I am currently in the process of thinking about new field experiments using our pervasive game (CatchBob!). What I am interested in, is to improve my understanding of the intersubjective experience: how players infer others' activities and intents (what is called Mutual Modeling). For that matter, I am using qualitative methods, very common in the french culture of "ergonomie" or "psychologie ergonomique" known as self-confrontation. There is a good description of self-confrontation in the paper "Methodologies for evaluating the affective experience of a mediated interaction" by Cahour et al. (2005):
The general idea of self-confrontation is to provide a subject with traces of his/her activity (more frequently audio or video recording, but also writings, schemas, annotations,…) in order to collect verbal descriptions of what was going on by putting him/her in the context of the past setting. In the same time external traces enables the analyst to control the correspondence between the verbal report produced by the subject (first person data) and the traces of the activity being observed (third person data). We also use some techniques of the explicitation interview when stopping the video and asking the subjects about what they lived (affectively, cognitively, bodily) during the sequence watched.
I already used this method in the first field experiment we completed. Now, in order to move forward, there is another interesting add-on called "crossed self-confrontation" (developed by Yves Clot) which is very well described by Philippe De Leener in his paper "Self-analysis of professional activity as a tool for personal and organisational change":
The two workers who have experienced self-confrontation review the picture of their own activity but now through the eyes of their fellow-worker. The first worker comments on the activity of the second and vice versa. Again a dialogical activity is initiated about the activity, but this time the players principally confront their experiences. The discussions and exchanges of points of view about the same activity give them an opportunity to re-examine their respective real-life activity and to reveal what is not necessarily self-obvious. So workers, be they researchers or developers, are in a better position to talk about what they have actually lived or about what they actually live when working in a participatory way.
Why do I blog this? I want to apply this crossed self-confrontation method to our next CatchBob! experiment. This means that after playing the game, I will conduct an interview with one of the player, showing him/her traces of the gaming activity (with our replay tool) of a partner (so that player B puts players A's socks for instance). Then I'll do the interview of this player (player A in my example) so that I could cross the descriptions.
The benefit I am expecting is to get an insightful description of the activity, on which I could rely on to examine the player's intersubjectivity.