Smells Like Team Spirit

Abstract

Verbal communication is a central component in collaborative multiplayer gaming and creates a feeling of companionship among the players. In single-player games, this aspect is often missing. Advancements in speech recognition now open new potentials for voice-activated single-player experiences. In this work, we integrated voice interaction to a single-player virtual reality (VR) game. To create a sense of team spirit, we enabled players to talk to a multiplicity of agents using natural language. We hypothesize that conversing with only one agent cannot produce the same level of camaraderie. We conducted a preliminary qualitative user study (N=10) to explore how players experience talking with the in-game characters in the single-agent and the multi-agent condition. Early results suggest that our participants prefer interacting with the group of interlocutors. They perceived the multi-agent condition as more entertaining and liked the feeling of being part of a team.