Player Dominance Adjustment: Promoting Self-Efficacy and Experience of Game Players by Adjusting Dominant Power

This paper presents an idea of promoting game-related self-efficacy and user experience of game players by adjusting their dominant power. The assumption is that game players will gain higher self-efficacy and better gameplay experience when game situations go in the way they expect. To evaluate this assumption, we conduct a pilot study using a famous social deduction game called Werewolf by letting human players play this game, one player at a time over the Internet. In the pilot-study setting, each participant thinks that he/she plays with other six players, but all the other players are in fact controlled by the experimenter. Game situations are manipulated to create two cases of gameplay: (1) a case in which most of the participant's actions impact gameplay (player-dominance games), and (2) a case in which almost none of the participant's actions impact gameplay (non-player-dominance games). The findings based on evaluation using General Self-Efficacy Scale and Game User Experience Satisfaction Scale are that player-dominance games lead to higher self-efficacy, and there is a strong linear relationship between self-efficacy and enjoyment.