Building a bi-directional bridge between social presence and interaction in online games

While gaming environments represent various forms of interaction, entertainment and dynamism, they create short term interactions and long term relationships. Social presence and social interaction are two major design factors to ensure being involved in online multiplayers games (OMPG). This paper argued that there is a positive relationship between the perception of social interaction and the feeling of social presence in online multiplayer games. For the sake of improving the OMPG experience, the researchers presented and validated a framework called “Mutual Bi-Directional Reinforcement Relationship” that explains the nature of the relationship between social presence and social interaction. The validation process relies on an empirical analysis that focused on studying the relationship between social presence and social interaction. A positive significant relationship was found between the level of the perception of social interaction and the level of the feeling of social presence.