Impact of Viewpoint on Social Presence and Collaborative Processes in a

Collaborative Serious Game

Anthony Basille

1 a

Elise Lavou

1 b

and Audrey Serna

2 c

University of Lyon, University Jean Moulin Lyon 3, Iaelyon School of Management, CNRS, LIRIS, UMR5205, F-69621,

Lyon, France

Univ. Lyon, INSA Lyon, CNRS, UCBL, LIRIS, UMR5205, F-69621 Villeurbanne, France

Keywords:

Serious Game, Social Presence, Collaborative Processes, Viewpoint, Soft Skills.

Abstract:

Collaborative serious games have proven to be effective learning environments to enhance the development

of learners’ soft skills, such as collaboration, negotiation and cooperation. To be effective, such role paying

games should provide genuine interactions. However, little is known on how design choices, such as the view-

point (either ﬁrst or third person perspective), impact collaborative processes and learners’ perception of their

partners. This paper reports an exploratory study on the impact of the viewpoint on the sense of social pres-

ence, and on collaborative processes that emerge from learners’ interactions in a collaborative serious game

dedicated to soft skills training. To address this issue, learners played in either ﬁrst-person or third-person

perspective during a session of two games. Our results show that the ﬁrst-person view allowed for a higher

sense of social presence and increased information sharing. This seems to be mainly due to the knowledge

asymmetry caused by the affordances of the environment, in other words design choices. These results can

be applied in the design of collaborative serious games that support social interactions and collaborative skills

training.

1 INTRODUCTION

With the strong technological evolution, soft skills

(non-technical skills) are becoming more and more

important in education. In many ﬁelds they are highly

valued by recruiters, Archer and Davison (2008) ar-

gue that most employers consider students’ soft skills

to be more important than their degree qualiﬁcations.

The European Commission (2018) has highlighted

the key competencies for learning: problem solving,

decision making, cooperation, and communication.

Various studies on serious games agree that they can

be effective tools for the development of such skills,

and other 21st century skills such as self-regulation,

information skills, networked co-operation and prob-

lem solving strategies (Westera et al., 2008). Seri-

ous games can easily immerse learners into a spe-

ciﬁc scenario, using role-playing methods, which al-

lows learners to experience a speciﬁc situation with

others (humans or artiﬁcial agents), learning about

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2733-2107

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2659-6231

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1468-9761

social roles and interactions (Marocco et al., 2015).

In this context, some studies underline the impor-

tance of considering the levels of immersion, pres-

ence, interactivity and ﬁdelity for a game to be ef-

fective (De Freitas et al., 2010). Among others, so-

cial presence, ”the feeling of being with others in a

mediated environment” (Heeter, 1992), seems partic-

ularly interesting to develop for soft skills training. In

fact, different studies have shown that social presence

has an impact on many factors, for example allowing

to increase participation and interaction (Zhao et al.,

2014). Thus, in this paper we focus on two interre-

lated aspects of serious games for soft skills training:

the social presence perceived by learners and the col-

laborative processes that emerge in such environment.

We conducted a study based on the hypothesis

that the affordances of a virtual environment (in other

words design choices), and more particularly the

learner viewpoint, has an impact on both social pres-

ence and collaboration between players. The good

choice of the viewpoint in the design of video games

is primordial given its impact on many elements such

as presence (spatial presence, self-presence) or em-

bodiment perceived by players (Denisova and Cairns,

614

Basille, A., Lavoué, É. and Serna, A.

Impact of Viewpoint on Social Presence and Collaborative Processes in a Collaborative Serious Game.

DOI: 10.5220/0011046400003182

In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2022) - Volume 2, pages 614-621

ISBN: 978-989-758-562-3; ISSN: 2184-5026

2015). We conducted a study with 18 participants,

who played a collaborative serious game in either a

ﬁrst or third-person perspective. Our study mainly

shows that the ﬁrst-person viewpoint increases social

presence and information sharing. These results show

the importance of this design choice for the develop-

ment of serious games that support social interactions

and collaborative skills training.

