Or do they try to gather as many or as few friends as possible? This is a component that I feel Facebook is completely missing, and as such the affective component is not nearly as strong as cognitive component in Facebook.

Lastly the behavioural component. In Facebook, you could say people are dependant on each other, but that's mostly just an emotional connection between the people and not a practical one. Still the dependancy could be quite strong. The groups in Facebook might have a certain common goal, say reach 10000 members for a cause. They usually have a goal, but there's rarely any kind of activities organized to help them reach this goal. This is why I would place the behavioural component below cognitive, although the dependancies can not be ignored.

In conclusion, we can identify certain components which improve group identity in Facebook. It's mostly concentrated on cognitive side, but also people's dependancy on each other is quite strong. Still, when compared to communities in MMO's, I think that Facebook is lagging behind quite a bit. Whether that's a good or a bad thing is anyone's guess.

About NodeXL

NodeXL is a novel tool for visualization of networks. There are numerous tools for this-and-that available and coming on to, but the picture of HCI semi-god Ben Shneiderman in the contributors enlistment along with several “better schools” of the planet (i.e. Stanford, Oxford and Cambridge) woke my interest: There must be something in this!

Because of Moneysoft NodeXL works as an Excel plugin. This can be forgiven, because alongside with the vast arsenal of ready-made computing spells this selection offers familiar and somewhat intuitive user interface for, well, everybody. It does not take too long to figure out the main idea, but I would strongly suggest familiarizing yourself with the (slightly outdated) tutorial and example data sets. While NodeXL might be relatively easy to get up & running, creating visualizations like those presented in the flickr.com gallery will require deep understanding about the functions as well as some skills in visualization and computing.

The beauty of computing lies in handling big data. When your network has hundreds or thousands of nodes, it is likely that you find it fairly difficult to figure out even the most obvious patterns. This is where NodeXL really shines: Even though polishing the views might take time and effort, finding out the key metrics and arranging the set according to them with a selection of pre-defined models is very easy –and fast. For example, from the graph metrix tell you instantly the number of vertices and edges, and calculated values of graph density, maximum and average geosidic distance and vertex betweenness centrality.

To what NodeXL can be used for? Well, in case you have access to data, possibilities are various. For example, from the company mailing data you could figure out who are the central persons, and who do not interact. From your supply chain phone data you could see what are the bottle-necks in the information flow. From your Facebook friend network analysis you could figure out to whom to gossip in order to spread the message efficiently. And so on.