Perceived control and gender difference on the relationship between trialability and intent to play new online games

With the growing number of online game players and the increasing of new online games development, it is imperative for marketers to develop a better understanding of players’ new game adoption decisions. This study examines perceived control as a mediator of trialability-product adoption relationship, and gender difference as a moderator of the relationship between trialability-product adoptions. A field survey was conducted to test the hypotheses of the study. Respondents were graduate students from Taiwan universities. A total of 411 undergraduate students with massively multiplayer online gaming (MMOGs) experience participated in this study. The structural equation model (SEM) method was employed to analyze the data. The findings indicate that perceived product trialability has a direct influence on intent to play new games, and indirect effects through perceived process control. Gender differences also moderate the trialability effects on the adoption of new online games. Perceived trialability had more of an effect on intention to play new online games for female players than for male players. To develop an effective product development and communication strategy, the finding suggests that online game firms should focus on new product characteristics and consider consumer gender differences.     

The moderating role of locus of control on the links between experiential motives and intention to play online games

Online games represent a burgeoning market sector with growth potential. The distinctive entertainment-oriented features of such games provide experiential motives for users. However, most previous studies have focused on the single dimensional affective motive of online game use. The multi-dimensional affective motivational aspects of entertainment technologies have been relatively neglected. In addition, previous studies report inconsistent relationships between motives and online game usage. To fill these gaps in the literature, the present study proposes five experiential motives such as concentration, enjoyment, escape, epistemic curiosity, and social affiliation as predictors of intention to play online games. External locus of control is also introduced as a moderator in the links between experiential motives and intention. The model was tested with the data from 576 current online game players who answered online survey. Structural equation model analysis confirmed that three experiential motives with the exception of concentration and epistemic curiosity have a positive effect on intention. χ² difference test confirmed that the coefficients linking experiential motives such as concentration, enjoyment, and escape to intention are higher for people with external locus of control than for people with internal locus of control. Implications are discussed in conclusion.     

What makes good games go viral? The role of technology use,efficacy, emotion and enjoyment in players’ decision to share a prosocial digital game

Serious digital games may be an effective tool for prosocial message dissemination because they offer technology and experiences that encourage players to share them with others, and spread virally. But little is known about the factors that predict players’ willingness to share games with others in their social network. This panel study explores how several factors, including sharing technology use, emotional responses, and game enjoyment, contribute to players’ decision to share the game Darfur is Dying, with others. College students played the game and completed questionnaires that assessed whether they had shared the games at two different time points: during game play and after game play. Positive emotions predicted sharing while students played the game, but negative emotions predicted whether the game was shared after initial game play. Game enjoyment predicted players’ intentions to share the game, but it did not predict actual sharing behavior. Neither players’ general use of sharing technologies nor their satisfaction related to sharing digital content predicted sharing intentions or behavior. These findings have implications for the study of viral social marketing campaigns, and serious game design and theory.     

基于神经网络求解游戏关卡问题

随着网络游戏的流行,玩家越来越关注游戏的智能化。本文基于人工神经网络中的BP网络算法建立了一个自动过关模型,此模型根据游戏中的不同环境输入神经元,经过隐含神经的不断学习,输出正确的路径,实验表明此模型能够有效地解决游戏关卡问题,并和遗传算法,情境法进行了对比。     

What's in a name? Ages and names predict the valence of social interactions in a massive online game

Multi-player online battle arena games (MOBAs) are large virtual environments requiring complex problem-solving and social interaction. We asked whether these games generate psychologically interesting data about the players themselves. Specifically, we asked whether user names, which are chosen by players outside of the game itself, predicted in-game behaviour. To examine this, we analysed a large anonymized dataset from a popular MOBA (‘League of Legends’) – by some measures the most popular game in the world.We find that user names contain two pieces of information that correlate with in-game social behaviour. Both player age (estimated from numerical sequences within name) and the presence of highly anti-social words are correlated with the valences of player/player interactions within the game.Our findings suggest that players' real-world characteristics influence behaviour and interpersonal interactions within online games. Anonymized statistics derived from such games may therefore be a valuable tool for studying psychological traits across global populations.     

