User evaluation of virtual reporting agents

Many persistent online environments such as Massively-Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), feature weblogs and/or live reportage of participants' activities in the world. While such reports and commentary can enhance the user's enjoyment and increase their sense of shared experience, the demands of such large scale reporting on the participants can be considerable. To address this problem a number of in-game reporting and commentary systems have been proposed which use virtual "reporter" agents within the game to produce real-time and post-game commentary tailored to the interests of individual users. However, to date, there has been no evaluation of these systems from a user perspective. In this paper we present the results of a live evaluation study performed using an instance of the online role-playing game Neverwinter Nights augmented with witness-narrator agents to provide in-game and post-game reports. Our results indicate that reporting does increase enjoyment of the game, and that players play for longer when their activities are recorded on a community web page, suggesting that agent-based reporting is a promising approach to community building in online games and social environments.