Multimodal augmented reality tangible gaming

This paper presents tangible augmented reality gaming environment that can be used to enhance entertainment using a multimodal tracking interface. Players can interact using different combinations between a pinch glove, a Wiimote, a six-degrees-of-freedom tracker, through tangible ways as well as through I/O controls. Two tabletop augmented reality games have been designed and implemented including a racing game and a pile game. The goal of the augmented reality racing game is to start the car and move around the track without colliding with either the wall or the objects that exist in the gaming arena. Initial evaluation results showed that multimodal-based interaction games can be beneficial in gaming. Based on these results, an augmented reality pile game was implemented with goal of completing a circuit of pipes (from a starting point to an end point on a grid). Initial evaluation showed that tangible interaction is preferred to keyboard interaction and that tangible games are much more enjoyable.     

Towards computer game studies

It is relatively stress-free to write about computer games as nothing too much has been said yet, and almost anything goes. The situation is pretty much the same when it comes to writing about games and gaming in general. The sad fact with alarming cumulative consequences is that they are under-theorized; there are Huizinga, Caillois and Ehrmann of course, and libraries full of board game studies,in addition to game theory and bits and pieces of philosophy – most notably those of Wittgenstein – but they won't get us very far with computer games. So if there already is or soon will be a legitimate field for computer game studies, this field is also very open to intrusions and colonisations from the already organized scholarly tribes. Resisting and beating them is the goal of our first survival game in this paper, as what these emerging studies need is independence, or at least relative independence.     

What Drives People to Continue to Play Online Games? An Extension of Technology Model and Theory of Planned Behavior

Online gaming has become one of the fastest growing entertainment industries on the Internet over the past decade. However, little is known about why people continue to play certain online games or which design factors are most closely related to the amount of time spent by players at particular online gaming sites. The purpose of this study is to propose a theoretical research model, which integrates flow experience, human–computer interaction, social interaction, and perceived enjoyment, together with the technology acceptance model and theory of planned behavior to explain why people continue to play online games. The proposed model was examined through an empirical study involving 415 participants using structural equation modeling techniques. The results found that player attitudes, subjective norms, perceived behavioral control, flow experience, and perceived enjoyment have a positive influence on players' continued intention to play online games and explain about 70% of variance. In addition, implications for online games development are discussed.     

EEG-based BCI and video games: a progress report

This paper presents a systematic review of electroencephalography (EEG)-based brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) used in the video games, a vibrant field of research that touches upon all relevant questions concerning the future directions of BCI. The paper examines the progress of BCI research with regard to games and shows that gaming applications offer numerous advantages by orienting BCI to concerns and expectations of a gaming application. Different BCI paradigms are investigated, and future directions are discussed.     

A hybrid edge-cloud architecture for reducing on-demand gaming latency

The cloud was originally designed to provide general-purpose computing using commodity hardware and its focus was on increasing resource consolidation as a means to lower cost. Hence, it was not particularly adapted to the requirements of multimedia applications that are highly latency sensitive and require specialized hardware, such as graphical processing units. Existing cloud infrastructure is dimensioned to serve general-purpose workloads and to meet end-user requirements by providing high throughput. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of using this general-purpose infrastructure for serving latency-sensitive multimedia applications. In particular, we examine on-demand gaming, also known as cloud gaming, which has the potential to change the video game industry. We demonstrate through a large-scale measurement study that the existing cloud infrastructure is unable to meet the strict latency requirements necessary for acceptable on-demand game play. Furthermore, we investigate the effectiveness of incorporating edge servers, which are servers located near end-users (e.g., CDN servers), to improve end-user coverage. Specifically, we examine an edge-server-only infrastructure and a hybrid infrastructure that consists of using edge servers in addition to the cloud. We find that a hybrid infrastructure significantly improves the number of end-users served. However, the number of satisfied end-users in a hybrid deployment largely depends on the various deployment parameters. Therefore, we evaluate various strategies that determine two such parameters, namely, the location of on-demand gaming servers and the games that are placed on these servers. We find that, through both a careful selection of on-demand gaming servers and the games to place on these servers, we significantly increase the number of end-users served over the basic random selection and placement strategies.     

