Magpies

Magpies was created and deployed using the Facebook platform. The platform exposes large amounts of information about the social graph to application developers through an API to allow the creation of socially rich games and tools. Magpies is centred on the theme of collection; in many cultures, Magpies are birds associated with the activity of collecting small shiny trinkets with which they decorate their nests. Players in the game work individually and create collections or stashes around a theme determined through free text entry. Other players are invited to contribute items that match the theme, in the form of text, images and/or locations. The stash then builds up over time as a list of curiosities that match this theme. Players can rate one another’s stashes and compete to build the most popular collections.

In Magpies, as an addition to the main game, users were exposed to a variety of measures based on a selection of standard Social Network Analysis (SNA) indices. These were split into group and individual indices. The Group Indices included Group Centralisation, Group Reciprocity and Group Density. The Individual Indices included Degree Centrality, In-Degree Centrality, Out-Degree Centrality and Reciprocity.
These measures were calculated regularly based on activity within the game, and presented to the user as values between zero and five “stars”.

Research Focus

Magpies was built to test how users responded to reflective social network indices based on their behaviour, and if their future social behaviours change based on this additional information.

Research Outputs

The results of a controlled trial involving Magpies were presented at ACM CHI 2010, and the paper received an honourable mention for quality.

Kirman, Ben and Lawson, Shaun and Linehan, Conor and Martino, Francesco and Gamberini, Luciano and Gaggioli, Andrea (2010) Improving social game engagement on Facebook through enhanced socio-contextual information. In: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computer Systems

The PASION Project

This work was carried out as part of the PASION Project.
PASION was an EU integrated project, funded under the Framework 6 Programme.
PASION Fruit was developed as part of the EU funded PASION project. In this project, LiSC collaborated with 17 partner universities and organisations around Europe. The aims of the project were to investigate the nature of social interactions when mediated by the Internet. LiSC led the social gaming strand of PASION.