2 RELATED WORK

2.1 Soft Skills and Collaborative

Processes

Traditionally, education has focused on the transmis-

sion of knowledge and hard skills (technical skills)

training. However, due to the important technological

evolution, Prensky (2004) showed that our way of so-

cializing, searching for information, learning and an-

alyzing has changed signiﬁcantly. Trilling and Fadel

(2009) show the importance of ”21st century skills”,

also called soft skills, including collaboration and

communication, which are among the most important

skills for success in modern society (Romero et al.,

2015).

Collaborative learning is an educational approach

to teaching and learning, which involves groups of

learners working together to solve a problem, com-

plete a task, or create a product (Laal and Laal, 2012).

There are several studies that highlight the usefulness

and beneﬁts of ”cooperative teams”. For example

these teams achieve higher levels of thinking and re-

tain information longer (Johnson and Johnson, 1987).

In these collaborative activities, the coordination of

individual actions within each group is important. In-

deed, since the participants have a common goal, they

will have to act while taking into account several con-

straints such as time or organization. For this, sev-

eral processes will be used for collaboration such as

awareness, regulation, information sharing and dis-

cussion (Tong, 2017). For Schmidt (2002), aware-

ness refers to ”reciprocal practices of monitoring oth-

ers and designing actions in order to make certain as-

pects of the activity visible”. To complement this,

Yuill and Rogers (2012) extend the concept of aware-

ness, not only to actions but also to situations where

people ”have ongoing awareness of the actions, inten-

tions, emotions, and other mental states of other in-

teractants”. Regulation builds upon awareness and re-

lates to people’s ability to plan, monitor, evaluate and

regulate the joint activity (Vauras et al., 2003). Infor-

mation sharing involves building a common ground,

which means that members collaborate in ensuring

understanding and in grounding their mutual knowl-

edge and assumptions (Clark and Brennan, 1991).

The discussion takes place when participants gather

and evaluate arguments for and against the available

options, and make decisions for the alternatives on the

way to a ﬁnal solution (Tong, 2017).

2.2 Social Presence

Many works investigated how users are feeling and

acting in virtual environments through the tightly re-

lated concepts of immersion and presence (Sanchez-

Vives and Slater, 2005). Presence can be deﬁned as

the subjective experience of being in the virtual envi-

ronment, and is grounded on the ability to do things

in the virtual environment, relying on actions and the

affordances offered in the virtual environment. Usu-

ally presence is divided into different sub-concepts:

physical, self and social presence (Lee, 2004).

Social presence can be deﬁned as the feeling of

”being with others” (Heeter, 1992). It is the moment-

to-moment awareness of co-presence of a mediated

body and the sense of accessibility of the other be-

ing’s psychological, emotional, and intentional states

(Biocca and Harms, 2002). This can be interpreted as

the degree to which a person is perceived as “real”

in mediated communication. Several studies have

shown that social presence is a key element to create a

sense of community, for instance in online courses, to

enable productive collaboration, increased participa-

tion and interaction (Zhao et al., 2014). Thus, in this

paper, we propose to explore in which way it can be

impacted by the design of a serious game. We rely on

the deﬁnition of Biocca and Harms (2002) who dis-

tinguishes three dimensions:

Co-presence:

can be deﬁned as the degree to which

the users feel that they are not alone and isolated.

Goffman (1963) extends the notion of co-presence by

incorporating ”awareness of others”: the user is aware

of the mediated other, and the other is aware of the

user.

Psychobehavioral Accessibility: this dimension fo-

cuses on the perceived accessibility of the other, the

user’s sense of awareness and access to the other

(through attentional engagement, emotional state, un-

derstanding...).

Perceived Symmetry: Social presence is not only

based on our vision of the other, but also on our feel-

ing of what the other thinks of us. Indeed, social pres-

ence is not a one-way interaction, but an interaction

between several interlocutors. Subjective symmetry

is the degree of symmetry or correlation between the

users’ sense of social presence and their perception

Impact of Viewpoint on Social Presence and Collaborative Processes in a Collaborative Serious Game

615

of their partner’s sense of social presence (Biocca and

Harms, 2002).

