Re-engineering jake2 to work on a grid using the GridGain Middleware

With the advent of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), engineers and designers of games came across with many questions that needed to be answered such as, for example, "how to allow a large amount of clients to play simultaneously on the same server?", "how to guarantee a good quality of service (QoS) to a great number of clients?", "how many resources will be necessary?", "how to optimize these resources to the maximum?". A possible answer to these questions relies on the usage of grid computing. Taking into account the parallel and distributed nature of grid computing, we can say that grid computing allows for more scalability in terms of a growing number of players, guarantees shorter communication time between clients and servers, and allows for a better resource management and usage (e.g., memory, CPU, core balancing usage, etc.) than the traditional serial computing model. However, the main focus of this thesis is not about grid computing. Instead, this thesis describes the re-engineering process of an existing multiplayer computer game, called Jake2, by transforming it into a MMOG, which is then put to run on a grid

INVISIBLE LABOR FOR DATA: INSTITUTIONS, INFRASTRUCTURE, AND VIRTUAL SPACE

Americans are accustomed to a wide range of data collection in their lives: census, polls, surveys, user registrations, and disclosure forms. When logging onto the Internet, users’ actions are being tracked everywhere: clicking, typing, tapping, swiping, searching, and placing orders. All of this data is stored to create data-driven profiles of each user. Social network sites, furthermore, set the voluntarily sharing of personal data as the default mode of engagement. But people’s time and energy devoted to creating this massive amount of data, on paper and online, are taken for granted. Few people would consider their time and energy spent on data production as labor. Even if some people do acknowledge their labor for data, they believe it is accessory to the activities at hand. In the face of pervasive data collection and the rising time spent on screens, why do people keep ignoring their labor for data? How has labor for data been become invisible, as something that is disregarded by many users? What does invisible labor for data imply for everyday cultural practices in the United States? Invisible Labor for Data addresses these questions. I argue that three intertwined forces contribute to framing data production as being void of labor: data production institutions throughout history, the Internet’s technological infrastructure (especially with the implementation of algorithms), and the multiplication of virtual spaces. There is a common tendency in the framework of human interactions with computers to deprive data and bodies of their materiality. My Introduction and Chapter 1 offer theoretical interventions by reinstating embodied materiality and redefining labor for data as an ongoing process. The middle Chapters present case studies explaining how labor for data is pushed to the margin of the narratives about data production. I focus on a nationwide debate in the 1960s on whether the U.S. should build a databank, contemporary Big Data practices in the data broker and the Internet industries, and the group of people who are hired to produce data for other people’s avatars in the virtual games. I conclude with a discussion on how the new development of crowdsourcing projects may usher in the new chapter in exploiting invisible and discounted labor for data

Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Models

We introduce Voyager, the first LLM-powered embodied lifelong learning agent in Minecraft that continuously explores the world, acquires diverse skills, and makes novel discoveries without human intervention. Voyager consists of three key components: 1) an automatic curriculum that maximizes exploration, 2) an ever-growing skill library of executable code for storing and retrieving complex behaviors, and 3) a new iterative prompting mechanism that incorporates environment feedback, execution errors, and self-verification for program improvement. Voyager interacts with GPT-4 via blackbox queries, which bypasses the need for model parameter fine-tuning. The skills developed by Voyager are temporally extended, interpretable, and compositional, which compounds the agent's abilities rapidly and alleviates catastrophic forgetting. Empirically, Voyager shows strong in-context lifelong learning capability and exhibits exceptional proficiency in playing Minecraft. It obtains 3.3x more unique items, travels 2.3x longer distances, and unlocks key tech tree milestones up to 15.3x faster than prior SOTA. Voyager is able to utilize the learned skill library in a new Minecraft world to solve novel tasks from scratch, while other techniques struggle to generalize. We open-source our full codebase and prompts at https://voyager.minedojo.org/.Comment: Project website and open-source codebase: https://voyager.minedojo.org

