A Design Exploration of Affective Gaming

Physiological sensing has been a prominent fixture in games user research (GUR) since the late 1990s, when researchers began to explore its potential to enhance and understand experience within digital game play. Since these early days, it has been widely argued that “affective gaming”—in which gameplay is influenced by a player’s emotional state—can enhance player experience by integrating physiological sensors into play. In this thesis, I conduct a design exploration of the field of affective gaming by first, systematically exploring the field and creating a framework (the affective game loop) to classify existing literature; and second by presenting two design probes, to probe and explore the design space of affective games contextualized within the affective game loop: In the Same Boat and Commons Sense. The systematic review explored this unique design space of affective gaming, opening up future avenues for exploration. The affective game loop was created as a way to classify the physiological signals and sensors most commonly used in prior literature within the context of how they are mapped into the gameplay itself. Findings suggest that the physiological input mappings can be more action-based (e.g., affecting mechanics in the game such as the movement of the character) or more context-based (e.g., affecting things like environmental or difficulty variables in the game). Findings also suggested that while the field has been around for decades, there is still yet to be any commercial successes, so does physiological interaction really heighten player experience? This question instigated the design of the two probes, exploring ways to implement these mappings and effectively heighten player experience. In the Same Boat (Design Probe One) is an embodied mirroring game designed to promote an intimate interaction, using players’ breathing rate and facial expressions to control movement of a canoe down a river. Findings suggest that playing In the Same Boat fostered the development of affiliation between the players, and that while embodied controls were less intuitive, people enjoyed them more, indicating the potential of embodied controls to foster social closeness in synchronized play over a distance. Commons Sense (Design Probe Two) is a communication modality intended to heighten audience engagement and effectively capture and communicate the audience experience, using a webcam-based heart rate detection software that takes an average of each spectator’s heart rate as input to affect in-game variables such as lighting and sound design, and game difficulty. Findings suggest that Commons Sense successfully facilitated the communication of audience response in an online entertainment context—where these social cues and signals are inherently diminished. In addition, Commons Sense is a communication modality that can both enhance a play experience while offering a novel way to communicate. Overall, findings from this design exploration shows that affective games offer a novel way to deliver a rich gameplay experience for the player

CAPTCHA Types and Breaking Techniques: Design Issues, Challenges, and Future Research Directions

The proliferation of the Internet and mobile devices has resulted in malicious bots access to genuine resources and data. Bots may instigate phishing, unauthorized access, denial-of-service, and spoofing attacks to mention a few. Authentication and testing mechanisms to verify the end-users and prohibit malicious programs from infiltrating the services and data are strong defense systems against malicious bots. Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) is an authentication process to confirm that the user is a human hence, access is granted. This paper provides an in-depth survey on CAPTCHAs and focuses on two main things: (1) a detailed discussion on various CAPTCHA types along with their advantages, disadvantages, and design recommendations, and (2) an in-depth analysis of different CAPTCHA breaking techniques. The survey is based on over two hundred studies on the subject matter conducted since 2003 to date. The analysis reinforces the need to design more attack-resistant CAPTCHAs while keeping their usability intact. The paper also highlights the design challenges and open issues related to CAPTCHAs. Furthermore, it also provides useful recommendations for breaking CAPTCHAs

Advanced Biometric Technologies: Emerging Scenarios and Research Trends

Biometric systems are the ensemble of devices, procedures, and algorithms for the automatic recognition of individuals by means of their physiological or behavioral characteristics. Although biometric systems are traditionally used in high-security applications, recent advancements are enabling the application of these systems in less-constrained conditions with non-ideal samples and with real-time performance. Consequently, biometric technologies are being increasingly used in a wide variety of emerging application scenarios, including public infrastructures, e-government, humanitarian services, and user-centric applications. This chapter introduces recent biometric technologies, reviews emerging scenarios for biometric recognition, and discusses research trends