3 RESEARCH QUESTIONS

From previous work, we can assume that to engage

users in collaborative activities, the immersive envi-

ronment should promote a good experience of social

presence. As shown in the literature review, the sense

of presence seems to be related to the actions in the

virtual environment. We are thus particularly inter-

ested in investigating the impact of the immersive en-

vironment affordances on social presence experience

and collaborative processes.

Regarding affordances, some works have investi-

gated the impact of the viewpoint of users in virtual

environments. In particular, several studies on video

games showed that the third person viewpoint could

increase awareness in the virtual space, as well as

a better perception of the avatar within its environ-

ment (Denisova and Cairns, 2015). In addition, some

studies show that the ﬁrst-person perspective is the

most appropriate condition to induce a high sense of

embodiment, refering to self-presence concept (Slater

et al., 2010), while other studies did not observe any

signiﬁcant difference (Debarba et al., 2015). Finally,

little is known on the impact of viewpoint on social

presence, as well as on collaborative behaviors. In

this paper, we try to ﬁll these gaps by investigating the

inﬂuences of different affordances (viewpoints) of a

same virtual environment on social presence and col-

laboration. We use a collaborative serious game for

soft skills training to address the following research

questions:

RQ1: Does the viewpoint have an impact on social

presence?

RQ2: Does the viewpoint have an impact on collabo-

rative processes ?

4 DESCRIPTION OF THE

COLLABORATIVE SERIOUS

GAME

We used a collaborative serious game, designed to

measure and train soft skills (see the project presenta-

tion link for more details

). The game relies on a col-

laboration between three players whose objective is to

repair the four breakdowns of a submarine. At each

turn, the water level rises progressively. The game

http://icar.cnrs.fr/bodega/

is lost when the water level reaches a certain level.

The submarine must therefore be repaired before it is

completely ﬁlled with water. To do this, each player

in turn can perform several actions. Each player has

one movement point and two bailing points per turn

(to move, to scoop or to repair a breakdown). To re-

pair a breakdown, there must be at least two players

in the room. Each player has a speciﬁc power that al-

lows him to perform a special action. The Diver has

one more movement point per turn. The Oceanogra-

pher can scoop the rooms adjacent to his own. The

computer scientist is able to move a quantity of water

from one room to another per turn.

Players are able to interact with each other at any

time, via a video and audio feed. According to the ex-

perimental conditions, players can play either in ﬁrst

or third person. In third person, all actions are per-

formed on the map when it is their turn to play. In

ﬁrst person, they must perform their actions directly

in the room , the water level of each room, the plan of

the submarine and the total water level in the subma-

rine are not accessible to the player. They then revert

to a third person viewpoint. The possible actions and

the ways of communication remain the same in the

ﬁrst or third person perspective.

5 STUDY

5.1 Experimental Conditions

Condition 1: Participants were not in the same room,

and could communicate via webcam and audio. The

game was in third person when it was not their turn to

play and in ﬁrst person when it was their turn to play

(First Person Perspective).

Condition 2: Participants were not in the same room,

and could communicate via webcam and audio. The

game was only in third person (Third Person Perspec-

tive).

5.2 Participants

We recruited 30 participants. Due to technical prob-

lems during the experiment as well as the pandemic,

we were able to use the data from only 18 partici-

pants. They were divided into 6 groups (G1, G2,

G3, G4, G5, G6) of 3 participants (P1, P2, P3) ac-

cording to their availability. Groups G1, G2 and G3

were associated with condition 1, and groups G4, G5

and G6 were associated with condition 2. Participants

were recruited via the mailing list of the University of

Lyon. The average age was 23.5 years (SD = 2.5) and

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616

there was an equal distribution of nine men and nine

women.

5.3 Procedure

Given the sanitary conditions during the experiment,

the game sessions were conducted remotely. Players

used their own equipment, namely a computer, a web-

cam, a microphone and a headset (or earphones). The

participants were invited to sit in front of their com-

puter screen. First, they had to go through the game’s

tutorial. They then started playing the serious game,

in collaboration with two other participants. After the

end of the ﬁrst game, they had to do a second game

with a different role (but the same condition). At the

end, a debrieﬁng was set up with the three participants

and the two experimenters. For the interested groups,

a third game was proposed to them with the other

viewpoint, followed by a second debrieﬁng. Only the

debrieﬁng is considered in this article.

