Exploring the Entertainment Value of Playing Games with a Humanoid Robot

Besides providing functional support, socially assistive robots can provide social support in the form of entertainment. Previous studies have shown that this type of social support improves elderly people’s well-being significantly. But it is still far from clear what underlying causes drive people’s judgment of entertainment value. Showing emotionally expressive behaviors seems to raise entertainment value, but what if these behaviors are not truly embodied, i.e., tied to processes in the environment? It would seem that it is important that expressive behaviors are tied to the proper events. In this study, we investigated whether multimodal behavioral patterns (i.e., combinations of gestures, eye LED patterns, and verbal expressions) based on the developments within a game aids the entertainment value. We chose a gaming situation where the robot plays Mastermind with a human, in which the robot could show no behavioral patterns, behavioral patterns tied to game progress, or randomly selected behavioral patterns from the same set. The behavioral patterns were designed to imitate four basic emotions (neutral, happy, angry, sad) in combination with five levels of surprise and five levels of confidence. In a pilot study we validated the correct interpretation of the behavioral patterns. The experimental setup was designed to collect information about which behaviors to choose. The results of our study confirmed that a robot playing games with people has entertainment value. The main technical contribution is the information we collected on the behaviors.