Students' attitudes toward playing games and using games in education: Comparing Scotland and the Netherlands

Games-based learning has captured the interest of educationalists and industrialists who seek to exploit the characteristics of computer games as they are perceived by some to be a potentially effective approach for teaching and learning. Despite this interest in using games-based learning there is a dearth of empirical evidence supporting the validity of the approach covering the wider context of gaming and education. This study presents a large scale gaming survey, involving 887 students from 13 different Higher Education (HE) institutes in Scotland and the Netherlands, which examines students' characteristics related to their gaming preferences, game playing habits, and their perceptions and thoughts on the use of games in education. It presents a comparison of three separate groups of students: a group in regular education in a Scottish university, a group in regular education in universities in the Netherlands and a distance learning group from a university in the Netherlands. This study addresses an overall research question of: Can computer games be used for educational purposes at HE level in regular and distance education in different countries? The study then addresses four sub-research questions related to the overall research question:

• •What are the different game playing habits of the three groups?
• •What are the different motivations for playing games across the three groups?
• •What are the different reasons for using games in HE across the three groups?
• •What are the different attitudes towards games across the three groups?

To our knowledge this is the first in-depth cross-national survey on gaming and education. We found that a large number of participants believed that computer games could be used at HE level for educational purposes and that further research in the area of game playing habits, motivations for playing computer games and motivations for playing computer games in education are worthy of extensive further investigation. We also found a clear distinction between the views of students in regular education and those in distance education. Regular education students in both countries rated all motivations for playing computer games as significantly more important than distance education students. Also the results suggest that Scottish students aim to enhance their social experience with regards to competition and cooperation, while Dutch students aim to enhance their leisurely experience with regards to leisure, feeling good, preventing boredom and excitement.     

Dissecting the protocol and network traffic of the OnLive cloud gaming platform

Cloud gaming is a new paradigm that is envisaged to play a pivotal role in the video game industry in forthcoming years. Cloud gaming, or gaming on demand, is a type of online gaming that allows on-demand streaming of game content onto non-specialised devices (e.g. PC, smart TV, etc.). This approach requires no downloads or game installation because the actual game is executed on the game company’s server and is streamed directly to the client. Nonetheless, this revolutionary approach significantly affects the network load generated by online games. As cloud gaming presents new challenges for both network engineers and the research community, both groups need to be fully conversant with these new cloud gaming platforms. The purpose of this paper is to investigate OnLive, one of the most popular cloud gaming platforms. Our key contributions are: (a) a review of the state-of-the-art of cloud gaming; (b) reverse engineering of the OnLive protocol; and (c) a synthetic traffic model for OnLive.     

Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment in Computer Games Through Real-Time Anxiety-Based Affective Feedback

A number of studies in recent years have investigated the dynamic difficulty adjustment (DDA) mechanism in computer games to automatically tailor gaming experience to individual player's characteristics. Although most of these existing works focus on game adaptation based on player's performance, affective state experienced by the players could play a key role in gaming experience and may provide a useful indicator for a DDA mechanism. In this article, an affect-based DDA was designed and implemented for computer games. In this DDA mechanism, a player's physiological signals were analyzed to infer his or her probable anxiety level, which was chosen as the target affective state, and the game difficulty level was automatically adjusted in real time as a function of the player's affective state. Peripheral physiological signals were measured through wearable biofeedback sensors and several physiological indices were explored to determine their correlations with anxiety. An experimental study was conducted to evaluate the effects of the affect-based DDA on game play by comparing it with a performance-based DDA. This is the first time, that is known, that the impact of a real-time affect-based DDA has been demonstrated experimentally.     

The Game of Reading and Writing: How Video Games Reframe Our Understanding of Literacy

This essay focuses on how video games both highlight our traditional assumptions about reading and writing and suggest alternative paradigms that combine the new and the traditional:

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Play. Video games reveal how pleasure and desire are inherent to the reading and writing process. This dimension of gaming helps explain why video games can produce resistance in terms of approaches to writing instruction grounded in maintaining the cultural distinction between play and work.

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Authority. The interactivity of video games complicates questions of who authors and authorizes meaning in a discourse community. Video game players are simultaneously readers and writers whose gaming decisions are inscribed within a certain horizon of possibilities but not predictability. The video game is an inherently dialogic discursive space that problematizes the institutionalized distinction between “reading” and “writing”

•

Return to the visual. The case of video games not only helps restore the understanding of writing as a visual form of communication but also challenges the apparent static quality of the printed text, emphasizing the temporal quality of all communication. In so doing, the study of video games promises to fundamentally rewrite the conceptual binary of process and product in composition pedagogy.