5.4 Data Collection/Recording

We collected the screen and webcam recordings of

each participant. After the experiment, students were

asked to ﬁll in a questionnaire: the Networked Mind

Social Presence Inventory (SPI, 34 items) (Biocca and

Harms, 2003). We chose this questionnaire due to its

approach to social presence. The questions focus on

the dimensions of co-presence and psycho-behavioral

accessibility. All the questions in these dimensions

deal with both ”perception of self” (e.g. I paid special

attention to my partners), but each of these questions

is followed by a question about ”perception of others”

(e.g. my partners paid special attention to me). The

perceived subjective symmetry is calculated as a cor-

relation between the ratings of the social presence of

the self “Perception of self” and the other “Perception

of my partner”, for each dimensions (co-presence and

psycho-behavioral accessibility). At the end of the

experiment, we conducted semi-directive interviews

with the participants to collect their perceptions and

feelings about the lived experience.

5.5 Video Analysis and Coding Schemes

The goal of this analysis was to provide quantitative

insight into how participants collaborated in the game.

We focused on the four collaborative processes iden-

tiﬁed in section 2.1 (awareness, regulation, informa-

tion sharing and discussion) to understand how they

were impacted by the change in viewpoint (in answer

to RQ2). We deﬁned a coding scheme for video anal-

ysis deﬁned hereafter and in detail in Table 1. Two

coders analyzed video samples independently repre-

senting 10% of the total videos (and 131 utterances).

They did an inter-rater reliability test with the result of

85% agreement. Cohen’s Kappa, which measures the

agreement between the two observers is: κ = 0.899.

There were a total of 6 videos, for a duration of 3

hours 33 minutes and 31 seconds. There is an average

of 182 utterances per game at the ﬁrst-person condi-

tion and 159 at the third-person condition.

• Awareness: ”The extent to which awareness of

users’ current actions, intentions, and state of

mind is present or made visible at all times” (Yuill

and Rogers, 2012). ”I go to the locker room”

• Regulation: ”Represents the processes that mem-

bers use to plan, monitor, evaluate and control

joint activity” (Vauras et al., 2003). ”Go to the

locker room to bail out, then use your power”

• Information sharing: ”Collaboration of members

to ensure understanding and to build on each

other’s knowledge and assumptions” (Clark and

Brennan, 1991). ”The changing rooms are on the

right of the cabin”

• Discussion: ”It takes place when participants

gather and evaluate arguments for and against the

available options, and make decisions about al-

ternatives on the way to a ﬁnal solution” (Tong,

2017). ”I don’t agree with your idea, I think it’s

better to go to the locker room now”

6 RESULTS

6.1 Impact of Viewpoint on Perceived

Social Presence

Cronbach’s alpha was used to assess the internal con-

sistency of the questionnaire and therefore its relia-

bility. They were found to be very reliable, since α

> 0.8 for both dimensions (see Table 2). Given the

rather small amount of data we collected from 18 par-

ticipants, we performed a Mann-Whitney U test on

the 2 dimensions of social presence between ﬁrst and

third person conditions (results are considered signiﬁ-

cant when ρ < 0.05), as well as the mean and standard

deviation (see Table 2). Concerning the perceived

subjective symmetry, Spearman’s correlation test was

performed for each questionnaire between the dimen-

sions ”self” and ”others”, then we calculated the av-

erage of these coefﬁcients for the 2 conditions (ﬁrst

person and third person perspective).

Co-presence: Regarding the co-presence dimen-

sion of the SPI, the p-value ρ = 0.779 being far above

Impact of Viewpoint on Social Presence and Collaborative Processes in a Collaborative Serious Game

617

Table 1: Categories, sub-categories and indicators used for the video analyses of the different collaborative processes.