온라인 게임과 컨텐트 공유 네트워크 분석을 통한 온라인 군집 현상의 이해

학위논문 (박사)-- 서울대학교 대학원 : 전기·컴퓨터공학부, 2015. 2. 권태경.Quantification of collective human behavior and understanding the group characteristics in the Internet is important in user behavior studies since people tend to gather together and form groups due to their inherent nature. On the Internet, people are also often forming a group for a specific purpose such as i) an online group in games (e.g., MMORPGs) to experience various social interactions with other players or accomplish a difficult quest with teammates or ii) a swarm in peer-to-peer network to share a content to utilize a higher download rate with an availability. To this end, we studied the two most well-known major applications in the Internet that people are actively using with different purposesi) MMORPGs and ii) BitTorrent. In this dissertation, we analyze the i) group activities of users in Aion, one of the largest MMORPGs, based on the records of the activities of 94,497 users and ii) crowd phenomena of BitTorrent. First, in a case study of Aion, we focus on (i) how social interactions within a group differ from the ones across groups, (ii) what makes a group rise, sustain, or fall, (iii) how group members join and leave a group, and (iv) what makes a group end. We first find that structural patterns of social interactions within a group are more likely to be close-knit and reciprocative than the ones across groups.We also observe that members in a rising group (i.e., the number of members increases) are more cohesive, and communicate with more evenly within the group than the ones in other groups. Our analysis further reveals that if a group is not cohesive, not actively communicating, or not evenly communicating among members, members of the group tend to leave. Second, we investigate what kinds of crowd phenomena of content exist and why different patterns of crowd phenomena appears and how we can exploit content crowd phenomena considering the content category, publisher, and population of content in BitTorrent. To this end,We conduct comprehensive measurements on content locality in one of the largest BitTorrent portals: The Pirate Bay. In particular, we focus on (i) how content is consumed from spatial and temporal perspectives, (ii) what makes content be consumed with disparity in spatial and temporal domains, and (iii) how we can exploit the content locality. We find that content consumption in real swarms is 4.56 times and 1.46 times skewed in spatial (country) and temporal (time) domains, respectively. We observe that a cultural factor (e.g., language) mainly affects spatial locality of content. Not only the time-sensitivity of content but also the publishing purpose affects temporal locality of content.We reveal that spatial locality of content iii rarely changes on a daily basis (microscopic level), but there is notably spatial spread of content consumption over the years (macroscopic level). Based on the observation, we conduct simulations to show that bundling and caching can exploit the content locality.Abstract . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ii I. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1.1 Crowd Phenomena in Massively Multi-player Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 1.2 Crowd Phenomena in BitTorrent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 II. RelatedWork . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 2.1 Crowd Phenomena in MMORPGs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 2.1.1 Social Interactions in MMORPGs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 2.1.2 Group Activities in MMORPGs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 2.1.3 Group Activities in Other Online Services . . . . . . . . . . 7 2.2 Crowd Phenomena (Locality) in BitTorrent . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 2.2.1 Peer Localization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 2.2.2 Crowd Phenomena in BitTorrent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 2.2.3 Locality in Other Domains . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 III. Group Activities in Online Social Game . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 3.1 Aion overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 3.1.1 Game Features . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 3.1.2 Datasets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 3.2 Group Affiliation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 v 3.2.1 How prevalent are group activities in Aion? . . . . . . . . . 14 3.2.2 Effect of Joining a Group . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 3.2.3 Social Interactions Within a Group . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 3.3 Group Dynamics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 3.3.1 Group Cohesion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 3.3.2 Group Diversity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 3.3.3 Group Locality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 3.3.4 Survival Rate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 3.3.5 Dichotomy in Stable Groups . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 3.4 Group Network . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 3.4.1 Properties of the Group Network . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 3.4.2 Structural Holes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 3.5 Implications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 3.5.1 Why people leave groups? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 3.5.2 Why a group ends? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 IV. Crowd phenomena of BitTorrent in Spatial and Temporal Perspective 46 4.1 Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 4.1.1 Discovering Swarm Topology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 4.1.2 Dataset . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 4.1.3 Representativeness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 4.2 Spatial Locality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 4.2.1 Locality Metrics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 4.2.2 Swarm, Community, and Neighbor . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 vi 4.2.3 Content Categories, Publishers, and Popularity . . . . . . . 55 4.2.4 Spatial Locality Over Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 4.3 Temporal Locality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 4.3.1 Existence of Temporal Locality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 4.3.2 Categories, Publishers, and Popularity . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 4.3.3 Temporal Usage Trends . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 4.4 How to Exploit Locality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 V. Summary & Future Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76Docto

Strategic Latency Unleashed: The Role of Technology in a Revisionist Global Order and the Implications for Special Operations Forces

