The Effect of Avatar Realism and Location Awareness of Social presence in Location-based Games

Candidate: Pooya Amini Behbahani
Type: Master of Science (MSc), School of Interactive Arts and Technology
Date: March 29, 2011
Senior Supervisor: Dr. Magy Seif el-Nasr
Thesis: Download Thesis Document

Abstract

Location-Based Games (LBGs) have been gaining both academic and industrial interest in the past few years. Utilizing location information, LBGs enable users to extend their social game-play from cyberspace to the real-world. However, sharing personal information and particularly the physical location of users is likely to raise privacy concerns resulting in eroding players' social experience. To further explore this issue, I investigated the impacts of two attributes of privacy, avatar realism and location-awareness, on the players' perceived social presence during a designed LBG. The results indicated that the social presence was not significantly affected by the applied privacy configurations. However, players' negative feelings decreased when photographic images of players were used as their avatars. Further, players desired to share their physical location and sacrifice location privacy in order to track other players. My findings suggest that a well-designed LBG can lessen users' location privacy concerns.

Keywords: Avatar realism, Location awareness, Social presence, Location-based game, Location privacy, Location-based service