VR Social Exclusion Experience

In collaboration with the Virginia Commonwealth University, Part Time Evil created Interact VR. Essentially, the game is a modernized version of the existing Cyberball PC game, which is a virtual ball-tossing game used to research the effects of ostracization by manipulating the user’s degree of inclusion. The idea of the social psychological experiment is to make the user think they are playing with two other participants, but who are in fact computer programmed. At the beginning of the game the participants are tossed the ball equally among the three of them. But as time goes by, the participants are being passed the ball less and less to the point where they do not get the ball at all.

In this modernized version of Cyberball , not only did we make it more immersive and interactive by developing it in VR, we also added a sci-fi twist to it! In this version instead of using a classic “ball” like in a game of catch, we opted to use “orb blasters” that launch and receive a ball of energy. To fully immerse participants, we made the player and computer-controlled characters actual robots to fit into the sci-fi theme.

We included an option where the users can “charge the shot” of their orb blaster to be able to blast the orb harder and faster. A fully charged shot is emphasized in the tutorial stage to be “too fast” and more difficult to catch. This is not only to analyze the degree of inclusion, but to also analyze the participant’s response to the different degrees of ostracism as the game progresses.

The upbeat sound design and the overall look of neon lights makes a fresh take to the original Cyberball.

The game is divided into three portions: onboarding, tutorial, and rounds.

Onboarding

• Users create their username and join a matchmaking lobby to help emphasize to the participants that the other “players” are real, and not AI-controlled bots.
• Serves to create and store data the research team needs to analyze per participant profile.

Tutorial

• Helps the player understand how to catch and launch the ball with their orb blaster.
• Allows the player practice time.
• Introduces the "charged shot" mechanic and communicates that a fully charged shot is aggressive.

Rounds

• The participant plays a total of three rounds with the bots, with each round becoming more and more ostracizing.
• At the end of each round, the participant is taken to a separate assessment room and asked to answer a few questions about the experience to help researchers collect important data.
  

In the background, analytics are recorded for the onboarding portion and post-round assessments. The game also records data during gameplay, such as who the participants are blasting the orb to, user response time, and aggression response.