An empirical study of early access games on the Steam platform

“Early access” is a release strategy for software that allows consumers to purchase an unfinished version of the software. In turn, consumers can influence the software development process by giving developers early feedback. This early access model has become increasingly popular through digital distribution platforms, such as Steam which is the most popular distribution platform for games. The plethora of options offered by Steam to communicate between developers and game players contribute to the popularity of the early access model. The model is considered a success by the game development community as several games using this approach have gained a large user base (i.e., owners) and high sales. On the other hand, the benefits of the early access model have been questioned as well. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study on 1,182 Early Access Games (EAGs) on the Steam platform to understand the characteristics, advantages and limitations of the early access model. We find that 15% of the games on Steam make use of the early access model, with the most popular EAG having as many as 29 million owners. 88% of the EAGs are classified by their developers as so-called “indie” games, indicating that most EAGs are developed by individual developers or small studios. We study the interaction between players and developers of EAGs and the Steam platform. We observe that on the one hand, developers update their games more frequently in the early access stage. On the other hand, the percentage of players that review a game during its early access stage is lower than the percentage of players that review the game after it leaves the early access stage. However, the average rating of the reviews is much higher during the early access stage, suggesting that players are more tolerant of imperfections in the early access stage. The positive review rate does not correlate with the length or the game update frequency of the early access stage. Based on our findings, we suggest game developers to use the early access model as a method for eliciting early feedback and more positive reviews to attract additional new players. In addition, our findings suggest that developers can determine their release schedule without worrying about the length of the early access stage and the game update frequency during the early access stage.     

RTS游戏中用户行为的神经网络预测模型

即时战略游戏(简称RTS游戏)中,用户的行为由于游戏自身庞大的决策空间而难以预测.针对这个问题,提出了通过对RTS游戏的对战记录进行分析,建立5种结构的神经网络模型来预测用户行为的方法.模型考虑了不同时间片的状态对于决策行为的影响,设计了单时间片输入和双时间片输入的神经网络,并与基于动态贝叶斯网络的模型进行了比较.实验结果表明,基于单时间片输入的神经网络模型能够更加快速地完成训练过程并达到满意的预测准确度.     

Exploration of Player Behaviours from Broadcast Badminton Videos

Understanding an opposing player's behaviours and weaknesses is often the key to winning a badminton game. This study presents a system to extract game data from broadcast badminton videos, and visualize the extracted data to help coaches and players develop effective tactics. Specifically, we apply state-of-the-art machine learning methods to partition a broadcast video into segments, in which each video segment shows a badminton rally. Next, we detect players' feet in each video frame and transform the player positions into the court coordinate system. Finally, we detect hit frames in each rally, in which the shuttle moves towards the opposite directions. By visualizing the extracted data, our system conveys when and where players hit the shuttle in historical games. Since players tend to smash or drop shuttles under a specific location, we provide users with interactive tools to filter data and focus on the distributions conditioned by player positions. This strategy also reduces visual clutter. Besides, our system plots the shuttle hitting distributions side-by-side, enabling visual comparison and analysis of player behaviours under different conditions. The results and the use cases demonstrate the feasibility of our system.     

Learning in multilevel games with incomplete information. II

Multilevel games are abstractions of situations where decision makers are distributed in a network environment. In Part I of this paper, the authors present several of the challenging problems that arise in the analysis of multilevel games. In this paper a specific set up is considered where the two games being played are zero-sum games and where the decision makers use the linear reward-inaction algorithm of stochastic learning automata. It is shown that the effective game matrix is decided by the willingness and the ability to cooperate and is a convex combination of two zero-sum game matrices. Analysis of the properties of this effective game matrix and the convergence of the decision process shows that players tend toward noncooperation in these specific environments. Simulation results illustrate this noncooperative behavior.     

Stop talking and type: comparing virtual and face‐to‐face mentoring in an epistemic game

Research has shown that computer games and other virtual environments can support significant learning gains because they allow young people to explore complex concepts in simulated form. However, in complex problem‐solving domains, complex thinking is learned not only by taking action, but also with the aid of mentors who provide guidance in the form of questions, instructions, advice, feedback and encouragement. In this study, we examine one context of such mentoring to understand the impact of replacing face‐to‐face interactions between mentors and students with virtual, chat‐based interactions. We use pre‐ and post‐measures of learning and a post‐measure of engagement, as well as epistemic network analysis (ENA), a novel quantitative method, to examine student and mentor discourse. Our results suggest that mentoring via online chat can be as effective as mentoring face‐to‐face in appropriately structured contexts more generally – and that ENA may be a useful tool for assessing student and mentor discourse in the context of learning interactions.     

