Augmenting remote trading card play with virtual characters used in animation and game stories-Towards persuasive and ambient transmedia storytelling

Using well-known virtual characters is a promising approach to enhance information services, since such characters provoke people's empathetic feelings easily, and it is also easy for people to recall the leitmotif of the character's fictional stories. In Japan, recently, it has become a popular culture to use famous virtual characters of animations and games in various services, and this has even become ! main business activity for some companies. In the real world, our daily life consists of various social activities, and virtual characters offer the possibility to enhance these activities. For example, our current social activities might be gamified by replacing unknown people with our favorite virtual characters or might be augmented by the characters' stories. In this paper, we present Augmented Trading Card Game that enhances remote trading card game play with virtual characters used in the fictional stories of popular animations and games. We show our observations about the way players use the system, realizing the game, and what their feelings and impressions about the game are. We believe the obtained results would be useful to consider how to use empathetic virtual characters and the fictional story that the characters are used in, in the real world activities for future information services. We also discuss how our approach can be extended to design a new type of transmedia storytelling by considering Augmented Trading Card Game as one form of transmedia storytelling.