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Familiars: representing Facebook users' social behaviour through a reflective playful experience

Published: 29 October 2009 Publication History

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.

References

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Adonomics Facebook Analytics, Accessed June 2009 http://adonomics.com
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Brugnoli, M. C., Morabito, F. et al, The PASION Project: Psychologically Augmented Social Interaction Over Networks, (2006), PsychNology 4:1, pp. 103--116
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Facebook Developers Platform: http://developers.facebook.com/
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Hitwise Web Trends, http://www.hitwise.com/datacenter, Accessed June 2009
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Kirman, B. and Lawson, S., Hardcore Classification: Identifying Play Styles in Social Games using Network Analysis, In proceedings of International Conference on Entertainment Computing 2009, Paris (In Press)
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Martino, F., Miotto, A., Davide, F. and Gamberini, L.: Exploring Social Network Indices as Cues to Augment Communication and to Improve Social Practices, in proceedings of 1st International Workshop on Maps Based Interaction in Social Networks, 2007
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OpenSocial by Google, http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/
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Pullman, P., His Dark Materials Trilogy (Reissued in 2007), Scholastic UK
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Sharabi, A., Facebook applications trends report, November 19th 2007. {Online}. Available: http://no-mansblog.com/2007/11/19/facebook-applications-trends-report-1/
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Tsalakanidou, F. and Malassiotis, S., Application and Evaluation of a 2D+3D Face Authentication System, in proceedings of 3DTV Conference, 2007
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Wasserman, S., Faust, K. and Iacobucci, D., Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications, Cambridge University Press, 1994

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  • (2016)Protecting Oneself OnlineJournalism & Mass Communication Quarterly10.1177/107769901664022493:2(409-429)Online publication date: 23-Mar-2016

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      cover image ACM Other conferences
      ACE '09: Proceedings of the International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology
      October 2009
      456 pages
      ISBN:9781605588643
      DOI:10.1145/1690388
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 29 October 2009

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      Author Tags

      1. representation
      2. social games
      3. social networks

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      • (2016)Protecting Oneself OnlineJournalism & Mass Communication Quarterly10.1177/107769901664022493:2(409-429)Online publication date: 23-Mar-2016

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