Presence is a concept used to describe the feeling of “being there.” I will use this concept and its derivatives to help understand how we become immersed in MMOs and how to best strengthen mastery motivators in MMOs. Different authors have described presence using different terms. Kwan Lee writes:
[This paper] first compares various types of presence-related terms (e.g. telepresence, virtual presence, mediated presence, copresence, and presence) and suggests that of those terms the term presence works best for the systematic study of human interaction with media and simulation technologies. […] Presence is newly defined as “a psychological state in which virtual objects are experienced as actual objects in either sensory or non-sensory ways.” Three types of presence -- physical, social, and self presence -- are defined. (28)
Several terms have been used to describe this concept of presence over the years. The concept started with Marvin Minsky in 1980, when he used telepresence to describe a sense of physical transportation through a computer. Though Minsky was thinking of computer terminals showing only text and containing no dressings of entertainment, his concept still applies today to MMOs. Controlling an avatar that exists simultaneously on one's PC, on the game server, and in a fictional, virtual world is an outgrowth of the activity Minsky describes.
Why use presence to understand experience of mastery in MMOs? Players use MMOs to have virtual experiences that feel real. As Lee explains, presence seeks to understand virtual experience, not real experience or hallucination. Lee writes:
Human experience can be categorized into three types -- real experience, hallucination, and virtual experience -- according to the ways of experiencing (sensory vs. nonsensory) and the objects that are being experienced (actual vs. imaginary vs. virtual [para-authentic vs. artificial]). Real experience is the sensory experience of actual objects. Hallucination is the nonsensory experience of imaginary objects. Virtual experience is the sensory or nonsensory experience of virtual (either para-authentic or artificial) objects. Presence research is about virtual experience and has nothing to do with real experience or hallucination. (Lee 37)
MMOs are all about virtual experience. They are neither real (as defined here) nor hallucination. What does Lee mean by virtual experience? He defines it in terms of virtual objects. What are virtual objects? They can be something we normally think of as an object, such as a chair, or they can be places or even people. Para-authentic objects exist in virtual space but have real-world counterparts. For example, the imagery in a videoconference is a digital reproduction, and therefore virtual, but it realistically represents real objects -- the space and people on the other end of the videoconference call. Artificial objects, on the other hand, are virtual objects with no real-life counterpart -- most objects in MMOs fall into this category. Even people in the game space are not represented as they would be in the real world, making them the artificial brand of virtual. Thus, while Lee spends much of his time discussing para-authentic objects and comparing them with artificial objects, I will focus only on the artificial.
Presence Overview
In rest of this chapter, I will use the following terms to refer to the different kinds of presence. I will analyze them in more depth in their respective sections of the chapter, but let this serve as an introduction.
- Physical presence
- Transporting physical presence refers to the phenomenon of players' feeling located in a virtual world.
- Non-transporting physical presence refers to the player's belief in the validity of the virtual world and the objects within (i.e. not focusing on their artificiality).
- Social presence
- Copresence refers to the player's feeling of having other social entities available for interaction in real time.
- Asynchronous social presence, on the other hand, refers to the sense that other social entities are available to be interacted with, but not in real time.
- Self presence refers to players' focus on their avatars as valid representations of themselves.
After explaining each concept, I will explore how we can apply it to game design in the context of Labyrinth and how it affects mastery motivators.
I will use three different kinds of presence: physical, social, and self presence. Physical presence, or the sense of being physically located in a virtual environment, helps us think about what makes MMOs immersive. When and why do we feel we are walking through a medieval forest or down the hallways of a spaceship? Social presence, or the sense of being with others, is useful for distinguishing a social experience where others matter. Some MMOs make players feel alone even with thousands of others nearby, so social presence captures more than just virtual location. Finally, self presence helps us think about what makes players feel as though it is them in the virtual world, allowing them to see in-game events as reflecting on and impacting them. Lee attributes these concepts to Biocca:
Biocca (1997) identified three types of presence: physical, social, and self presence. Physical presence refers to the sense of being physically located in a virtual environment. Biocca emphasized the feeling of transportation into a virtual environment from the real physical environment as an integral part of physical presence. In a recent article, Biocca and colleagues (2001) defined social presence as “the sense of being together with another and mental models of other intelligences (i.e., people, animals, agents, gods, etc.) that help us simulate other minds.” Self presence refers to a user's mental model of himself/herself or simply the awareness of self-identity inside a virtual world. (Lee 42)
Biocca's definitions are the easiest to understand, and prove useful to my analysis, but they alone are not sufficient.
