Despite being a traditional tabletop game, online bingo has still managed to undergo an exciting digital transformation that is capable of attracting budding online players without alienating the traditional market.
These ‘chat’ facilities enable players to celebrate wins together and hold out the lure of emulating the pleasant social atmosphere of the old-style bingo hall.
Social interaction
In virtual rooms the authorised users can talk and interact in a virtual reality, for example, inspired by the Opensim software. Social VR gives a highly precise tool for collaboration and can potentially reinforce social bonds between participants in a more natural way than other forms of online interactions, where the display of one’s personality is purely expressed through text signs, excluding the possibility to convey physical co-presence. A class user of the platform can have immersed social experiences with his friends and peers.
Intriguingly, recent findings show that higher social interaction reduces cybersickness in virtual reality (VR), though research has investigated this phenomenon only recently. In a very easy task to recreate, participants had to carry cubes with the alphabet in the virtual reality, receiving the instruction to collect as many correct alphabet letters as possible in 21 minutes.
Work heightened heart rates for solitary tasks but helped reduce cybersickness for collaborative work. Social interactions could influence heart rates differently depending on the virtual environment in which the game takes place, what the person is doing, or due to less obvious social cues.
Customizable avatars
In a virtual world, people can develop their identities and personal style through their avatars. Your avatar is your persona that helps you interact with other users, make friends and socialise – as well as network or conduct business in the metaverse where avatars act as instruments for immersion and increased user experience.
With Pigg Party, players choose face parts (eye, mouth, nose, chin, facial contouring and beard hair), body parts (arm, leg waist head hands feet accessories and clothes/shoes), clothing styles and shoes from 40 different categories and a spectrum of more than 250 colours, shapes and textures.
To explore the intervening effects, we also conducted a SEM to investigate whether and how the two forms of embodied identification (ie, avatar customisation and wishful identification) mediated the dynamic processes constituting self-presentation and social relationships in the experiences of immersive participation in online virtual worlds. We found that embodied identification (the degree to which the characters of individuals are grounded in the avatars they adopt) positively predicted engagement in private room communication and relation expansion, whereas wishful identification had negative effects, and the similarity between them suggested that they were related to the same mechanism of effects.
Virtual worlds
For 21st-century societies, virtual worlds – shared graphical spaces on the web – represent a new and compelling way for humans to be present. Virtual worlds have been used in multi-player gaming scenarios and for education and business. For educators, virtual worlds provide a scaffolding where student co-building can produce a far better learning result.
The term refers to immersive three-dimensional digital spaces in which users access the world from within, typically as avatar characters. Virtualworlds are different from video games in that they do not have goals, quests or challenges as one might find in games.
The most well-known of the current wave of virtual worlds include Second Life, Twinity and There; others include Vivaty for mobile phones, which offers a lip-synching avatar as well as social hangouts on games consoles, while others are virtual worlds for children that put the various elements — social networks, gaming — of the virtual world into a single package and draw public and private money in their wake. For all this innovation, virtual worlds draw large investments even though their complexity defies simplistic explanations.
Gamification
Gamifying virtual events can be an extremely powerful tool in boosting attendee engagement, increasing participation, improving knowledge retention and providing overall better event experiences. This can be done a number of different ways, from using quizzes or puzzles; to curating interactive (in person or virtual) games such scavenger hunts or an escape room to increase event participation and promote better attendee experiences.
Measure attendee engagement and interaction carefully to see if gamification is increasing these measures. This can be done with analytics tools (built-in or via event management systems) as well as with attendee feedback after the event. Use this data to determine whether or not gamification will be an effective engagement strategy for future events.
By adding gamification features, such as points, badges and leader boards into sales tasks and targets, a business could use this training to encourage and foster teamwork, making the process more competitive and collaborative – which would ultimately engage and motivate sales representatives to put in their best work.
