Team reactions to voiced agent instructions in a pervasive game

Abstract

The assumed role of humans as controllers and instructors of machines is changing. As systems become more complex and incomprehensible to humans, it will be increasingly necessary for us to place confidence in intelligent interfaces and follow their instructions and recommendations. This type of relationship becomes particularly intricate when we consider significant numbers of humans and agents working together in collectives. While instruction-based interfaces and agents already exist, our understanding of them within the field of Human-Computer Interaction is still limited. As such, we developed a large-scale pervasive game called 'Cargo', where a semi-autonomous ruled-based agent distributes a number of text-to-speech instructions to multiple teams of players via their mobile phone as an interface. We describe how people received, negotiated and acted upon the instructions in the game both individually and as a team and how players initial plans and expectations shaped their understanding of the instructions.