     

Energy-centric DVFS controlling method for multi-core platforms

Dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) is a well-known and effective technique for reducing energy consumption in modern processors. However, accurately predicting the effect of frequency scaling on system performance is a challenging problem in real environments. In this paper, we propose a realistic DVFS performance prediction method, and a practical DVFS control policy (eDVFS) that aims to minimize total energy consumption in multi-core platforms. We also present power consumption estimation models for CPU and DRAM by exploiting a hardware energy monitoring unit. We implemented eDVFS in Linux, and our evaluation results show that eDVFS can save a substantial amount of energy compared with Linux “on-demand” CPU governor in diverse environments.     

Power and welfare in bargaining for coalition structure formation

We investigate a noncooperative bargaining game for partitioning n agents into non-overlapping coalitions. The game has n time periods during which the players are called according to an exogenous agenda to propose offers. With probability \(\delta \), the game ends during any time period \(t<n\). If it does, the first t players on the agenda get a chance to propose but the others do not. Thus, \(\delta \) is a measure of the degree of democracy within the game (ranging from democracy for \(\delta =0\), through increasing levels of authoritarianism as \(\delta \) approaches 1, to dictatorship for \(\delta =1\)). We determine the subgame perfect equilibrium (SPE) and study how a player’s position on the agenda affects his bargaining power. We analyze the relation between the distribution of power of individual players, the level of democracy, and the welfare efficiency of the game. We find that purely democratic games are welfare inefficient and that introducing a degree of authoritarianism into the game makes the distribution of power more equitable and also maximizes welfare. These results remain invariant under two types of player preferences: one where each player’s preference is a total order on the space of possible coalition structures and the other where each player either likes or dislikes a coalition structure. Finally, we show that the SPE partition may or may not be core stable.     

Analyzing repetitive action in game based on sequence pattern matching

As games become more popular, procedures which can support the analysis and understanding of players’ behaviors are necessary for success of commercial games. This paper presents a log-based usability evaluation system to analyze user behavior in a gaming environment. We explore the potential of input log data for automated usability evaluation and visualization of player behavior in a game. We traced the keyboard input value and mouse movement of users using a sequence data mining technique in a gaming environment. And we also constructed 3D body meshes for the behavior analysis using Kinect interface. We visualized the data obtained by tracing and automatically searched repetitive patterns in the game and analyzed them. The result obtained from the analysis can be used for user interface optimization, fun evaluation, and the bot-detection field.     

共建移动游戏的版权保护道路

随着智能终端的普及和4G网络的建设,移动游戏的用户规模和市场份额都呈现爆发式增长。移动游戏作为移动互联网行业中具备成熟商业模式的领域,近年来,已经成为推动信息消费的重要助力。同时,与移动游戏产业快速发展共存的是移动游戏侵权盗版现象屡见不鲜,版权纠纷问题与日俱增。游戏产业蓬勃发展的同时,移动游戏版权保护工作还需要进一步完善和加强,营造良好的移动游戏版权环境,促进移动游戏行业健康可持续发展。     

Swordplay: Innovating Game Development through VR

With the movement towards 3D input devices in gaming, we explored the use of 3D user interfaces in the context of Swordplay, an immersive sword-fighting and spell-casting game aimed toward casual gamers. Developed as part of a course on "innovating game development" at Brown University, Swordplay is an attempt to determine what types of interaction techniques could be useful with natural human expression in virtual 3D environments. The result is a fun, lightning-fast game intended to push the skills and dexterity of its users, similar to the popular button-mashing games of the early 1980s     

Characterizing the Nash equilibria of a three-player Bayesian quantum game

Quantum games with incomplete information can be studied within a Bayesian framework. We consider a version of prisoner’s dilemma (PD) in this framework with three players and characterize the Nash equilibria. A variation of the standard PD game is set up with two types of the second prisoner and the first prisoner plays with them with probability p and \(1-p\), respectively. The Bayesian nature of the game manifests in the uncertainty that the first prisoner faces about his opponent’s type which is encoded either in a classical probability or in the amplitudes of a wave function. Here, we consider scenarios with asymmetric payoffs between the first and second prisoner for different values of the probability, p, and the entanglement. Our results indicate a class of Nash equilibria (NE) with rich structures, characterized by a phase relationship on the strategies of the players. The rich structure can be exploited by the referee to set up rules of the game to push the players toward a specific class of NE. These results provide a deeper insight into the quantum advantages of Bayesian games over their classical counterpart.     

Cheating detection through game time modeling: A better way to avoid time cheats in P2P MOGs?