具有情感和语音交互能力的虚拟人系统

计算机能与人类进行具有情感和自然和谐的交互是计算机应用领域一项富有挑战性的课题。该文依据马斯洛的需求层次论构建了虚拟人情感交互系统，讨论了生理需求和安全需求及它们对情感的影响，并结合西米诺夫情绪信息论构建了虚拟人情感模型。还论述了虚拟人语音交互系统的实现，通过实验表明，虚拟人能够和人进行具有情感和自然的交互。     

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。     

Gaze controlled games

The quality and availability of eye tracking equipment has been increasing while costs have been decreasing. These trends increase the possibility of using eye trackers for entertainment purposes. Games that can be controlled solely through movement of the eyes would be accessible to persons with decreased limb mobility or control. On the other hand, use of eye tracking can change the gaming experience for all players, by offering richer input and enabling attention-aware games. Eye tracking is not currently widely supported in gaming, and games specifically developed for use with an eye tracker are rare. This paper reviews past work on eye tracker gaming and charts future development possibilities in different sub-domains within. It argues that based on the user input requirements and gaming contexts, conventional computer games can be classified into groups that offer fundamentally different opportunities for eye tracker input. In addition to the inherent design issues, there are challenges and varying levels of support for eye tracker use in the technical implementations of the games.     

Let’s Get Physical! In, Out and Around the Gaming Circle of Physical Gaming at Home

Physical gaming is a genre of computer games that has recently been made available for the home. But what does it mean to bring games home that were originally designed for play in the arcade? This paper describes an empirical study that looks at physical gaming and how it finds its place in the home. We discuss the findings from this study by organizing them around four topics: the adoption of the game, its unique spatial needs, the tension between visibility and availability of the game, and what it means to play among what we describe as the gaming circle, or players and non-players alike. Finally, we discuss how physical gaming in the home surfaces questions and issues for householders and researchers around adoption, gender and both space and place.     

Power up! Using Digital Gaming Techniques to Enhance Library Instruction

ABSTRACT

Incorporating digital gaming into education is an increasingly popular topic in academia. Educators’ views of digital gaming (e.g., computer, video, and online games) have shifted from categorizing these games as an entertaining, yet pedagogically void activity to a promising medium that engages students in the learning process. With over 70% of college students enthusiastically playing digital games, educators are tapping into digital gaming as an effective means to teach millennials problem solving and communication skills. This article investigates gamer characteristics, motivational and engaging aspects of digital games, and the parallels between gaming and the information retrieval process. The authors build on this information to present approaches to incorporate digital gaming techniques into the library classroom since it is not feasible for all libraries to create instructional digital games.     

High-resolution gaming: Interfaces,notifications, and the user experience

Advances in technology and display hardware have allowed the resolution of monitors – and video games – to incrementally improve over the past three decades. However, little research has been done in preparation for the resolutions that will be available in the future if this trend continues. We developed a number of display prototypes to explore the different aspects of gaming on large, high-resolution displays.By running a series of experiments, we were not only able to evaluate the benefits of these displays for gaming, but also identify potential user interface and hardware issues that can arise. Building on these results, various interface designs were developed to better notify the user of passive and critical game information as well as to overcome difficulties with mouse-based interaction on these displays. Different display form factors and user input devices are also explored in order to determine how they can further enhance the gaming experience. In many cases, the new techniques can be applied to single-monitor games and solve the same problems in real-world, high-resolution applications.     

The effect of flow experience on player loyalty in mobile game application

Mobile gaming is an emerging with highly competitive industry. There are hundreds of games launched per day in the past two years. To understand whether factors influence the player loyalty (PL) of game users through flow experience, this study tested the proposed hypothesis by administering a questionnaire survey on the mobile game application “Tower of Saviors”. A structural equation modelling analysis and the FsQCA method were adopted to explore the survey responses of 394 players who were recruited for this study. According to the empirical study results, human–computer interaction (HI), social interaction (SI), skill (S), and challenge (C) independently positive influenced flow experience, and further positively influenced the PL of mobile game users. This study contributes to the literature on flow theory by elucidating the influence of player behavior on their PL. In particular, the higher the C and SI are, the more the game challenges experienced players and facilitates interactions with each other, thereby raising PL.     

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.     

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.     

