The Effects of Asymmetrical Player Roles on Turn Taking in Serious Gaming

Abstract

Serious games can be used as an effective educational tool. Some serious games use asymmetrical player roles to ensure the players engagement.If these roles cause asymmetrical social relations between players they could interfere with the games learning goals. The goal of this study is to identify how a player’s social interactions can be affected by their player roles. To this end, a modified version of Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson (1978) Simplest-systematics was used to annotate recorded play-sessions of the multiplayer game Ruby’s Mission. Analyses of these annotation revealed that asymmetrical player roles may affect some specific aspects of a player’s turn taking behaviours but generally do not affect the social interactions of players in ways that would suggest the presence of assymetrical social relations.