Category Subcategory Indicator

Awareness

Action awareness Tells what it does

Intention awareness Tells what he is going to do

Mind state awareness Shares how he feels

Regulation

Planning

Suggest what should be done

Assigns task

Asks if he should do this action

Asks a question about the other’s possibilities

Control

Monitoring

Give someone a voice

Information sharing

Asks a question about the card/item he does not have

Gives an indication about the card/item

Discussion

Game understanding

Asks a question about the game

Gives an explanation about the game

Idea exchange Exchange ideas in order to reach a solution

Consensus building Accepts/rejects the proposal, proposes a new solution

Table 2: Mean, standard deviation, cronbach’s alpha and

p-value for the different dimensions of social presence.

First Person Third person

x σ x σ α ρ

Co-presence 5.60 0.717 5.35 1.066 0.929 0.779

Psycho-

behavioral

6.07 0.357 5.23 1.008 0.934 0.018

Table 3: Average of Spearman’s correlation coefﬁcients for

perceived subjective symmetry between the ”self” and ”oth-

ers” questions of the SPI questionnaire.

First person Third person

Co-presence 0.876 0.707

Psychobehavioral 0.839 0.671

0.05, it means that the results are not signiﬁcant (ﬁrst

person: mean = 5.60, SD = 0.717; third person: mean

= 5.35, SD = 1.066). So the viewpoint does not seem

to have an impact on co-presence.

Psychobehavioral Accessibility: Regarding the

psychobehavioral dimension of the SPI, the p-value

ρ = .018 is below the α = 0.05 threshold so the re-

sults are signiﬁcant. These results suggest that the

ﬁrst-person perspective allows for greater psychobe-

havioral accessibility (M = 6.07; SD = 0.357) than

the third-person perspective (M = 5.23; SD = 1.008).

Perceived Subjective Symmetry: The mean of the

correlation coefﬁcients is larger in the ﬁrst person for

both dimensions namely co-presence (ﬁrst person: ρ

= 0.876; third person: ρ = 0.707) and perceived psy-

chobehavioral accessibility (ﬁrst person: ρ = 0.839;

third person: ρ = 0.671). Thus, this appears to show a

stronger perceived subjective symmetry for the ﬁrst-

person group than for the third-person group. This

means that in the ﬁrst-person condition, participants

have a better perception of what the others think of

them than the ones in the third-person condition.

Table 4: Number of utterances for each category per group

and per viewpoint.

First person Third person

G1 G2 G3 G4 G5 G6

Awareness 49 15 49 26 59 32

Regulation 103 109 99 59 124 81

Information

sharing

76 27 39 5 13 18

Discussion 206 176 143 94 247 198

Table 5: Average number of utterances in each collaboration

process for each player during a game at the ﬁrst and third

person conditions.

First Person Third Person

Categories x σ x σ ρ

Awareness 6.27 3.261 6.5 3.426 0.983

Regulation 17.28 6.215 14.67 6.722 0.424

Information

sharing

7.89 4.053 2.00 1.369 .00037

Discussion 29.17 6.704 29.94 14.525 0.776

6.2 Analysis of Collaborative Processes

In answer to RQ2, we observed the different indica-

tors (described in section 5.5) to analyse awareness,

regulation, information sharing and discussion pro-

cesses. For each game, we counted the number of

utterances in each category for each participant. The

table 4 presents the sum of the utterances for each

group (sum of the utterances of the two games and

the three players).

Table 5 presents the average number of utterances

in each collaboration process per player and per game.

We performed a Mann-Whitney U test on the aver-

age of the two games (per group) of each player re-

garding each categories for the two viewpoints. We

observed a signiﬁcant difference for the information

sharing process during a game according to the view-

point (ρ = .00037). These results suggest that the

viewpoint has an impact on the information sharing

process, with greater information sharing in the ﬁrst

CSEDU 2022 - 14th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

618

Table 6: Percentage of utterances in each collaboration pro-

cess for each player during a game at the ﬁrst and third per-

son conditions.

