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

Chilltime’s online game expansion into targeted countries in the MENA and East-Asia region

Being the most innovator Portuguese company in the online gaming industry, Chilltime aims to expand its leading game, World War Online, into targeted countries in the MENA and East- Asia countries. Already present in more than 100 countries and with more than 10 000 active players, the company expects to have his game released worldwide for the mobile platform, with players from every country fighting to be the ultimate winner. The motivation for this dissertation was to write a case study about a company in its early years and analyse the strategic and marketing approaches that better suits its final objective of having an effective and efficient market development. The main challenge of the company is to understand the feasibility of investing in the marketing development in countries with cultures and behaviours much different from the Europeans. With a study of the market potential in each country, it is concluded that countries in the Middle East and East-Asia have a higher probability of becoming profitable for the company. Such is due to the higher number of online people and smartphone users, the easiness to adapt the game to the local culture and the monetization potential that these regions offer to the company. It is given some recommendation on the best online and offline marketing strategies that can lead to an efficient market development.Sendo a empresa portuguesa mais inovadora na indústria de jogos online, Chilltime tem como objetivo expandir o seu jogo, World War Online, para mercados selecionados do Médio Oriente, Norte de África e Este Asiático. Disponível em mais de 100 países e com mais de 10 000 jogadores ativos, a empresa pretende ter o seu jogo distribuído por todo o mundo, com jogadores de todos os países a lutar com o objetivo de serem o vencedor final. Este projeto tem a intenção de escrever um caso de estudo sobre uma empresa nos seus anos iniciais, analisando as estratégias de marketing que combinam com o seu objetivo de ter um desenvolvimento de mercado eficiente. O desafio principal é entender a viabilidade de investimento no desenvolvimento de mercado em países com culturas e comportamentos diferentes dos europeus. Ao analisar o potencial de mercado de cada país, conclui-se que os países do Médio Oriente e Este Asiático têm um maior potencial de serem mais lucrativos para a empresa, devido ao elevado número de pessoas online e de usuários de smartphones, à facilidade de adaptação do jogo à cultural local e ao potencial de monetização destas regiões. Por fim, são dadas recomendações das formas online e offline mais eficazes para um desenvolvimento de mercado eficiente

Associations between attention deficit hyperactivity and internet gaming disorder symptoms: is there consistency across types of symptoms, gender and countries?

Background: Videogame addiction has been suggested as a tentative disorder in 2013 by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and was recently officially recognized as a mental health disorder by the World Health Organization (WHO). Although a few studies have identified attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) as a key risk factor for Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD), the interplay between ADHD and IGD symptoms with gender differences across cultures remains to be further examined. Objective: This study examined the moderating effects of gender in the association between ADHD and IGD across two nations. Method: A cross-sectional online survey was developed to recruit 164 Australian (Mage = 23.01, SD = 3.35, Minage = 18, Maxage = 31, Males n = 121, 73.80%) and 457 U.S.-North American (Mage = 25.25 years, SD = 2.76, Minage = 18 years, Maxage = 29 years, Males = 265, 57.98%) Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) players aged between 18 and 29 years. Results: The hierarchical linear regression, moderation and moderated moderation analyses revealed that participants presenting greater inattention and hyperactivity symptoms exhibited higher levels of IGD-related behaviors in the two samples. Moreover, these associations differed across genders between the two countries. Specifically, more hyperactive-impulsive, as well as inattentive males in the USA presented higher levels of disordered gaming. Conclusion: The results highlight the need for more cross-cultural and symptom-focused research in the broader IGD field

“It taught me to hate them all.”: Toxicity through DOTA 2’s Players, Systems, and Media Dispositive

‘Toxicity’ has become a pervasive term for describing and discussing online game communities,but exactly what constitutes toxicity remains loosely defined. This project seeks to uncover how toxicity is constructed and understood within a game community described from inside and out as toxic. After situating toxicity within prior academic literature on toxicity’s constitutive elements such as griefing, trolling, flaming and racism online, this project focuses on the DOTA 2 community. It examines how the game’s culture operates throughout what Mirko Tobias Schäfer referred to as the media dispositive, or the collection of sites and discourses that the community engages with that overlap with the in-game experience. Throughout the dispositive certain voices are sanctioned by the game’s company, Valve, while others are silenced by the affordances of the dispositive’s sites and game’s culture. The final section of this work explores the in-game experience through ethnographic, interview, and participant observation data, to uncover how players perceive toxicity in-game. This work finds that toxicity is in part reflective of and formed by the broader culture of the game as discovered through an analysis of the dispositive, but that players possess highly subjective ideas about what constitutes toxicity that they tend to universalize, which strengthens toxicity as a rhetorical rather than descriptive term. The impact of toxicity on players and community members is uneven as some players are put into conflict with others while others, particularly women, are erased from the game space and community discussions. In conclusion, this project finds that toxicity in DOTA 2 is constructed by overlapping cultural and mechanical elements and is as much about what players perceive to be toxic as it is about actual player behaviors

Design of a horizontally scalable backend application for online games

Mobile game market is increasing in popularity year after year, attracting a wide audience of independent developers who must endure the competition of other more resourceful game companies. Players expect high quality games and experiences, while developers strive to monetize. Researches have shown a correlation between some features of a game and its likelihood to succeed and be a potential candidate to enter the top grossing lists. This thesis focuses on identifying the trending features found on the current most successful games, and proposes the design of a scalable, flexible and modular backend application which integrates all the services needed for fulfilling the common needs of a mobile online game. A microservice oriented architecture have been used as a basis for the system design, leading to a modular decomposition of features into small, independent, reusable services. The system and microservices design comply with the Reactive Manifesto, allowing the application to reach responsiveness, elasticity, resiliency and asynchronicity. For its properties, the application is suitable to serve on a cloud environment covering the requirements for small games and popular games with high load of traffic and many concurrent players. The thesis, in addition to the application and microservices design, includes a discussion on the technology stack for a possible implementation and recommended setup for three use case scenarios