A Study of User Attitude Dynamics in a Computer Game

When designing a distributed system where a certain level of cooperation among real people is important, for example CSCW systems, systems supporting workflow processes and peer-to-peer (P2P) systems, it is important to study the evolution of relationships among the users. People develop attitudes to other people and reciprocate the attitudes of other people when they able to observe them. We are interested to find out how the design of the environment, specifically the feedback mechanisms and the visualization may influence this process. For this purpose we designed a web-based multi-player computer game, which requires the players to represent explicitly their attitudes to other players and allows studying the evolution of interpersonal relationships in a group of players. Two versions of the game deploying different visualization techniques were compared with respect to the dynamics of attitude change and type of reactions. The results show that there are strong individual differences in the way people react to success and failure and how they attribute blame and change their attitude to other people involved in the situation. Also the level and way of visualizing the other players’ attitude influences significantly the dynamics of