Exploring mischief and mayhem in social computing or: how we learned to stop worrying and love the trolls

In this paper, we explore the role of mischief as borderline socially acceptable behaviour within social computing applications. Mischievous activity pushes the boundaries of the implicit social contract present in all online social systems, and, we argue, is of vital importance understanding online social interactions. Using examples from games and other applications, we explore mischief as an act of appropriation, which reinterprets mechanics defined by developers in unexpected and sometimes upsetting ways. Although frequently interpreted as negative and anti-social behaviour, we argue that mischief serves a vital social role, and find surprising richness in the chaos

Towards a generic method of evaluating game levels

This paper addresses the problem of evaluating the quality of game levels across different games and even genres, which is of key importance for making procedural content generation and assisted game design tools more generally applicable. Three game design patterns are identified for having high generality while being easily quantifiable: area control, exploration and balance. Formulas for measuring the extent to which a level includes these concepts are proposed, and evaluation functions are derived for levels in two different game genres: multiplayer strategy game maps and single-player roguelike dungeons. To illustrate the impact of these evaluation functions, and the similarity of impact across domains, sets of levels for each function are generated using a constrained genetic algorithm. The proposed measures can easily be extended to other game genres.This research was supported, in part, by the FP7 ICT project SIREN (project no: 258453) and by the FP7 ICT project C2Learn (project no: 318480).peer-reviewe

A Framework for Exploring and Evaluating Mechanics in Human Computation Games

Human computation games (HCGs) are a crowdsourcing approach to solving computationally-intractable tasks using games. In this paper, we describe the need for generalizable HCG design knowledge that accommodates the needs of both players and tasks. We propose a formal representation of the mechanics in HCGs, providing a structural breakdown to visualize, compare, and explore the space of HCG mechanics. We present a methodology based on small-scale design experiments using fixed tasks while varying game elements to observe effects on both the player experience and the human computation task completion. Finally we discuss applications of our framework using comparisons of prior HCGs and recent design experiments. Ultimately, we wish to enable easier exploration and development of HCGs, helping these games provide meaningful player experiences while solving difficult problems.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure

Qualitative Evaluation of Latency and Packet Loss in a Cloud-based Games

On-demand multimedia services are more popularthan ever and continue to grow. Consumers can now streammusic, movies, television, and video games at the push of abutton. Such services typically require a minimum connectionspeed to support streaming. However, transient network effectssuch as packet loss and delay variation can play a crucial role indetermining the user quality of experience (QoE) in streamingmultimedia systems. This paper will seek to establish thesubjective impact of negative network effects on the userexperience of a popular cloud-based on-demand video gameservice