Creating scalable location-based games: lessons from Geocaching

Location-based games seek to move computer gaming out from behind the PC and into the “real world” of cities, streets, parks, and other locations. This real-world physicality makes the experience fun for game players, yet it brings the unique challenge of creating and orchestrating such a game. That is, location-based games are often difficult to create, grow, and maintain over long periods of time. Our research investigates how location-based games can be designed to overcome this challenge of scalability. We studied the well-established location-based game of Geocaching through active participation and an online survey to better understand how it has succeeded in maintaining user involvement and growth over the last decade. Findings show that Geocaching benefits by having players directly create game content, including both lightweight and elaborate creations. Geocaching has also made it simple for players to perform game orchestration by monitoring game content, other players, and even non-players. We then characterize location-based games according to various attributes and suggest how the lessons learned from Geocaching could be applied more generally to the design of other location-based games and in which cases they should not be applied.     

IOCP机制在P2P网络游戏中的应用

大型网络游戏作为一种分布式系统在高峰时要承载巨量用户在线负荷,这就对大型网络游戏通信系统的设计提出了非常高的要求。如何提高系统玩家承载量,使系统具有良好的伸缩性,以及如何利用有限的带宽为玩家带来一致而平滑的游戏已成为人们关注的焦点。通过对当前游戏开发技术的考察发现:在传统的网络游戏开发过程中,多是基于C/S模型,服务器在多人在线的情况下承受着巨大的压力。虽然也有基于P2P的网络游戏,但是对多个玩家同时在线支持不够。针对上述问题,文章提出将IOCP的模型应用在对等网络(P2P)模型的客户端中,以增强对等网中每个节点计算机的承载能力,从而降低主服务器的负载量。     

A model of cognitive loads in massively multiplayer online role playing games

Being one of the most commercially successful entertainment software applications, massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs) continue to expand in term of the revenue they generate as well as the involvement of users who congregate in their virtual space and form communities around them to support each other. Unlike conventional offline computer games, or networked games with limited numbers of players, MMORPGs are not merely software applications as they are usually seen as a space with complicated dynamics of social interactions. Hence, it is believed that playing these games might cause cognitive overload problems among the players as they have to constantly interact with the game world as well as with other users. We conducted an exploratory study using qualitative methods to explore cognitive overloads in Maple Story, a typical MMORPG. Our results reveal that several types of cognitive overloads emerge during the game playing. While some of these overloads pose serious problems even to expert players, players seem to develop strategies to overcome them. It is found that some forms of cognitive load are actually desirable in order to make the game challenging. We have also created a set of recommendations that can help game developers handle cognitive load problems in MMORPGs.     

Participatory Design of a Hybrid Kinect Game to Promote Collaboration between Autistic Players and Their Peers

ABSTRACT

We report on the participatory design of a hybrid two-player Kinect game to encourage complex emotion recognition and collaboration between autistic people and their peers. From its inception, autistic college students have been involved in an iterative process to design, evaluate, and redesign the game. The emotion recognition game has two playing phases. In the first phase, the players independently assemble pieces in a digital puzzle. In the second phase, players communicate in-person to agree on the appropriate emotion for the context and construct the emotional face for the body they have assembled together. We also designed collaborative reward games that require the two players to cooperate and one that encourages players to look at each other. In order to assess the level of in-game cooperation, we added a face tracking component that automatically quantifies collaboration and can replace time-consuming hand-coded evaluations. We report on how this game was designed and built by a team of autistic students, their peer mentors, a psychologist, computer scientists, and a graphic artist. Preliminary observations show that modeling of emotion recognition and collaboration by peers with stronger social skills is emerging as a central aspect of the effectiveness of our game. The participatory process has led to several design changes including one that dramatically increased player collaboration. We share insights and lessons learned that can guide others working in participatory design.     

Ball tracking and 3D trajectory approximation with applications to tactics analysis from single-camera volleyball sequences

Providing computer-assisted tactics analysis in sports is a growing trend. This paper presents an automatic system for ball tracking and 3D trajectory approximation from single-camera volleyball sequences as well as demonstrates several applications to tactics analysis. Ball tracking in volleyball video has great complexity due to the high density of players on the court and the complicated overlapping of ball-player. The 2D-to-3D inference is intrinsically challenging due to the loss of 3D information in projection to 2D frames. To overcome these challenges, we propose a two-phase ball tracking algorithm in which we first detect ball candidates for each frame, and then use them to compute the ball trajectories. With the aid of camera calibration, we involve physical characteristics of ball motion to approximate the 3D ball trajectory from the 2D trajectory. The visualization of 3D trajectory and the applications to trajectory-based tactics analysis not only assist the coaches and players in game study but also make game watching a whole new experience. The experiments on international volleyball games show encouraging results. We believe that the proposed framework can be extended and applied to various kinds of sports games.     

