Summary for two papers of facilitate the conference by social games

Summary 

To help conference attendees gain social capital or expand social networking is always an interesting research topic. One of the direction is by "social games". The paper from [1] and [2], both design a social game to facilitate people social interaction inside a conference. In  [1], the author designed a game requires 2-6 people to communicate on a puzzle of ball and hole location matching. This is a tool for "ice-breaking" between the conference attendees through the teamwork procedure. In [2], the author discussed an approach to gain community retention by the social game. They build up a cell phone app that supports a collaborative function on the task. The users can solve problems insides the game with others, as a community. The author argued, this app encourages user to improve their network connectivity. Furthermore, this app may be used inside the class to increase the class retention rate for minority groups.

Both of the papers proposed an interesting idea about social game. However, I think the evaluation would be an issue to support the above claims. In [1], the author proposed a questionnaire for the game players. Based on the response, the users indicated the communication and team-work function are the most important election for them. The evidence to support the game usefulness in helping users to "making friends fast" is not strong. In [2], the authors only present the evaluation plan about how the social game is helping to build a community. The experimental data are still lacking.

I think the research question can be more specific classified as 1) cold-breaking; 2) social interaction and engagement; 3) social recommendation; 4)social networking ; 5) teamwork and communication and 6) community formation and retention. For each of them, the experimental design should be varied. Some of the aspect is hard to find a ground truth to prove the model/game/app effectiveness. For instance, if the user talk to each other more due to the apps? It is not easy to compare the talk frequency before/after the game play. Hence, an experiment design for certain research questions is critical. Some of the ideas: 1) A/B testing to different group of users; 2) quick questionnaire/feedback insides the game; 3) clicking/bookmarking/friendship behavior analysis, etc.

Reference

[1] Evie Powell, Rachel Brinkman, Tiffany Barnes, and Veronica Catete. 2012. Table tilt: making friends fast. In Proceedings of the International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games(FDG '12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 242-245. DOI=10.1145/2282338.2282386 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2282338.2282386

[2] Samantha L. Finkelstein, Eve Powell, Andrew Hicks, Katelyn Doran, Sandhya Rani Charugulla, and Tiffany Barnes. 2010. SNAG: using social networking games to increase student retention in computer science. In Proceedings of the fifteenth annual conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education (ITiCSE '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 142-146. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1822090.1822131