CountMeIn: Evaluating Social Presence in a Collaborative Pervasive Mobile Game Using NFC and Touchscreen Interaction

This paper presents the motivation, design and evaluation of CountMeIn, a mobile collaborative pervasive memory game to revive social interactions in public places (e.g. a train station or bus stop). Two versions of CountMeIn were tested; an NFC-based and a touchscreen version. In a 2×1 within-subject (NFC vs. Touch) experiment (N = 20), postexperiment group interviews and findings indicate the NFC version led to increased perception of social presence while participants were more aware of others' actions and intentions (mode of co-presence). However, we did not find quantitative evidence that attributes of social presence were higher from the Social Presence Game Questionnaire. Together, our findings suggest that placement of a physical NFC interface does not necessarily increase perceived social presence when users play collaboratively. However, social expansion in mobile collaborative pervasive games can greatly benefit from people's mutual awareness from such an interface. This mutual awareness has the potential to both attract users and spectators, and reduce anxiety of users to invite spectators, or accept an invite from users.