Physical Presence
Lee starts with Biocca's definition and offers some important adjustments. Lee redefines physical presence as “a psychological state in which virtual (para-authentic or artificial) physical objects are experienced as actual physical objects in either sensory or nonsensory ways” (45). The important thing for physical presence is that “technology users do not notice either the para-authentic nature of mediated objects (or environment) or the artificial nature of simulated objects (or environment)” (45). Lee does not necessitate a sense of transportation. Ignore the para-authentic side of physical presence, as the artificial-virtual applies best to MMOs. According to Lee, physical presence occurs when players don't notice the artificial nature of various objects in the MMO. However, players do notice, and if one asks them whether objects are artificial, players will answer that they are. While immersed, players simply don't focus on the artificial nature of MMOs. Claiming they don't notice the artificial nature is like saying they are confused about what is real. Players aren't confused. They simply choose to suspend disbelief and focus on artificial objects as if they were real. Unlike Biocca, Lee claims that no sense of transportation is required for physical presence to occur. Players don't need to feel that they have left their computer rooms in order to focus on the virtual world and perceive objects therein as valid. As Lee says, “this approach makes it possible to encompass virtual experiences created by low-tech media.” In particular, accessing a virtual world from a cell phone, while actually quite high-tech, may not engender the same sense of “being there” that comes from logging in from a PC. Therefore, compared to the PC experience, the outdated processing, graphical, and auditory capabilities of mobile seem low-tech.
Lee intends his definition of presence to override Biocca's, but both have merit. I want to use physical presence to get at a sense of transportation when it's appropriate, as with aspects of MMOs on PCs, and I want to use physical presence to get at a sense of players focusing on the validity of artificial objects, as with aspects of MMOs on both PC and mobile. Thus, I will refer to Biocca's definition of physical presence as transporting physical presence and Lee's definition of physical presence as non-transporting physical presence.
Physical Presence in Labyrinth
How do Labyrinth 's features support transporting and non-transporting physical presence? What kinds of experiences create a feeling of physical presence? Physical presence can come from an activity like reading a book, which usually just describes a physical space and the activity within. Film can create physical presence as well, by stimulating the imagination, as books do, along with senses of sight and hearing. Games strengthen physical presence further by allowing interactivity. Simply walking around in a virtual world makes it feel more real, and then anything a player can do to affect the state of the virtual world increases that feeling further. Fan fiction authors can achieve this interactivity with books and films by imagining and crafting their own extensions, but games make interaction more easily accessible by integrating it naturally into the first experience of the primary text (the game). Clark describes the feeling of being able to look around a space, at a distance, mediated by a video camera, as creating significantly more presence than watching video of the space without being able to look around. The interactivity makes the difference. Clark writes, “Our sense of personal location has more to do with this sense of an action-space than with anything else” (93-4). Clark 's action-space helps us understand what differentiates the experience of passively viewing and interactively viewing. When we feel that a space supports and reflects our actions, we feel increased non-transporting physical presence. The space seems more valid and believable, even if it is also fantastic and unrealistic. This increase in non-transporting physical presence also strengthens transporting physical presence, as we can't easily feel located in a world we don't recognize as valid. Both kinds of physical presence strengthen personal relevancy as well, since players care more about progress in worlds that immerse and entertain coherently.
In Labyrinth, we have created a physical space in which players can walk around and interact with characters and objects. By walking around, players can explore the physical space of the game world. Exploration helps players get to know a space, increasing its coherence and validity. Exploration also helps players feel located in a space, as they can affect what they can see of the space. By affecting what they can see, players create a tight loop of input and output between themselves and the game. They frequently click on the ground in the virtual space to move their characters and their fields of vision. This minimal but frequent input yields frequent and highly visible output from the game: players observe and lead their characters through new spaces. This continual interaction helps players feel their own agency within the game world. The flow and frequency of this interaction encourages players to focus on the output from the game, namely the moving and changing virtual world. Simply focusing on changes within the physical, virtual world and possible actions within that world creates transporting physical presence. With infrequent or no interaction, players feel less transporting physical presence. Labyrinth has less interaction with the physical space than some other kinds of games, especially ones that emphasize movement timing as challenges. Labyrinth uses movement to enable exploration, but it has no jumping puzzles, for instance, nor does it require dodging bullets. It also has only two dimensions representing the world with a top-down view, so players can't move their fields of vision to peer into the horizon. These restrictions have some negative impact on transporting physical presence.
