High Score! - Motivation Strategies for User Participation in Virtual Human Development

Conversational modeling requires an extended time commitment, and the difficulty associated with capturing the wide range of conversational stimuli necessitates extended user participation. We propose the use of leaderboards, narratives and deadlines as motivation strategies to persuade user participation in the conversational modeling for virtual humans. We evaluate the applicability of leaderboards, narratives and deadlines through a user study conducted with medical students (n=20) for modeling the conversational corpus of a virtual patient character. Leaderboards, narratives and deadlines were observed to be effective in improving user participation. Incorporating these strategies had the additional effect of making user responses less reflective of real world conversations.