Ambidextrous Innovation and Game Market Fit Performance: Feedback from Game Testers

ABSTRACT

The dynamics of the market pose a challenge for the digital game industry. Game development firms must develop innovative games to satisfy game players’ ever-changing needs and sustain a suitable product/market fit. To realize such innovation, developers tend to adopt an ambidextrous approach that includes exploratory and exploitative activities to develop games. In addition, game development teams must rely on feedback from game testers to enhance development and meet game players’ needs. However, the effect of feedback on innovation is subject to debate. Some studies have proposed that feedback has potentially negative effects on creativity. Given the prevalence of ambidextrous innovation and the utilization of feedback from game testers, no study to date has investigated the effects of feedback on game development quality. A survey of 119 paired game producers and developers revealed that “feedback timing” from game testers positively enhances the relationship between ambidextrous innovation and a game’s final development performance, whereas “feedback specificity” impairs the effectiveness of ambidextrous innovation. This paper discusses the implications of this study.     

DIAGAL: An Agent Communication Language Based on Dialogue Games and Sustained by Social Commitments

In recent years, social commitment based approaches have been proposed to solve problems issuing from previous mentalistic based semantics for agent communication languages. This paper follows the same line of thought since it presents the latest version of our dialogue game based agent communication language – DIAlogue-Game based Agent Language (DIAGAL) – which allows agents to manipulate the public layer of social commitments through dialogue, by creating, canceling and updating their social commitments. To make apparent such commitments, we consider here Agent Communication Language (ACL) from the dialectic point of view, where agents “play a game” based on commitments. Such games based on commitments are incorporated in the DIAGAL language, which has been developed having in mind the following questions: (a) What kind of structure does the game have? How are rules specified within the game? (b) What kind of games compositions are allowed? (c) How do participants in conversations reach agreement on the current game? How are games opened or closed? Using such games we show how we can study the commitments dynamic to model agent dialogue and we present metrics that can be used to evaluate the quality of a dialogue between agents. Next, we use an example (summer festival organization) to show how DIAGAL can be used in analyzing and modeling automated conversations in offices. Finally, we present the results and analysis of the summer festival simulations that we realized through our dialogue game simulator (DGS).     

Effect of Network Quality on Player Departure Behavior in Online Games

Understanding the impact of network conditions on player satisfaction, which is one of the major concerns of network game designers, is a popular research topic. Of the various ways to gauge user satisfaction, in this paper, we focus on how network quality affects a player's decision to leave a game prematurely. To answer this question, we analyze a 1,356-million-packet trace from a large commercial massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) called ShenZhou Online. We show that both network delay and network loss significantly affect a player's decision to leave a game prematurely. It is feasible to predict whether players will quit prematurely based on the network conditions they experience. The proposed model can determine the relative impact of different types of network impairment. For our traces, the degrees of player intolerance to network delay, delay jitter, client packet loss, and server packet loss are in the proportion of 1:2:4:3 approximately. The model can also be used to make system design decisions. Through simulations, we show that by prioritizing server processing according to the goodness of network conditions, employing dejitter buffers, or replacing TCP with a more lightweight transport protocol, the probability of premature departure can be significantly reduced. In this way, we demonstrate how our model of players' network experience provides feedback for the design of online games.     

基于LSP代理的网络游戏加速方法

随着网络条件的改善,网络游戏正在成为一种新兴的网络应用服务。与其他互联网应用服务不同,网络游戏需要网络延时和抖动的QoS。通过对网络游戏所需的网络环境进行分析,提出一种增强网络游戏体验的网络优化方法,通过LSP客户端代理游戏用户的网络通信,使用加速服务端对游戏的通信路由进行优化,形成一个能够大幅提升用户游戏体验的游戏加速方法,保证网络游戏所需的低延时和低抖动的网络要求,最后现网测试数据表明该方法有效且高效。     

When and why is perceived congruity important for in-game advertising in fantasy games?

The present study investigates how the perceived congruity (the perceived level of fit between the execution of the in-game ad and the game environment) of in-game advertising (IGA) in fantasy games affects both players' attitude towards the IGA and their play intention of the fantasy game in which it is embedded, and how these effects are moderated by perceived IGA interactivity. An experimental study with actual fantasy game players (N = 619) following a 2 (Congruent IGA − Incongruent IGA) × 2 (Interactive IGA – Non-interactive IGA) between-subjects design was conducted. The results indicate that the perceived congruity of IGA reduces the perceived intrusiveness of the IGA and positively contributes to the perceived realism of the fantasy game. Intrusiveness and realism, in turn, influence players’ attitude towards the IGA and their play intention of the fantasy game. Whilst the positive effect of perceived congruity through intrusiveness is reinforced by the perceived interactivity of the IGA, the effect of perceived congruity through realism is attenuated by perceived interactivity.