The somewhat reduced transporting physical presence in Labyrinth reduces personal and social visibility of mastery. Players are less likely to look to the physical space for cues about mastery (e.g. avatar appearance). However, players still look to interface elements (e.g. score) for cues about mastery, so we have included those in the HUD (heads-up display) and The Personal Communicator (and interface device that includes the message boards). The Personal Communicator also has records of all monsters the player has encountered, encouraging the sense of mastery that comes from collecting and complete knowledge of a semiotic domain (Gee 2003). Records of monsters encountered are only visible to the player, so they increase personal visibility of mastery but not social visibility. Still, players will communicate more intelligently with teammates about the semiotic domain, increasing social visibility of mastery and directly.
In addition to exploring the physical space in Labyrinth, players can affect the world in permanent, visible ways. When they complete a puzzle at the highest level of difficulty, players can obliterate that puzzle. Obliterating the puzzle means physically changing the way the puzzle room looks permanently. In addition to obliterating puzzle rooms, players plant seeds for a vine that will eventually overtake the entire factory. This vine also creates a permanent, visible state change in the physical space. As players continue to move through and explore the physical space in the future, they observe obliterated puzzle rooms and vine growth. This creates a sense that they are affecting the world. This kind of permanent state change, brought about by player interaction, increases both kinds of physical presence. It emphasizes the validity of the world and the player's place in it as well as the physicality of the world. Reduced transporting physical presence reduces personal visibility of mastery if represented in the physical space (e.g. avatar appearance). Increased personal visibility of mastery increases both kinds of physical presence. There is a feedback loop: increased personal visibility of mastery in the physical space increases transporting physical presence, which then increases personal visibility again.
Players experience increased physical presence through Labyrinth 's story. The comic book style of the story represents the physical space of the game world visually differently than players see it as they move about that world. This double representation of the same space helps players suspend disbelief about the world, as both representations seem to corroborate each other in players' imaginations. Reading the story, then, directly increases non-transporting physical presence by validating the game's fiction. It also increases transporting physical presence by priming player's willingness to suspend disbelief when they later reenter the physical space with which they can interact and move around.
Players occasionally see each other's avatars in the game space, increasing physical presence. All interaction with other players is asynchronous, but the game will periodically take other players avatars and insert them in the games of their teammates. As a player, I might see my teammate rounding a corner and vanishing from site. I can't interact with that teammate, and in fact that teammate may not even be online, but it helps me think of the entire team as existing in the same physical space, increasing non-transporting physical presence. A rise in non-transporting physical presence increases transporting physical presence, so that gets strengthened too. This technique has diminishing returns, because when players first observe teammates they may not realize that those teammates are not actually there. They may never realize, and that's okay. If they do realize, though, the effect may lose its power for them. The effect increases personal relevancy early in the game, when players have the least attachment to the game. If the effect later loses its power, players will likely already have solid personal relevancy from their increasing mastery in, and progress through, the game. It gives a small but quick boost in personal relevancy when it's needed most.
Technical and artistic visual cues affect physical presence, too. Higher screen and art asset resolution helps players suspend this belief, as do color fidelity, screen size, animation smoothness, and frame rate (the rate at which the game screen gets redrawn). Since we are developing the game in flash, players may experience it in a web browser window, surrounded by non-game interface elements. All of these factors positively or negatively effect immersion, entertainment value, and ease of entering and exiting play. Our polished, atmospheric 2D imagery increases physical presence and personal relevancy. Polished, 2D imagery propels adventure games to success in the 90s, but the genre fell out of favor as the cutting edge of graphics moved to three dimensions. The right 3D environment could have helped strengthen presence and relevancy further, but not within our budget. All of this applies to play on a PC.
On mobile, the technical constraints become almost insurmountable. Players feel significantly less transporting physical presence due to the smaller screen size alone. This decreases non-transporting physical presence as well. Since players can jump in and out of the game world at any time on mobile, physical presence decreases even further. To some extent, players recall the high-resolution imagery from play on a PC and have that in mind during mobile play, but this isn't as strong as seeing it on the screen. Of the two kinds of physical presence, transporting physical presence suffers most from the transition to mobile. Non-transporting physical presence still receives significant support from personal relevancy, since players try to see the world as valid if they care about it.