Fast ray tracing and the potential effects on graphics and gaming courses

The modern graphics processing units (GPUs), found on almost every personal computer, use the z-buffer algorithm to compute visibility. Ray tracing, an alternative to the z-buffer algorithm, delivers higher visual quality than the z-buffer algorithm but has historically been too slow for interactive use. However, ray tracing has benefited from improvements in computer hardware, and many believe it will replace the z-buffer algorithm as the graphics engine on PCs. If this replacement happens, it will imply fundamental changes in both the API to and capabilities of 3D graphics engines. This paper overviews the backgrounds in z-buffer and ray tracing, presents our case that ray tracing will replace z-buffer in the near future, and discusses the implications for graphics oriented classes should this switch to ray tracing occur. Since computer gaming is one of the most important industry driving graphics hardware and the fact that recently there are many computer science courses related to games and games development, we also describe the potential impact on games related classes.     

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.     

Personalise your massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) with Artemis

Better mobile computing, broadband and devices have contributed to the fast growth and popularity of massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs). Players are now expecting a more personalised gaming experience as personalisation has begun to filter into most games and not just MMOGs. In this paper, we explain how players of MMOGs can enjoy a ubiquitous and personalised gaming experience anywhere, on any device, and on any network with Artemis. MPEG-7 is not traditionally used for modelling games; however, Artemis adopts MPEG-7 for modelling the player, their device and the game, in conjunction with genetic algorithms for personalising the game, where possible.     

Psychosocial causes and consequences of pathological gaming

Pathological use of computer and video games has been associated with indicators of psychosocial well-being, such as loneliness, low self-esteem, low social competence, and low life satisfaction. However, few studies have decisively demonstrated whether these indicators of psychosocial well-being are causes or consequences of pathological gaming. To address this gap in the literature, we conducted a two-wave panel study among 851 Dutch adolescents (543 gamers). Causal relations were analyzed using autoregressive structural equation models. These analyses indicated that social competence, self-esteem, and loneliness were significant predictors of pathological gaming six months later. Thus, lower psychosocial well-being can be considered an antecedent of pathological gaming among adolescent gamers. Our analyses further indicated that loneliness was also a consequence of pathological gaming. This suggests that displacement of real-world social interaction resulting from pathological use of video games may deteriorate existing relationships, which could explain the increase in adolescent gamers’ feelings of loneliness.     

Performance Characterization of Game Recommendation Algorithms on Online Social Network Sites

Since years,online social networks have evolved from profile and communication websites to online portals where people interact with each other,share and consume multimedia-enriched data and play different types of games.Due to the immense popularity of these online games and their huge revenue potential,the number of these games increases every day,resulting in a current offering of thousands of online social games.In this paper,the applicability of neighborhood-based collaborative filtering(CF) algorithms for the recommendation of online social games is evaluated.This evaluation is based on a large dataset of an online social gaming platform containing game ratings(explicit data) and online gaming behavior(implicit data) of millions of active users.Several similarity metrics were implemented and evaluated on the explicit data,implicit data and a combination thereof.It is shown that the neighborhood-based CF algorithms greatly outperform the content-based algorithm,currently often used on online social gaming websites.The results also show that a combined approach,i.e.,taking into account both implicit and explicit data at the same time,yields overall good results on all evaluation metrics for all scenarios,while only slightly performing worse compared to the strengths of the explicit or implicit only approaches.The best performing algorithms have been implemented in a live setup of the online game platform.     

Developing serious games for cultural heritage: a state-of-the-art review

Although the widespread use of gaming for leisure purposes has been well documented, the use of games to support cultural heritage purposes, such as historical teaching and learning, or for enhancing museum visits, has been less well considered. The state-of-the-art in serious game technology is identical to that of the state-of-the-art in entertainment games technology. As a result, the field of serious heritage games concerns itself with recent advances in computer games, real-time computer graphics, virtual and augmented reality and artificial intelligence. On the other hand, the main strengths of serious gaming applications may be generalised as being in the areas of communication, visual expression of information, collaboration mechanisms, interactivity and entertainment. In this report, we will focus on the state-of-the-art with respect to the theories, methods and technologies used in serious heritage games. We provide an overview of existing literature of relevance to the domain, discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the described methods and point out unsolved problems and challenges. In addition, several case studies illustrating the application of methods and technologies used in cultural heritage are presented.