First Person Third Person

Categories x σ x σ ρ

Awareness 3.49 1.730 4.03 1.559 0.730

Regulation 9.57 3.920 9.99 4.020 0.562

Information

sharing

4.20 1.652 1.20 0.916 .0005

Discussion 16.07 3.655 18.11 6.657 0.387

person (M = 7.89; SD = 4.053) than in the third per-

son (M = 2.00; SD = 1.369). We did not observe any

signiﬁcant differences regarding the other collabora-

tive processes (awareness, regulation, discussion) be-

tween the ﬁrst-person and the third-person conditions.

Since the number of utterances was different for each

game, we also calculated the average of utterances per

game, but divided for each game the number of utter-

ances per categories over the total number of utter-

ances (see Table 6). We also obtain signiﬁcant results

(ρ = .0005), which conﬁrms that viewpoint has an im-

pact on information sharing, with greater information

sharing in the ﬁrst person (M = 4.20; SD = 1.652) that

in the third person (M = 1.20; SD = 0.916). However,

we did not observe any signiﬁcant differences regard-

ing the other collaborative processes (awareness, reg-

ulation, discussion) between the ﬁrst and third-person

viewpoint.

7 DISCUSSION

7.1 Viewpoint and Social Presence

Our results show that co-presence is not signiﬁcantly

impacted by the viewpoint. The co-presence is mainly

based on the perception of others using automatic

classiﬁcation of other’s representation. Accordingly,

this result can be explained by the fact that the virtual

representation of the other players in the game is the

same regardless the viewpoint (webcam and voice).

The perception of the other players’ body thus does

not change. This would certainly have been differ-

ent with additional representations such as shadows

or avatar when the two players are in the same room,

as underlined by Kim et al. (2013), who showed that

seeing their partner’s avatar increased co-presence.

The results concerning psychobehavioral acces-

sibility reveal signiﬁcant impact of the ﬁrst-person

viewpoint, which seems to allow for greater psy-

chobehavioral accessibility than the third-person

view. This difference could be explained by the asym-

metry of knowledge introduced by the ﬁrst-person

viewpoint for several reasons. First, the lack of con-

textual information when players are in ﬁrst-person

view may have forced them to communicate with the

other two players in order to make relevant decisions

early in the game, contrary to the third person view-

point. One player declared in the third person view

”If I wanted I could play alone” (P1-G2) emphasizing

the lesser importance of collective decisions accord-

ing to him. Second, players at the ﬁrst-person were

more dependent on others, which led them to trust

more. One of the players made this clear during the

interview (for the ﬁrst person viewpoint) by stating

”You can’t trust your own perception but you have to

trust the perception of others” (P1-G3). Third, hav-

ing access to other’s perception of things is directly

associated with ”mind reading” (emotional states for

instance) and may reduce uncertainty in relationships

(Planalp and Honeycutt, 1985). In our case, it is thus

possible that the greater reliance on others’ percep-

tions induced by the knowledge asymmetry provided

a greater sense of access to others’ minds and there-

fore increased psychobehavioral accessibility at the

ﬁrst-person view.

The results regarding subjective symmetry reveal

that there is a greater correlation between one’s own

sense of social presence and one’s perception of one’s

partner’s sense of social presence at the ﬁrst-person

view than at the third-person view. In other words,

participants in the ﬁrst-person condition perceived

some sort of psychological and behavioral match be-

tween themselves and the other players. We may sup-

pose that at the third-person view, some players felt

they were giving more (i.e. attention) than the others

gave them. A certain imbalance could be perceived

because since the players have all the information,

there is less need for cooperation during their turns. A

participant said for the third person perspective ”We

didn’t have to collaborate, we could play alone and

ignore the others” (P1-G2).