Finally, the game's controls affect whether players can forget the interface or struggle with it continually. When playing on a PC, players will use the mouse, and when on a Nintendo DS, players will use the stylus. Both of these controls have a high degree of familiarity for almost all players, so they don't disturb presence.
Physical presence increases personal relevancy directly. In Labyrinth, it increases social relevancy only by increasing personal relevancy for each player. Teammates don't actually interact within the virtual space, as they would in games with real-time, reflex driven interactions like sports and action games, so social relevancy remains detached from physical presence. Likewise, social visibility in Labyrinth remains detached from physical presence when each player has his own computer. Teammates don't see physical representations of increasing mastery unless they play together at the same computer. If they do play at the same computer, physical presence exists and increases social visibility. However, the gain is offset by reduced personal relevancy (since both players can't equally experience direct control of the game and since one avatar poorly represents two or more players).
To increase physical presence beyond what we've done with Labyrinth, maintaining a similar budget, we should have added synchronized, space-dependent interactions between teammates. This would increase both kinds of physical presence, as well as all four mastery motivators. For example, if two players needed to collaborate to distract a guard and free some pets from the guarded room, one player could get the guard to chase him around the factory while the other escorted the pets to safety. Perhaps the player leading the guard around the factory could only escape by hiding in obliterated rooms, emphasizing the importance of prior mastery.
Social Presence
Next, let's unpack social presence. We've already begun to think of it as the feeling of being together with another. Goffman describes copresence as the feeling of being together, with mutual, concurrent awareness. Lee defines social presence as the experience of virtual actors as real, so he can incorporate asynchronous interactions. Lee writes:
Social presence is different from copresence […] in that copresence requires sharing of a space with other humans (Zhao, 2001). The emphasis of copresence on co-location of self and others requires mutual awareness in which individuals become “accessible, available, and subject to one another” (Goffman, 1963, p. 22) as a necessary condition for copresence. Therefore, it cannot explain well a possible social experience occurring when users engage in one-way communication (e.g., reading a letter, hearing a prerecorded voice message) in which no mutual awareness is involved. (45)
Both the concepts of copresence and social presence add value when thinking about social interactions in MMOs. I will use copresence when I want to emphasize the importance of co-location or real-time interaction with another. Lee uses social presence to encompass both copresence and asynchronous, interpersonal interactions. However, I want to distinguish between copresence and those asynchronous interactions. Therefore, I will use asynchronous social presence to get at this subset of social presence.
Social Presence in Labyrinth
How do Labyrinth 's features support copresence, the feeling of being located in the same space and time as other players, and asynchronous social presence, the feeling of having other players available to interact with, but not in real-time? The example in the previous paragraph generates copresence. Two players collaborate in real-time and in the same space. Each feels that the other player is focused on the game at that time, and each feels that location has relevancy (one player tries to draw a guard away from the other in physical space). Labyrinth doesn't support much copresence with players each at their own computers. MMOs like World of Warcraft traditionally create copresence very well by making travel somewhat cumbersome and providing hubs of travel and commerce that encourage players to congregate. Labyrinth creates copresence differently, encouraging players to play together at a single computer. They know that each player is available for real-time interaction, because they are sitting at the same computer focused on the game. They have a different sense of location than they would in the example from the previous paragraph. In the real world, their bodies occupy nearby space, so they are copresent in the nonvirtual sense. They feel co-located in the game space as well to the extent that they identify as the common avatar in the game. However, one avatar representing more than one player leads to very little identification as the avatar from any player. Thus, having multiple players at the same computer creates a sense of real-time availability but not virtual co-location. This partial copresence represents a missed opportunity for Labyrinth to strengthen social presence and all four mastery motivators. Taking advantage of this opportunity would have required extensive redesign, though, because if players can meet in virtual space, they expect activities there as well. WoW gives players many activities to do together in virtual space, including trading, dueling, exploring, and questing. Adding this type of activity to Labyrinth would have changed the game entirely and probably diminished the focus on puzzles and math thinking. Not having shared virtual space is therefore justified, even if it's also a missed opportunity.