Cheating is a key issue in online games. Whatever the rules that govern a game, some players will always be tempted to break or elude these rules so as to gain an unfair advantage over other players. Mitigation schemes are thus needed in online gaming platforms. However, it is widely recognized that typical cheating prevention schemes introduce complications and overheads in the distributed game system, which may seriously jeopardize the online gaming experience. It turns out that, often, detecting the cheaters, instead of preventing the cheats, could represent a viable solution, especially for time cheats. We present a general framework able to model game time advancements in P2P online games. Based on this framework, time cheat detection schemes can be easily devised, which monitor the communication patterns among peers and do not affect the performances of the game system. To provide evidence of our claim, we present in this paper two different time cheats, namely fast rate cheat and look-ahead cheat, and discuss on practicable methods to detect them. Simulation results confirm the viability of the proposed approach.

基于BREW MP平台的手机触摸屏游戏的实现

随着手机无线增值业务的不断发展,手机游戏也越来越受到大众的追捧.BREW是高通推出的基于CDMA网络的“无限互联网发射平台”上增值业务开发运行的基本平台.针对以往BREW仅在功能机上的应用程序,通过一个简单的贪吃蛇的例子,利用Brew API中的IDISPLAY接口和timer定时器定时描画和更新游戏画面,和EVT_PEN触摸屏事件来完成触摸屏效果的贪吃蛇游戏.由于贪吃蛇游戏的画面简单和图形简单不需要加载图片.本系统采用的是BREW技术,用C语言代码进行编写,该项目具有贪吃蛇的基本功能,在整个贪吃蛇游戏中,很好地完成了触摸屏的结果.     

Procedural content generation for platformers: designing and testing FUN PLEdGE

Video games are a peculiar medium, standing at the crossing point between art and software application, and characterized by an active involvement of its audience. The complexity of the product generates a huge challenge for the companies that develop video games. In the development process, level designers play a crucial role: they are in charge of declining the theoretical framework developed by the game designer into game levels, which contain the actual gameplay scenarios. Hence, the final goal of any level designer is to valorize the game design by creating enjoyable gaming experiences while, at the same time, respecting several constraints. To lighten the burden on level designers, several semi-automated approaches to level generation have appeared in time, but the majority of these tools suffer from several drawbacks. In the present work, we tackle the issue of designing, prototyping and testing FUN PLEdGE, a general-purpose automated levels generator and editor for platform video games. Its main goal is to shrink development time while producing – unassisted – levels that are both playable and fun. Moreover, our tool provides the maximum freedom to the level designer, by avoiding to impose unnecessary constraints on the structure of the levels and by guaranteeing the possibility to modify and personalize by hand the generated levels. During this process, the generator assists the designer by suggesting corrections functional to the quality of the player experience. To prove the effectiveness of our prototypal application we have also developed and tested with players a platform game. In the same vein, we asked to a group of game developers to test FUN PLEdGE.     

Virtual reality software package for implementing motor learning and rehabilitation experiments

Virtual reality games for rehabilitation are attracting increasing growth. In particular, there is a demand for games that allow therapists to identify an individual’s difficulties and customize the control of variables, such as speed, size, distance, as well as visual and auditory feedback. This study presents and describes a virtual reality software package (Bridge Games) to promote rehabilitation of individuals living with disabilities and highlights preliminary researches of its use for implementing motor learning and rehabilitation. First, the study presents seven games in the software package that can be chosen by the rehabilitation team, considering the patient’s needs. All game characteristics are described including name, function presentation, objective and valuable measurements for rehabilitation. Second, preliminary results illustrate some applications of two games, considering 343 people with various disabilities and health status. Based on the results, in the Coincident Timing game, there was a main effect of movement sensor type (in this instance the most functional device was the keyboard when compared with Kinect and touch screen) on average time reached by sample analyzed, F(2, 225) = 4.42, p < 0.05. Similarly, in the Challenge! game, a main effect was found for movement sensor type. However, in this case, touch screen provided better performance than Kinect and Leap Motion, F(2, 709) = 5.90, p < 0.01. Thus, Bridge Games is a possible software game to quantify motor learning. Moreover, the findings suggest that motor skills might be practiced differently depending on the environmental interface in which the game may be used.     

An instrument to build a gamer clustering framework according to gaming preferences and habits

In the era of digital gaming, there is a pressing need to better understand how people's gaming preferences and habits affect behavior and can inform educational game design. However, instruments available for such endeavor are rather informal and limited, lack proper evaluation, and often yield results that are hard to interpret. In this paper we present the design and preliminary validation (involving N = 754 Spanish secondary school students) of a simple instrument that, based on a 10-item Game Preferences Questionnaire (GPQ), classifies participants into four ‘clusters’ or types of gamers, allowing for easy interpretation of the results. These clusters are: (1) Full gamers, covering individuals that play all kinds of games with a high frequency; (2) Hardcore gamers, playing mostly first-person shooters and sport games; (3) Casual gamers, playing moderately musical, social and thinking games; and (4) Non-gamers, who do not usually play games of any kind. The instrument may have uses in psychology and behavioral sciences, as there is evidence suggesting that attitudes towards gaming affects personal attitudes and behavior. Besides, we propose applying the instrument to help designers of educational games to get better tailored their games to their target audiences.     

