(Mine) Crafts reality: MSIS researchers use video games to study deputy experiences

Monday, May 5, 2025

Media contact: Hallie Hart | Communication coordinator | 405-744-1050 | hallie.hart@okstate.edu

What can you learn from a room of the Oklahoma State University students who deal with popular video games Minecraft and Fortnite?

Much if you ask four researchers from the Spears School of Business Department of Management Science and Information Systems.

The doctoral student Caleb Krieger and Ghazal Abdolhossein Khani have with the extraordinary professor Dr. Andy Luse and Professor Dr. Rathindra Sarathy teamed up for the study, “sees the same as an evaluation of deputy experiences in the metaverse.”

In Decision Support Systems, their results published conventional theories about perception technology experiences. The results indicate that people get a feeling for active participation and social cooperation when they see other video games play.

“It's almost like a mirrored experience,” said Krieger. “I can experience it because you can experience it.”

With the impact on several industries, this paper uses social psychology to examine a growing technical trend.

The young audience flocks on platforms such as Twitch and YouTube and regularly watched live streams from people who play video games. According to several databases, global play streaming has developed into one billion dollar market.

However, when Luse noticed that his young nephew went online to see Twitch Streamers, the Associate Professor wondered why.

The academic theory told him that people are more of a commitment and the immersion level as a participant in an activity as an observer.

“I tried to find out what these people bring back to do this all the time,” said Luse, a chairman of William S. Spears in Business.

The research team gathered with mutual interest in this secret. The main author Krieger had worked as a Lude teaching assistant. They were the first people who met Khani on arrival at the OSU in the MSIs department. Khani and Krieger wrote down the group in a seminar with Ardmore's Sarathy business administration and brought the group together.

The researchers had no problems recruiting participants. When the authors asked the OSU students to play video games in the business building, many responded to the call, especially with professors who offer additional recognition.

“We often filled the room because people were excited,” said Krieger.

As a father of two children, warrior knows that Minecraft and Fortnite are popular. His son enjoys both games and the new Minecraft film has led a quirky pop culture and starts a song in the Billboard Hot 100.

As an academic, Krieger selected these games for practical reasons. The researchers had to make their experiments with controlled virtual settings in which users do not have to pay or set up any accounts.

The authors turned to Mason Bayer, a graduate of the OSU Management Information System, which was listed in the confirmations of their newspaper. He created consistent in-game environments to eliminate unpredictable variables.

Then they let the games start. Some students have paired suitable virtual rooms in Minecraft or Fortnite, who actively deal with the games and work together on the interior. Other students were not instructed to play. Instead, they looked at videos of couples who disempower Minecraft and Fortnite rooms from a third person's point of view.

Each student then filled out a survey in which he measured his embodied social presence. This concept refers to a collaborative experience in a meta -verse, a virtual world that represent avatars or game characters for players.

In contrast to the theory, ESP values ​​showed no significant differences between the students played and those who watched.

Passive observers stated that they were feeling as if they were active participants.

Although video game streaming offers a new room for this phenomenon, it probably occurs elsewhere. Warrior explained it with a sports analogy. Football fans describe their favorite teams as “we” as they see television programs and often scream like they are training.

“We don't know people,” said Krieger. “We don't play the game, but we are connected to you in such a way that we win or lose, we cheer or we cry.”

Similarly, a viewer can identify in a game with the avatar of a Twitch streamer and say: “Bend left!” or “Add blocks there!” If this viewer has no control over the character.

Avatars use tools in the box-shaped Minecraft meta verse to create structures with basic Lego-like graphics. Fortnite has a higher graphic, but both games enable the audience to experience their worlds on behalf of.

Other meta verse contain more striking details.

In addition to playing, these deputy experiences in training for jobs could contribute with great stress. New surgeons begin with the use of meta-verse technology and look at immersive videos of procedures to prepare for practical practice. Similarly, disaster reaction teams could use these technologies to learn how to manage deputy emotions before entering the field, as the MSIS paper mentioned.

“We get to where we can create realistic meta -verse phenomena,” said Krieger. “We can replicate things pretty honestly, and in some cases it can be really powerful.”

With so many options, the researchers expand their work. Khani said she and warriors had taken screenshots of the Minecraft and Fortnite creations of the students to examine correlations between ESP values ​​and performance. Could a higher feeling of active participation correlate with more complex in-game designs?

“We have collected data for other research questions,” said Khani. “So I would like to see how ESP influences the overall result of cooperation in virtual environments.”

Warrior said he wanted to identify factors that feel more or less likely to be an active participant. Nobody wore a virtual reality headset in the experiments, but would the results be different if that were the case?

In some cases, parasocial relationships contribute to the attractiveness of live streams. For example,
Kai CenatOne of the most popular Twitch streamers in the world, known for humor and charisma, earned around 8.5 million US dollars in 2024.

However, the research of OSU suggests that people observe live streams than fandom for other reasons. The students gained a feeling of active participation when they play unknown people.

The researchers suggest that technology companies should take into account deputy viewers when designing games, and further studies could offer guidelines.

“It is probably more about understanding perception,” said Krieger. “As soon as we start to disguise this phenomenon, you can start using your software to maximize these experiences.”