The article of record may be found at https://cgsr.llnl.govThis work was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in part under Contract W-7405-Eng-48 and in part under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344. The views and opinions of the author expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of the United States government or Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC. ISBN-978-1-952565-07-6 LCCN-2021901137 LLNL-BOOK-818513 TID-59693This work was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in part under Contract W-7405-Eng-48 and in part under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344. The views and opinions of the author expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of the United States government or Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC. ISBN-978-1-952565-07-6 LCCN-2021901137 LLNL-BOOK-818513 TID-5969

Modes of Esports Engagement in Overwatch

This Open Access book provides a comprehensive review of the rapidly developing esport phenomenon by examining one of its contemporary flagship titles, Overwatch (Blizzard Entertainment 2016), through three central themes and from a rich variety of research methods and perspectives. As a game with more than 40 million individual players, an annual international World Cup, and a franchised professional league with teams from Canada, China, Europe, South Korea, and the US, Overwatch provides a multifaceted perspective to the cultural, social, and economic topics associated with the development of esports, which has begun to attract attention from both commercial and academic audiences. The book starts with an introduction chapter to Overwatch and esports engagement in general, co-authored by the editors. This is followed by 15 unique chapters from scholars within the field of game cultures and esports, representing ten different nationalities. The contributions construct thematic sections that divide the book into three parts: Players, Diverse Audiences? and Fan & Fiction Work. As such, the parts provide a wide-ranging overview of esport engagement, thus disclosing the phenomenon’s cross-cultural, transmedial, and interconnected relations that have not been probed earlier in a single anthology

Critical play: an action research investigation

Given the convergence of game consumption and production in recent years, the field of art education has theorized play as a learning mechanism and developed various ways to include games into educational settings. However, the cultural ideologies and practices within gaming cultures have not gone unchallenged, and the classroom application of these practices also has its problems. Without addressing these issues when appropriating and utilizing games, educators risk further indoctrinating and assimilating students as players into hegemonic structures. This study aimed to expand the concept of critical play developed by Flanagan (2009) for pedagogical purposes. Critical play as defined in this dissertation refers to when a player is able to engage with game as a complicated system related to the society at large and intentionally modify it based on political concerns, in game-based art pedagogy. Specifically, I used an action research approach to examine how to facilitate critical play of video games among youth in a library setting. I proposed a topology of critical play as the theoretical and curricular framework for this dissertation. This study found that the technological capabilities of the facilitator and participants, the moral developmental differences between the facilitator and participants, and the roles that the facilitator and participants played in the pedagogical exchanges were of particular significance to how to facilitate critical play. In addition, the processes of understanding, critiquing, and modifying in the topology of critical play each provided a significant function that when taken together allowed participants to play critically. Furthermore, I came to the conclusion that the development of critical play among youth was contingent upon an affinity group that focused on transgression as its shared endeavor. In sum, this study further complicated teaching criticality as articulated by Williamson (1981), Turnbull (1998), and Buckingham (2003) through the specific case of critical video games play

2010 GREAT Day Program

SUNY Geneseo’s Fourth Annual GREAT Day. This file has a supplement of three additional pages, linked in this record.https://knightscholar.geneseo.edu/program-2007/1004/thumbnail.jp

Modes of Esports Engagement in Overwatch

This Open Access book provides a comprehensive review of the rapidly developing esport phenomenon by examining one of its contemporary flagship titles, Overwatch (Blizzard Entertainment 2016), through three central themes and from a rich variety of research methods and perspectives. As a game with more than 40 million individual players, an annual international World Cup, and a franchised professional league with teams from Canada, China, Europe, South Korea, and the US, Overwatch provides a multifaceted perspective to the cultural, social, and economic topics associated with the development of esports, which has begun to attract attention from both commercial and academic audiences. The book starts with an introduction chapter to Overwatch and esports engagement in general, co-authored by the editors. This is followed by 15 unique chapters from scholars within the field of game cultures and esports, representing ten different nationalities. The contributions construct thematic sections that divide the book into three parts: Players, Diverse Audiences? and Fan & Fiction Work. As such, the parts provide a wide-ranging overview of esport engagement, thus disclosing the phenomenon’s cross-cultural, transmedial, and interconnected relations that have not been probed earlier in a single anthology