Watch Me Play: Does Social Facilitation Apply to Digital Games?

The presence of observers and virtual characters can significantly shape our gaming experience. Researchers suppose that most of the basic socio-psychological phenomena are also applicable for digital games. However, the social processes in gaming setups can differ from our experience in other social situations. Our work emphasizes that awareness. Insights are needed for the purposeful design of a game's social setting, specifically in applied contexts of learning and training. Here, we focus on the social facilitation effect, which describes an unconscious change in performance due to the presence of others, by investigating the impact of real observers and virtual agents on player experience and performance in four different games. The results of our four studies show that, in contrast to previous assumptions, in-game success was not significantly influenced by the presence of any social entity, indicating that social facilitation does not generally apply to the context of playing digital games.