Wait, But Why?: Assessing Behavior Explanation Strategies for Real-Time Strategy Games

Work in AI-based explanation systems has uncovered an interesting contradiction: people prefer and learn best from why explanations but expert esports commentators primarily answer what questions when explaining complex behavior in real-time strategy games. Three possible explanations for this contradiction are: 1.) broadcast audiences are well-informed and do not need why explanations; 2.) consuming why explanations in real-time is too cognitively demanding for audiences; or 3.) producing live why explanations is too difficult for commentators. We answer this open question by investigating the effects of explanation types and presentation modalities on audience recall and cognitive load in the context of an esports broadcast. We recruit 111 Dota 2 players and split them into three groups: the first group views a Dota 2 broadcast, the second group has the addition of an interactive map that provides what explanations, and the final group receives the interactive map with detailed why explanations. We find that participants who receive short interactive text prompts that provide what explanations outperform the no explanation group on a multiple-choice recall task. We also find that participants who receive detailed why explanations submit reports of cognitive load that are higher than the no explanation group. Our evidence supports the conclusion that informed audiences benefit from explanations but do not have the cognitive resources to process why answers in real-time. It also supports the conclusion that stacked explanation interventions across different modalities, like audio, interactivity, and text, can aid real-time comprehension when attention resources are limited. Together, our results indicate that interactive multimedia interfaces can be leveraged to quickly guide attention and provide low-cost explanations to improve intelligibility when time is too scarce for cognitively demanding why explanations.