Familiars: Representing facebook users' social behaviour through a reflective playful experience

  • Ben Kirman
  • , Eva Ferrari
  • , Shaun Lawson
  • , Jonathan Freeman
  • , Jane Lessiter
  • , Conor Linehan

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingsChapterpeer-review

Abstract

In this paper, we describe the design and development of a social game called Familiars. Inspired by the daemons in Pullman's "Dark Material" trilogy, Familiars are animal companions that sit on your Facebook profile and change into different animal forms based on your social activity within the social network of Facebook. Familiars takes advantage of the powerful capabilities of the developers platform of Facebook to build a multi-dimensional picture of a player's state based on social activity, facial expression analysis on photographs and suggestions from friends. This rich information is then distilled and presented to the player in the form of animal that the familiar chooses to take. We show how the types of animals and personalities were associated in a cross-cultural user study, and present quantitative results from the social behaviours of the players within the game in addition to qualitative data gathered from questionnaire responses.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology, ACE 2009
Pages157-164
Number of pages8
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2009
Externally publishedYes
EventInternational Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology, ACE 2009 - Athens, Greece
Duration: 29 Oct 200931 Oct 2009

Publication series

NameACM International Conference Proceeding Series

Conference

ConferenceInternational Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology, ACE 2009
Country/TerritoryGreece
CityAthens
Period29/10/0931/10/09

Keywords

  • Representation
  • Social games
  • Social networks

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