Surveillant assemblages of governance in massively multiplayer online games:a comparative analysis

This paper explores governance in Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), one sub-sector of the digital games industry. Informed by media governance studies, Surveillance Studies, and game studies, this paper identifies five elements which form part of the system of governance in MMOGs. These elements are: game code and rules; game policies; company community management practices; player participatory practices; and paratexts. Together these governance elements function as a surveillant assemblage, which relies to varying degrees on lateral and hierarchical forms of surveillance, and the assembly of human and nonhuman elements.Using qualitative mixed methods we examine and compare how these elements operate in three commercial MMOGs: Eve Online, World of Warcraft and Tibia. While peer and participatory surveillance elements are important, we identified two major trends in the governance of disruptive behaviours by the game companies in our case studies. Firstly, an increasing reliance on automated forms of dataveillance to control and punish game players, and secondly, increasing recourse to contract law and diminishing user privacy rights. Game players found it difficult to appeal the changing terms and conditions and they turned to creating paratexts outside of the game in an attempt to negotiate the boundaries of the surveillant assemblage. In the wider context of self-regulated governance systems these trends highlight the relevance of consumer rights, privacy, and data protection legislation to online games and the usefulness of bringing game studies and Surveillance Studies into dialogue

Evaluation of a Pervasive Game for Domestic Energy Engagement Among Teenagers

In this article, we present Power Agent—a pervasive game designed to encourage teenagers and their families to reduce energy consumption in the home. The ideas behind this mobile phonebased game are twofold; to transform the home environment and its devices into a learning arena for hands-on experience with electricity usage and to promote engagement via a team competition scheme. We report on the game’s evaluation with six teenagers and their families who played the game for ten days in two cities in Sweden. Data collection consisted of home energy measurements before, during, and after a game trial, in addition to interviews with participants at the end of the evaluation. The results suggest that the game concept was highly efficient in motivating and engaging the players and their families to change their daily energy-consumption patterns during the game trial. Although the evaluation does not permit any conclusions as to whether the game had any postgame effects on behavior, we can conclude that the pervasive persuasive game approach appears to be highly promising in regard to energy conservation and similar fields or issues

Exploiting General-Purpose In-Game Behaviours to Predict Players Churn in Gameful Systems

The value of a game is assessed by measuring the intensity of the level of activity of its players. No matter how thoroughly though the design is, the litmus test is whether players keep using it or not. To reduce the number of abandoning players, it is important to detect in time the subjects at risk. In the literature, many works are targeting this issue. However, the main focus has been on entertainment games, from which articulated indicators of in-game behaviors can be extracted. Those features tend to be context-specific and, even when they are not, they are proper of full-featured games, and thus, impossible to adapt to other systems such as games with a purpose and gamified apps. In this preliminary work, we fed to an Artificial Neural Network general-purpose in-game behaviors, such as participation data, to predict when a player will definitively leave the game. Moreover, we study the appropriate amount of information, in terms of players’ history, that should be considered when predicting players’ churn. Our use case study is an on-the-field long-lasting persuasive gameful system

WRITING FOR EACH OTHER: DYNAMIC QUEST GENERATION USING IN SESSION PLAYER BEHAVIORS IN MMORPG

Role-playing games (RPGs) rely on interesting and varied experiences to maintain player attention. These experiences are often provided through quests, which give players tasks that are used to advance stories or events unfolding in the game. Traditional quests in video games require very specific conditions to be met, and for participating members to advance them by carrying out pre-defined actions. These types of quests are generated with perfect knowledge of the game world and are able to force desired behaviors out of the relevant non-player characters (NPCs). This becomes a major issue in massive multiplayer online (MMO) when other players can often disrupt the conditions needed for quests to unfold in a believable and immersive way, leading to the absence of a genuine multiplayer RPG experience. Our proposed solution is to dynamically create quests from real-time information on the unscripted actions of other NPCs and players in a game. This thesis shows that it is possible to create logical quests without global information knowledge, pre-defined story-trees, or prescribed player and NPC behavior. This allows players to become involved in storylines without having to perform any specific actions. Results are shown through a game scenario created from the Panoptyk Engine, a game engine in early development designed to test AI reasoning with information and the removal of the distinction between NPC and human players. We focus on quests issued by the NPC faction leaders of several in-game groups known as factions. Our generated quests are created logically from the pre-defined personality of each NPC leader, their memory of previous events, and information given to them by in-game sources. Long-spanning conflicts are seen to emerge from factions issuing quests against each other; these conflicts can be represented in a coherent narrative. A user study shows that players felt quests were logical, that players were able to recognize quests were based on events happening in the game, and that players experienced follow-up consequences from their actions in quests

Feasibility of applied gaming during interdisciplinary rehabilitation for patients with complex chronic pain and fatigue complaints:A mixed-methods study

Background:  Applied gaming holds potential as a convenient and engaging means for the delivery of behavioral interventions. For developing and evaluating feasible computer-based interventions, policy makers and designers rely on limited knowledge about what causes variation in usage. Objective:  In this study, we looked closely at why and by whom an applied game (LAKA) is demanded and whether it is feasible (with respect to acceptability, demand, practicality, implementation, and efficacy) and devised a complementary intervention during an interdisciplinary rehabilitation program (IRP) for patients with complex chronic pain and fatigue complaints. Methods:  A mixed-methods design was used. Quantitative process analyses and assessments of feasibility were carried out with patients of a Dutch rehabilitation center who received access to LAKA without professional support during a 16-week interdisciplinary outpatient program. The quantitative data included records of routinely collected baseline variables (t0), additional surveys to measure technology acceptance before (t1) and after 8 weeks of access to LAKA (t2), and automatic log files of usage behavior (frequency, length, and progress). Subsequently, semistructured interviews were held with purposively selected patients. Interview codes triangulated and illustrated explanations of usage and supplemented quantitative findings on other feasibility domains. Results:  Of the 410 eligible patients who started an IRP during the study period, 116 patients participated in additional data collections (108 with problematic fatigue and 47 with moderate or severe pain). Qualitative data verified that hedonic motivation was the most important factor for behavioral intentions to use LAKA (P<.001). Moreover, quotes illustrated a positive association between usage intentions (t1) and baseline level (t0) coping by active engagement (Spearman ρ=0.25; P=.008) and why patients who often respond by seeking social support were represented in a group of 71 patients who accessed the game (P=.034). The median behavioral intention to use LAKA was moderately positive and declined over time. Twenty patients played the game from start to finish. Behavioral change content was recognized and seen as potentially helpful by interview respondents who exposed themselves to the content of LAKA. Conclusions:  Variation in the demand for applied gaming is generally explained by perceived enjoyment and effort and by individual differences in coping resources. An applied game can be offered as a feasible complementary intervention for more patients with complex chronic pain or fatigue complaints by embedding and delivering in alignment with patient experiences. Feasibility, effectiveness, and cost-effectiveness can be evaluated in a full-scale evaluation. New observations elicit areas of further research on the usage of computer-based interventions