[Colloquium] Today: Spencer Ng MS Presentation/May 18, 2023

[Jessica Garza]

This is a reminder of Spencer Ng's MS Presentation

Spencer Ng is a student in the Bx/MS program.

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Date: Thursday, May 18, 2023

Time: 3 PM, CST

Location: JCL 298
Zoom: https://uchicago.zoom.us/j/99833476111?pwd=VjduQUF5QjVpekhGM1ZrSTdNanJadz09 
Meeting ID: 998 3347 6111 Passcode: 519315


M.S. Candidate: Spencer Ng

M.S. Paper Title: Role-Playing with Robot Characters: Gamification and Narrative Agency for Increasing User Engagement

Advisor: Sarah Sebo

Committee Members: Sarah Sebo, Ken Nakagaki, Heather Zheng

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Abstract:

Live entertainment is moving towards a greater participatory culture, with dynamic narratives told through audience interaction. Robot characters offer a unique opportunity to mitigate the challenges of creating personalized entertainment at scale compared to human actors, as they can be automated and thus continually perform for small audience groups. In a between-subjects user study (n=46), we created an immersive storytelling experience where users role-play as a detective with two distinct robot characters where users either (1) primarily watch the two robots converse (control condition), (2) have a greater degree of involvement and self-identification in the story by talking with the robots in-character (narrative agency condition), or (3) have a more active role in playing games and solving puzzles (gameplay agency condition). Our results show how increasing the degree of user agency in an entertainment experience, either through narrative agency or gameplay agency, increases users' flow state, sense of autonomy and competence, sense of immersion and enjoyment, and social perceptions of the robots during the experience. These findings suggest that increasing user agency can lead to an increase in engagement, which can be extended to broader interactions with robots where role-playing in stories and manipulating agency can be incorporated. We also present design recommendations for future interactive narrative experiences featuring robot characters.

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Jessica Garza
Assistant Director of Undergraduate Studies
Department of Computer Science
The University of Chicago
John Crerar Library 374
Office: (773) 702-2336

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