Labyrinth creates asynchronous social presence through many of its features. Its communication system, a message board, supports mainly asynchronous communication. Players could use it as a real-time chat system, but the interface and conventions of message boards will lead them to use it more sporadically and asynchronously. If players want real-time communication, they will probably communicate face-to-face in the real world or through an instant messaging program. The combination of instant messaging and playing Labyrinth increases copresence, but reduces physical presence by decreasing immersion and suspension of disbelief about the integrity of the game world. The increased social relevancy and visibility from instant messaging counteracts the decreased personal relevancy from less physical presence.
Labyrinth creates asynchronous social presence through strategy writing as well. When one player solves a puzzle, the game encourages her to write a strategy for solving the puzzle for the benefit of her teammates. Her teammates likely won't see that strategy until much later, when they either brows the message board or get stuck on that particular puzzle. When they do come across that strategy, though, they experience asynchronous social presence. That is, they feel that what they are reading was written by another player, by a teammate, and they feel that player's presence in the game. Furthermore, if they've experienced any sort of frustration with that puzzle, they will likely feel impressed and appreciative or jealous of the other player's accomplishment. This asynchronous social presence gets partially codified in the reputation system. As players contribute strategies and rate those contributions on the message boards, they gain awareness of other players' progress and efforts in the game
Both kinds of social presence increase social relevancy and visibility. Copresence increases social relevancy and visibility because players feel they have an audience and feel pressure to perform. Of the two kinds of social presence, copresence creates more social relevancy through the immediacy of the performance and response. Asynchronous social presence also creates social relevancy, because players know their teammates will see their strategies on the message board eventually. It creates social visibility of mastery because those teammates do indeed see strategies on the message board. However, it is much less visible to players that their increasing mastery is visible to their teammates. In other words, social relevancy of mastery feeds into personal relevancy, but personal visibility of increasing social status does not increase much. To illustrate this problem, consider blogging. Bloggers enjoy checking who links to their blog, who comments on their blog, and even who visits their blog. Linking and commenting and visiting all increase social relevancy, but that doesn't translate entirely into increased perceived personal relevancy unless bloggers can see it. Tools like Technorati let bloggers see who links to them, and it becomes a way that bloggers estimate their own worth and contributions, sometimes compulsively. David Carr writes:
“We are living through the largest expansion of expressive capability in the history of the human race,” said Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor in the graduate interactive telecommunications program at New York University. Even as Mr. Shirky is saying this, I peek at the comments section of my blog, and he goes on, “There is an obsessive, dollhouse pleasure in configuring and looking at it, a constant measure of social capital.” (2007)
People enjoy measuring social capital. Nothing inherent in the asynchronous social presence reduces social relevancy, but because Labyrinth does not have many features for observing how teammates experience a particular player's contributions (aggregated reputation system aside), players can't easily measure their social capital. Copresence allows players to see how they are being experienced through features like real-time chat, which Labyrinth doesn't have integrated into the software. Players will probably prefer to play Labyrinth at separate computers but in the same real physical space, so they can tell teammates or competitors of their successes in real-time and judge responses through cues like body language and tone of voice. Playing on the DS allows teammates to congregate in the most convenient location while still maintaining the face-to-face communication that makes social relevancy personally visible.
Social presence can go too far and begin to feel like a burden to players. In MMOs, players sometimes think the burden of social interaction obstructs entertainment. Taylor writes: “Experienced players also can feel that they sometimes spend more time helping out guildmates or working to keep guilds together than they do actually playing. This can sometimes result in people creating new anonymous characters [...] to allow them to play without the burdens their social networks may bring” (50). This is an issue both inside and outside of games. I sign off of instant messaging programs when I really need to work to stop the interruptions. Sometimes, I won't pick up the phone if I'm in the middle of dinner or my favorite game/TV show/movie. Designers should ask themselves: does my game allow players to disconnect from their social burdens? Labyrinth avoids this problem by keeping team size small and interactions asynchronous. Requests for help come through the message board, going to all team members instead of one individual. The message board medium also reduces expectations of prompt responses, so even if a player logs into the game and sees some questions posted he can more easily choose to respond later or not at all. As a negative consequence of this design, players won't log into the game to see who's online or hang out, reducing positive social presence.