Parsing consumption preferences of music streaming audiences

As demands for insights on music streaming listeners continue to grow, scientists and industry analysts face the challenge to comprehend a mutated consumption behavior, which demands a renewed approach to listener typologies. This study aims to determine how audience segmentation can be performed in a time-relevant and replicable manner. Thus, it interrogates which parameters best serve as indicators of preferences to ultimately assist in delimiting listener segments. Accordingly, the primary objective of this research is to develop a revised typology that classifies music streaming listeners in the light of the progressive phenomenology of music listening. The hypothesis assumes that this could be solved by positioning listeners – rather than products – at the center of streaming analysis and supplementing sales- with user-centered metrics. The empirical research of this paper was based on grounded theories, enriched by analytical case studies. For this purpose, behavioral and psychological research results were interconnected with market analysis and streaming platform usage data. Analysis of the results demonstrates that a concatenation of multi-dimensional data streams facilitates the derivation of a typology that is applicable to varying audience pools. The findings indicate that for the delimitation of listener types, the motivation, and listening context are essential key constituents. Since these variables demand insights that reach beyond existing metrics, descriptive data points relating to the listening process are subjoined. Ultimately, parameter indexation results in listener profiles that offer novel access points for investigations, which make imperceptible, interdisciplinary correlations tangible. The framework of the typology can be consulted in analytical and creational processes. In this respect, the results of the derived analytical approach contribute to better determine and ultimately satisfy listener preferences.Während die Nachfrage nach Erkenntnissen über Musik-Streaming-Hörer kontinuierlich steigt, stehen Wissenschaftler sowie Industrieanalysten einem geänderten Konsumptions- verhalten gegenüber, das eine überarbeitete Hörertypologie fordert. Die vorliegende Studie erörtert, wie eine Hörersegmentierung auf zeitgemäße und replizierbare Weise umgesetzt werden kann. Demnach beschäftigt sie sich mit der Frage, welche Parameter am besten als Indikatoren für Hörerpräferenzen dienen und wie diese zur Abgrenzung der Publikumsseg- mente beitragen können. Dementsprechend ist es das primäre Ziel dieser Forschung, eine überarbeitete Typologie aufzustellen, die Musik-Streaming-Hörer in Anbetracht der progressiven Erscheinungsform des Musikhörens klassifiziert. Die Hypothese nimmt an, dass dies realisierbar ist, wenn der Hörer – anstelle von Produkten – im Zentrum der Streaming-Analyse steht und absatzzen- trierte durch hörerzentrierte Messungen ergänzt werden. Die empirische Forschung basiert auf systematischen Theorien, untermauert durch analytische Fallbeispiele. Hierfür werden psychologische und verhaltenswissenschaftliche Forschungserkenntnisse mit Marktanalysen und Nutzerdaten von Musikstreaming-Portalen fusioniert. Die Analyse der Ergebnisse verdeutlicht, dass eine Verkettung von multidimensionalen Rohdaten die Erhebung einer Typologie ermöglicht, die auf mehrere Hörergruppen anwend- bar ist. Die Befunde signalisieren, dass die Hörmotivation und der Hörkontext bei der Abgrenzung der Publikumstypen Schlüsselelemente darstellen. Da diese Variablen spezifis- che Kenntnisse fordern, die über vorliegende Kennzahlen hinausgehen, werden deskriptive Datenpunkte über den Hörvorgang ergänzt. Letztlich, resultiert die Indexierung der Pa- rameter in Hörerprofilen, die neue Zugangspunkte für Untersuchungen bieten, die nicht ersichtliche, interdisziplinäre Korrelationen greifbar machen. Das Gerüst der Hörertypologie kann sowohl in Erstellungs- als auch in Analyseprozessen herangezogen werden. Somit tragen die Ergebnisse der entwickelten Analysemethode zum Verständnis und letztlich zur Erfüllung von Hörerpräferenzen bei

Solving key design issues for massively multiplayer online games on peer-to-peer architectures

Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) are increasing in both popularity and scale on the Internet and are predominantly implemented by Client/Server architectures. While such a classical approach to distributed system design offers many benefits, it suffers from significant technical and commercial drawbacks, primarily reliability and scalability costs. This realisation has sparked recent research interest in adapting MMOGs to Peer-to-Peer (P2P) architectures. This thesis identifies six key design issues to be addressed by P2P MMOGs, namely interest management, event dissemination, task sharing, state persistency, cheating mitigation, and incentive mechanisms. Design alternatives for each issue are systematically compared, and their interrelationships discussed. How well representative P2P MMOG architectures fulfil the design criteria is also evaluated. It is argued that although P2P MMOG architectures are developing rapidly, their support for task sharing and incentive mechanisms still need to be improved. The design of a novel framework for P2P MMOGs, Mediator, is presented. It employs a self-organising super-peer network over a P2P overlay infrastructure, and addresses the six design issues in an integrated system. The Mediator framework is extensible, as it supports flexible policy plug-ins and can accommodate the introduction of new superpeer roles. Key components of this framework have been implemented and evaluated with a simulated P2P MMOG. As the Mediator framework relies on super-peers for computational and administrative tasks, membership management is crucial, e.g. to allow the system to recover from super-peer failures. A new technology for this, namely Membership-Aware Multicast with Bushiness Optimisation (MAMBO), has been designed, implemented and evaluated. It reuses the communication structure of a tree-based application-level multicast to track group membership efficiently. Evaluation of a demonstration application shows i that MAMBO is able to quickly detect and handle peers joining and leaving. Compared to a conventional supervision architecture, MAMBO is more scalable, and yet incurs less communication overheads. Besides MMOGs, MAMBO is suitable for other P2P applications, such as collaborative computing and multimedia streaming. This thesis also presents the design, implementation and evaluation of a novel task mapping infrastructure for heterogeneous P2P environments, Deadline-Driven Auctions (DDA). DDA is primarily designed to support NPC host allocation in P2P MMOGs, and specifically in the Mediator framework. However, it can also support the sharing of computational and interactive tasks with various deadlines in general P2P applications. Experimental and analytical results demonstrate that DDA efficiently allocates computing resources for large numbers of real-time NPC tasks in a simulated P2P MMOG with approximately 1000 players. Furthermore, DDA supports gaming interactivity by keeping the communication latency among NPC hosts and ordinary players low. It also supports flexible matchmaking policies, and can motivate application participants to contribute resources to the system

DevOps for Trustworthy Smart IoT Systems

ENACT is a research project funded by the European Commission under its H2020 program. The project consortium consists of twelve industry and research member organisations spread across the whole EU. The overall goal of the ENACT project was to provide a novel set of solutions to enable DevOps in the realm of trustworthy Smart IoT Systems. Smart IoT Systems (SIS) are complex systems involving not only sensors but also actuators with control loops distributed all across the IoT, Edge and Cloud infrastructure. Since smart IoT systems typically operate in a changing and often unpredictable environment, the ability of these systems to continuously evolve and adapt to their new environment is decisive to ensure and increase their trustworthiness, quality and user experience. DevOps has established itself as a software development life-cycle model that encourages developers to continuously bring new features to the system under operation without sacrificing quality. This book reports on the ENACT work to empower the development and operation as well as the continuous and agile evolution of SIS, which is necessary to adapt the system to changes in its environment, such as newly appearing trustworthiness threats