On the effect of quantum noise in a quantum prisoner’s dilemma cellular automaton

The disrupting effect of quantum noise on the dynamics of a spatial quantum formulation of the iterated prisoner’s dilemma game with variable entangling is studied in this work. The game is played in the cellular automata manner, i.e., with local and synchronous interaction. It is concluded in this article that quantum noise induces in fair games the need for higher entanglement in order to make possible the emergence of the strategy pair (Q, Q), which produces the same payoff of mutual cooperation. In unfair quantum versus classic player games, quantum noise delays the prevalence of the quantum player.     

Improving Skills and Perception in Robot Navigation by an Augmented Virtuality Assistance System

Successful navigation in a teleoperation scenario requires a good level of situational or environmental awareness. This paper presents the main features and capabilities of a new augmented virtuality-based system aimed at providing users with improved perception of the robot’s remote environment. With this purpose, a mixed-perspective exocentric display (ME3D), and a video centric display (VC2D) are compared. Both interfaces were implemented on a mobile robot and experiments were performed in a real working scenario. To assess this contribution, this works analyzes the teleoperation capability, performance, and human workload of users by means of NASA-TLX (Task Load Index). The results show that participants experienced a reduction in the driving workload and showed high degrees of acceptance for the proposed ME3D interface.     

Parallelizing Complex Streaming Applications on Distributed Scratchpad Memory Multicore Architecture

Multicore processors can provide sufficient computing power and flexibility for complex streaming applications, such as high-definition video processing. For less hardware complexity and power consumption, the distributed scratchpad memory architecture is considered, instead of the cache memory architecture. However, the distributed design poses new challenges to programming. It is difficult to exploit all available capabilities and achieve maximal throughput, due to the combined complexity of inter-processor communication, synchronization, and workload balancing. In this study, we developed an efficient design flow for parallelizing multimedia applications on a distributed scratchpad memory multicore architecture. An application is first partitioned into streaming components and then mapped onto multicore processors. Various hardware-dependent factors and application-specific characteristics are involved in generating efficient task partitions and allocating resources appropriately. To test and verify the proposed design flow, three popular multimedia applications were implemented: a full-HD motion JPEG decoder, an object detector, and a full-HD H.264/AVC decoder. For demonstration purposes, SONY PlayStation \(^{\circledR }\) 3 was selected as the target platform. Simulation results show that, on PS3, the full-HD motion JPEG decoder with the proposed design flow can decode about 108.9 frames per second (fps) in the 1080p format. The object detection application can perform real-time object detection at 2.84 fps at \(1280 \times 960\) resolution, 11.75 fps at \(640 \times 480\) resolution, and 62.52 fps at \(320 \times 240\) resolution. The full-HD H.264/AVC decoder applications can achieve nearly 50 fps.     

The effects of cognitive capacity and gaming expertise on attention and comprehension

Educational video games can impose high cognitive demands on its users. Two studies were conducted to examine the cognitive process involved in playing an educational digital game. Study 1 examined the effects of users' working memory capacity and gaming expertise on attention and comprehension of the educational messages. The results showed that gaming experts seem to benefit more from having a higher working memory capacity when processing information from the game. However, gaming experts' available working memory did not predict better comprehension. Instead, non‐experts' available working memory predicted better comprehension. Study 2 further examined whether these results were caused by insufficient working memory allocation or different attention focus between gaming experts and non‐experts. The findings suggest that gaming experts approach the game differently from non‐experts, focusing on familiar features and overlooking unfamiliar (educational) information.     

When Can Limited Randomness Be Used in Repeated Games?

The central result of classical game theory states that every finite normal form game has a Nash equilibrium, provided that players are allowed to use randomized (mixed) strategies. However, in practice, humans are known to be bad at generating random-like sequences, and true random bits may be unavailable. Even if the players have access to enough random bits for a single instance of the game their randomness might be insufficient if the game is played many times. In this work, we ask whether randomness is necessary for equilibria to exist in finitely repeated games. We show that for a large class of games containing arbitrary two-player zero-sum games, approximate Nash equilibria of the n-stage repeated version of the game exist if and only if both players have Ω(n) random bits. In contrast, we show that there exists a class of games for which no equilibrium exists in pure strategies, yet the n-stage repeated version of the game has an exact Nash equilibrium in which each player uses only a constant number of random bits. When the players are assumed to be computationally bounded, if cryptographic pseudorandom generators (or, equivalently, one-way functions) exist, then the players can base their strategies on “random-like” sequences derived from only a small number of truly random bits. We show that, in contrast, in repeated two-player zero-sum games, if pseudorandom generators do not exist, then Ω(n) random bits remain necessary for equilibria to exist.