Self Presence
Finally, let's review self presence. Self presence will interact with other theories of self, coming in the next chapter. Lee says ourselves become virtual when we experience or construct them through technology. Lee writes, “A virtual self thus can be defined as either the para-authentic representation of the technology user, or an artificially constructed altar-self (or selves) existing inside a virtual environment” (40). “Artificially constructed altar-selves” matches up well with how players experience their own existence in MMOs. This is just one way of describing an avatar. A “para-authentic representation of the technology user,” is more like seeing oneself on the screen during a video conference call. When I refer to self presence, I mean feeling at home in an artificial representation of self that could be described as an avatar, not the para-authentic representation. Lee formally defines it as, “a psychological state in which virtual (para-authentic or artificial) self/selves are experienced as the actual self in either sensory or nonsensory ways” (46). He also emphasizes that players don't notice the virtuality of their avatars, but I again want to rephrase this to highlight that they simply suspend their disbelief and do not focus on that virtuality.
Self Presence in Labyrinth
How does Labyrinth help players construct a sense of self presence, believing that the in-game representations of themselves are valid? Labyrinth lets players choose avatars. Players use avatars as hooks on which to hang identities. When given the chance, players spend large amounts of time, energy, and money customizing avatars. As Goffman says, performance of self is central to how we view ourselves (1963). Labyrinth gives players only basic controls over the appearances of their avatars, letting them choose the mask that the cloaked figure will wear. Even this control, however minimal, allows players to feel in control of how the game represents them. Any amount of control encourages a sense of ownership, tying the player's view of herself more closely to the triumphs and failures of her avatar. In other words, control allows self presence.
Control has two components: choice and appropriate response. Giving players choice gives them the chance to realize and exert preference in the game. Without an appropriate response from the game, though, choice has no meaning. Imagine an avatar selection screen that allowed players to customize the appearance of their characters in every detail, but when the game began their avatars all turned to stick figures. That's choice without appropriate response. Lee writes that appropriate responses, both physically and socially, increase self presence, and self presence increases players' self-efficacy (46). Self presence and therefore self-efficacy (sense of mastery) give players personal relevancy. Without self presence, players care little of the triumphs of their characters. They still experience some successes as their own, but any personal relevancy the story would have added disappears. If a fictional character in the game congratulates the player's character, only players with self presence translate those congratulations into increased senses of mastery. Since self presence increases personal relevancy, players experiencing self presence will more likely overcome the game's challenges. They will more likely experience increasing mastery both directly from their own actions and indirectly through the representation of success in their avatars (e.g. fictional characters congratulating their avatars). However, since they experience self presence, even their indirect successes represented in their avatars will feel direct, increasing their sense of their own mastery.
Non-transporting physical presence increases self presence. Players can't easily feel themselves and their actions represented authentically in the game world unless that world seems valid. Stronger non-transporting physical presence increases players' perceptions that the game world is valid. Transporting physical presence does not necessarily increase self presence on its own, though. Facebook and MySpace profiles, for instance, do not support much transporting physical presence, yet they allow for significant self presence. Hardly any Facebook users would claim their profiles don't represent them in some way.
Just as the game software must react appropriately to player actions, so does appropriate social response to players' actions strengthen self presence. Without appropriate social responses, the validity of players' existence within the game comes into question. Lee writes, “Users' self identification with either the [..] representation of themselves inside a virtual environment plays a key role in the feeling of the existence of a para-authentic virtual self. Other social entities' reactions to artificially constructed selves (e.g., responding to users according to their virtual identities) play a key role in eliciting the feeling that altar-selves exist inside a virtual environment” (40). In this case, the para-authentic qualifier becomes appropriate, because we want players to see their avatars as authentic extensions of themselves (not artificial). There is an interesting mix of reality and fantasy in games. The game world is fantasy, and when questioned players admit as much. Yet, players see their actions and advancements in the game world as real. Players really solve puzzles in Labyrinth, even though no actual puzzle room exists in the real world or gets obliterated there. In order for players to take pride in solving puzzles, they must see there in-game identities as para-authentic. Otherwise, their actions become like those performed by their avatars during cut scenes: uncontrolled and artificial. Because people play in teams, teammates can respond appropriately to player accomplishments. In other words, player mastery must be socially visible, and the social visibility must be personally visible to strengthen self presence. Social presence strengthens self presence. This social reinforcement comes from teammates through Labyrinth 's message boards and in person when players play near each other.
