Interpretations of Mutual Location-Awareness

Now that we have described the set of coordination devices players used to perform the joint actions required by this game, we would like to bring a specific focus on mutual location-awareness. During the post-game interviews, the large majority of players in the experimental conditions had underlined the importance of MLA. This section aims at reviewing the reasons why they thought so: we will describe how players interpreted MLA and what sort of usage they made of it.

Qualitative analysis was achieved by the method proposed by Creswell (1994). We first transcribed parts of the post-game interviews that concerned the use of the MLA (hence with players in the synchronous and asynchronous conditions). Then we listed all the topics and potential uses that had been quoted by all the participants. The next step consisted in clustering together similar topics that we applied again to all transcribed data so that we could find out whether it fitted or whether new topics emerged. After this analysis, four categories of MLA interpretations and uses emerged: some were common to the two conditions and others were only for players who had the asynchronous version. In the category descriptions hereafter, player’s citations have been translated from French to English.

Four roles of MLA

We describe here the five main roles MLA had in this study. The first four roles are the ones mentioned by players both in the synchronous and asynchronous conditions. The last role was only mentioned by players from the asynchronous condition.

- Activity awareness: the simplest form of MLA use was drawing simple inferences about directions (Group 11, with synchronous MLA: “to know where my partners were heading”) or proximity (Group 7, with synchronous MLA :“I knew Susi was close to me, just in case”). These inferences allowed activity awareness to better understand what the partners were doing (Group 24, with asynchronous MLA; “it helped to get what the others were up to”, Group 11, with synchronous MLA: ”to see that the red was close to the end”). By making player’s behavior manifest to themselves, it allowed to let them understand what was happening without communicating: “I saw red walking, so I understood that he understood the message of Blue [an arrow with “come over”]” (Group 4, with synchronous MLA).

- An efficient way to react accordingly since a communication economy is enabled by the MLA: “otherwise, we would have been forced to make more

annotations to orientate each other”, “I saw that he was going in that direction, then I did not communicate that much”, “it’s convenient to see where partners are, even without communication we knew that the object was not in the South or in the East, we inferred it was in the West”. Information about others’ whereabouts replaced a discussion about what to do next, especially when players had to join the “caller”. Moreover, in phase 2, the MLA allowed players to join the person who was close to Bob because he/she indicated the signal and partners were seeing where those readings were referring to: “it enabled us to locate the arrival zone and to join up where the one who found Bob was” (Group 27, with asynchronous MLA), “we knew where to go to find Bob” (Group 11, with synchronous MLA), “when first readings arrived, I knew where to go right away” (Group 18, with synchronous MLA). Sometimes, the process described by the players was different: “I saw both of them close to each other with high readings, so I thought I had to go there” (Group 17, with synchronous MLA).

- A resource for player’s joint actions: knowing the positions of partners in space was – as in the previous experiment – a resource for the player’s own contribution to the joint activity: either to move into a certain direction or to contact a player to help him or her. For the person who found Bob first, the MLA was a way to indicate the partners the shortest path: “I knew where they were so I was able to indicate to them the shortest path to me” (Group 11, with synchronous MLA). And it enabled this caller to know when the partner would appear: “I evaluated the time it would require for them to be there, backtracking” (Group 21, with asynchronous MLA). Additionally, players mentioned how the MLA was a resource for forming the triangle at the end of the game: “it was useful to form the triangle around Bob, I knew where to find my own position” (Group 18, with synchronous MLA), “we optimized the triangle formation accordingly, without communicating” (Group 11, with synchronous MLA).

- Mapping the past… to infer the future: players in the asynchronous MLA condition added three others usages that corresponded to usage of past location of the partners. For them, it gave them a clear map of what has been visited over time: “I haven’t taken the same paths as those I saw displayed on the map” (Group 27, with asynchronous MLA), “we could see which areas had been explored and did not go back there” (Group 21, with asynchronous MLA). And a corollary usage was that it allowed to see the evolution of the triangle at the end of the game: “we could track how partners tried to form the triangle” (Group 28, with asynchronous MLA). But the most important usage of the asynchronous MLA was that the players were able to access to their partners’ path with this tool and this helped them to infer their partner’s trajectory: “when the green guy noted his reading, I already knew the direction I should took: I had to follow his direction indicated by the continuity of his path” (Group 24, with asynchronous MLA).

Questioning MLA

An additional issue regarding Mutual location-awareness concerns how players reacted to discrepancies caused by the system. As a matter of fact, the information conveyed by the MLA is sometimes imperfect. The reasons for this are diverse: patchy wireless coverage, uneven connectivity, outdoor conditions (e.g. walls, humans, rain) creating disturbances.

Players spontaneously mentioned how they dealt with these uncertainties. When confronted to a discrepancy concerning their partner’s position, three types of reactions had been mentioned: believing the system, saying that the system was wrong (as reported by those players from group 11: “I saw that it was indicated that B was positioned here but he was not", “I saw that B moved on the screen but I know he did not") or not understanding (“I did not get why he was there” said a skeptical participant from t group 21 with the asynchronous MLA).

When asked why they questioned the system, players said that this information was contradictory with what they had in mind. For instance, a participant told us that “judging from my experience, the network coverage in the MX is low, so I though that was why player A was not moving” (Group 17, with synchronous MLA): this shows how another coordination device (knowledge about the campus drawn from a precedent experience or a discussion with others) could make him doubtful of the MLA information. To some extent, it also brings forward the fact that coordination devices can be conflicting, by providing divergent information.

Therefore, facing a potential discrepancy, participants reacted using the information available from other coordination devices they had (knowledge about the network, explicit agreement, conventions, precedent experience with participants).

5.6 Discussion