J. Allbeck et al. (Eds.): IVA 2010, LNAI 6356, pp. 482–488, 2010. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010 High Score! - Motivation Strategies for User Participation in Virtual Human Development Shivashankar Halan 1 , Brent Rossen 1 , Juan Cendan 2 , and Benjamin Lok 1 1 Computer Information Sciences Engineering, 2 Department of Surgery, University of Florida, USA shivashankarh@ufl.edu,{brossen,lok}@cise.ufl.edu, cendajc@surgery.ufl.edu Abstract. 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 applicabil- ity of leaderboards, narratives and deadlines through a user study conducted with medical students (n=20) for modeling the conversational corpus of a vir- tual 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 con- versations. Keywords: Virtual Humans, Intelligent Agent Authoring Tools, motivational strategies, persuasive technology, virtual patients, leaderboards, narratives, deadlines. 1 Introduction End-users are increasingly becoming an integral part of application development proc- esses. User interactions with the system during the development phase have different goals than interactions after deployment. The developmental user interactions primar- ily benefit the developers by helping them identify issues with the system. This is op- posed to post-deployment interactions where the goal is to use the system to primarily benefit the user. During the developmental interactions, the system will likely have poor performance as measured by number of errors and ease of use. The poor perform- ance of the system causes a motivation gap. We define a motivation gap as the lack of proper motivation for a user to participate in a particular task. Since the developmental interactions do not primarily benefit the user, there is minimal motivation for the user to expend effort and time to interact with a system that is still in development. We propose using external motivation strategies to address the motivation gap. In the past, providing monetary compensation and extra credit have been effective motivational techniques for increasing user participation [3] [4], however, these moti- vational techniques are not always applicable. For example, providing monetary