To conclude, our results show that the viewpoint

has an impact on social presence in the collabora-

tive game, and more speciﬁcally on the dimensions of

psycho-behavioral accessibility and perceived sym-

metry. It seems that this is mainly induced by the

knowledge asymmetry due to the affordances of the

environment that differ in each view. This is in line

with the work of Kreijns et al. (2007), which explains

the impact of the environment and its characteristics

on social presence, and this completes the work of

Slater et al. (2010), which showed that the ﬁrst per-

son view could increase the sense of self-presence

(another category of the concept of presence). To in-

crease the sense of social presence in a virtual game it

seems thus important to create asymmetrical knowl-

Impact of Viewpoint on Social Presence and Collaborative Processes in a Collaborative Serious Game

619

edge, easily offered with the use of the ﬁrst-person

view. Care should also be taken in designing others’

representation to enhance co-presence.

7.2 Viewpoint and Collaborative

Processes

We showed that the ﬁrst-person view increased infor-

mation sharing. This result can be explained by the

affordances of the environment, since some informa-

tion (map of the submarine, general level of water)

was not visible for players when they were at the ﬁrst

person view. Players had to compensated for this lack,

communicating on the missing information. We be-

lieve that this increase in information sharing partic-

ipated to the increase of sense of social presence, as

explained previously for the psychobehavioral acces-

sibility. The increase in information sharing through

the ﬁrst-person view can really beneﬁt to learning. In-

deed, according to Chi (2009), the co-construction of

knowledge enhances understanding by allowing one

to argue one’s propositions, to ask and answer ques-

tions, and to open up new perspectives and reasoning.

Winne et al. (2010) also support this assumption, ar-

guing that information that are not accessible to others

may requires more collaboration to become knowl-

edge shared by the group.

On the contrary, we did not observe differences

in terms of awareness, regulation and discussion with

the different viewpoints. These results may seem a

little surprising, especially for awareness since we

expected lower awareness with the introduction of

asymmetric knowledge and more regulation to com-

pensate. We therefore think that the higher level of in-

formation sharing compensated for the lack of aware-

ness, but further studies would be needed to inves-

tigate more deeply the relationship between the four

collaborative processes.

Finally, we did not observe direct correlation be-

tween social presence and collaboration processes.

This could be explained by a quite high sense of social

presence in both conditions. Further studies should be

conducted since some works, such as Garrison et al.

(2010), have showed that social presence inﬂuence

collaborative processes and develop learners’ aware-

ness of each other’s existence.

7.3 Limitations

First, our study involved a rather small number of par-

ticipants. This was mainly due to sanitary conditions,

which made the recruitment of participants and tech-

nological apparatus more difﬁcult at distance. How-

ever, we believe that our results are coherent and re-

veal tendencies that can be easily supported by the

existing the literature in the domain. Second, we be-

lieve that the observation of the participants’ behav-

iors in laboratory conditions would have allowed us

to go further in the analysis and understanding of the

collaborative processes that emerged between learn-

ers. This constitutes another perspective to deepen

this work. Finally, we were not able to analyze the

correlation between the perception of social presence

and collaboration processes that emerged due to the

rather small number of participants. We should ex-

amine more precisely the relationships between both,

making the assumption that a higher feeling of social

presence would lead to more collaborative processes

in the serious game or the opposite, that differences in

collaboration processes could impact the sense of so-

cial presence. We could also analyze more deeply the

impact of information sharing on other collaboration

processes.

8 CONCLUSION

We conducted a study with 18 participants to under-

stand the impact of the viewpoint (ﬁrst and third per-

son) on the sense of social presence and collabora-

tion processes in a collaborative serious game. Our

results show that the ﬁrst-person viewpoint appears

to lead to a greater sense of social presence through

higher psychobehavioral accessibility and higher per-

ceived subjective symmetry. The ﬁrst-person view-

point also impacted the collaboration processes, and

more speciﬁcally information sharing. These results

show the importance of the virtual environment affor-

dances (especially according to the chosen viewpoint)

when designing serious games. Our future research

will investigate other affordances of the virtual envi-

ronment, analyse the impact of different modalities of

communication provided to players (webcam, audio

only, chat only) as well as face-to-face versus remote

presence on collaborative processes, social presence

and engaged-behaviors.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This research is funded by the LABEX ASLAN, Uni-

versit

e de Lyon, within the framework of the French

program ”Investissements d’Avenir” managed by the

”Agence Nationale de la Recherche” (ANR).

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620

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