Analyzing the influence of virtuality on playful social interaction

Ambient intelligence technologies are making our daily life increasingly virtual, and the boundary between the real world and the virtual world is gradually disappearing. Computer games are often played on the Internet, which allows people to enjoy games with others, even when they are not at the same location. This paper analyzes the Trading Card Game (TCG), which has two versions. One version is played with paper-based cards, whereas the other is played on a computer. The computer-based TCG supports remote play and has a number of enhancements, such as providing special fictional effects on virtual cards. The two different versions are useful to analyze the influence of virtuality in making future social interaction more playful. First, we investigate potential pitfalls to introduce virtuality in TCG through the scenario-based analysis, which adopts a player’s personality to exploit potential difficulties. For investigating further insights on the influence of virtuality in TCG, we analyze some experiments with Augmented Trading Card Game, where a real opponent player is replaced with a fictional player. Our findings from the analyses show that the feeling of realness is essential to make incorporated virtuality successful. Recently some games’ concepts can be adopted in order to augment our real world. It is essential to investigate the influence of virtuality introduced with the games. The future social interaction will incorporate virtuality based on a variety of game-like features to make the interaction more playful. Therefore, the insights described in this paper will be useful to help the design of future playful social interaction.