Augmenting Group Presence: A Study with Activity Feedback

The study aims at investigating the effects of feedback intervention on group presence, and to measure these effects with both behavioral and self-reported data. Participants played 4 sessions of an online treasure hunting in one of three different conditions: in the first two conditions they received a visual feedback about their activity in the prior game session (‘centrality’ or ‘reciprocity’), while in the third condition no feedback about prior activity was provided. Results highlighted stable behavioral modifications in the two feedback conditions, in terms of the general number of messages exchanged, even though participants did not declare different levels of social presence and group awareness in the post-study questionnaire, and believed that the feedback had a low effectiveness. Keywords--Social Network Analysis, Feedback, Social Presence, Multiplayer game, Centrality, Reciprocity, Augmented Communication