“Game over, man. Game over”:looking at the Alien in film and videogames

In this article we discuss videogame adaptations of the Alien series of films, in particular Alien: Colonial Marines (2013) and Alien: Isolation (2014). In comparing critical responses and developer commentary across these texts, we read the very different affective, aesthetic and socio-political readings of the titular alien character in each case. The significant differences in what it means to ‘look’ at this figure can be analyzed in terms of wider storytelling techniques that stratify remediation between film and games. Differing accounts of how storytelling techniques create intensely ‘immersive’ experiences such as horror and identification—as well as how these experiences are valued—become legible across this set of critical contexts. The concept of the ‘look’ is developed as a comparative series that enables the analysis of the affective dynamics of film and game texts in terms of gender-normative ‘technicity’, moving from the ‘mother monster’ of the original film to the ‘short controlled burst’ of the colonial marines and finally to the ‘psychopathic serendipity’ of Alien: Isolation

Merging of opinions in game-theoretic probability

This paper gives game-theoretic versions of several results on "merging of opinions" obtained in measure-theoretic probability and algorithmic randomness theory. An advantage of the game-theoretic versions over the measure-theoretic results is that they are pointwise, their advantage over the algorithmic randomness results is that they are non-asymptotic, but the most important advantage over both is that they are very constructive, giving explicit and efficient strategies for players in a game of prediction.Comment: 26 page

Fixpoint Games on Continuous Lattices

Many analysis and verifications tasks, such as static program analyses and model-checking for temporal logics reduce to the solution of systems of equations over suitable lattices. Inspired by recent work on lattice-theoretic progress measures, we develop a game-theoretical approach to the solution of systems of monotone equations over lattices, where for each single equation either the least or greatest solution is taken. A simple parity game, referred to as fixpoint game, is defined that provides a correct and complete characterisation of the solution of equation systems over continuous lattices, a quite general class of lattices widely used in semantics. For powerset lattices the fixpoint game is intimately connected with classical parity games for $\mu$-calculus model-checking, whose solution can exploit as a key tool Jurdzi\'nski's small progress measures. We show how the notion of progress measure can be naturally generalised to fixpoint games over continuous lattices and we prove the existence of small progress measures. Our results lead to a constructive formulation of progress measures as (least) fixpoints. We refine this characterisation by introducing the notion of selection that allows one to constrain the plays in the parity game, enabling an effective (and possibly efficient) solution of the game, and thus of the associated verification problem. We also propose a logic for specifying the moves of the existential player that can be used to systematically derive simplified equations for efficiently computing progress measures. We discuss potential applications to the model-checking of latticed $\mu$-calculi and to the solution of fixpoint equations systems over the reals

Recall and recognition of in-game advertising : the role of game control

Digital gaming has become one of the largest entertainment sectors worldwide, increasingly turning the medium into a promising vehicle for advertisers. As a result, the inclusion of advertising messages in digital games or in-game advertising (IGA) is expected to grow steadily over the course of the following years. However, much work is still needed to maximize the effectiveness of IGA. The aim of the study was to contribute to IGA effectiveness research by analyzing the impact of two factors on the processing of IGA in terms of brand awareness. The primary objective was to investigate the effect of a person’s sense of involvement related to the control and movement mechanisms in a game (i.e. kinesthetic involvement). A within-subjects experiment was conducted in which control over a racing game was varied by manipulating game controller type, resulting in two experimental conditions (symbolic versus mimetic controller). Results show that the variation in game controller has a significant effect on the recall and recognition of the brands integrated into the game, and that this effect can be partially brought back to players’ perceived control over the game: when a game is easier to control, the control mechanisms require less conscious attention, freeing attentional resources that can be subsequently spent on other elements of the game such as IGA. A second factor that was taken into account in the study was brand prominence. The influence of both the size and spatial position of in-game advertisements was examined. Findings demonstrate that there are significant changes in effectiveness between different types of placements. Spatial position seems to be the most important placement characteristic, with central brand placements obtaining the highest recall and recognition scores. The effect of ad size is much smaller, with the effectiveness of the large placements not differing significantly from the effectiveness of their smaller counterparts

Reducing the number of inputs in nonlocal games

In this work we show how a vector-valued version of Schechtman's empirical method can be used to reduce the number of inputs in a nonlocal game $G$ while preserving the quotient $\beta^*(G)/\beta(G)$ of the quantum over the classical bias. We apply our method to the Khot-Vishnoi game, with exponentially many questions per player, to produce another game with polynomially many ($N\approx n^8$) questions so that the quantum over the classical bias is $\Omega (n/\log^2 n)$

Inside the Mind of McMillen

The paper discusses how Edmund McMillen created “The Binding of Isaac”. It goes into his inspirations, influences, and his background leading up to the game. It then describes the game, going into its mechanics, design, art and story and how each of these elements were unique and risky to put into an Indie game. I discussed how “The Binding of Isaac” brought in fresh, new elements that most mainstream games wouldn’t dare touch, and despite that “Binding of Isaac” accomplished amazing success. Then, I talk about how the game was initially made by a group of two people, and was made with no intention of being a success (they explained they made the game for themselves), but I concluded that over the time the game formed into a game made by the community, making it greater than any other mainstream game. Edmund values feedback from the community, often promoting mods, fanart, and suggestions. Most of the DLCs McMillen created later consisted a lot of the items, bosses, and dungeons made from fans alone. In conclusion, “The Binding of Isaac” lead Indie games to a whole new pathway and welcomed innovation and uniqueness, and over time became something even greater than any other game, a game created by the love and support of not only McMillen himself, but the fans as well