Enhancing trustability in MMOGs environments

Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs; e.g., World of Warcraft), virtual worlds (VW; e.g., Second Life), social networks (e.g., Facebook) strongly demand for more autonomic, security, and trust mechanisms in a way similar to humans do in the real life world. As known, this is a difficult matter because trusting in humans and organizations depends on the perception and experience of each individual, which is difficult to quantify or measure. In fact, these societal environments lack trust mechanisms similar to those involved in humans-to-human interactions. Besides, interactions mediated by compute devices are constantly evolving, requiring trust mechanisms that keep the pace with the developments and assess risk situations. In VW/MMOGs, it is widely recognized that users develop trust relationships from their in-world interactions with others. However, these trust relationships end up not being represented in the data structures (or databases) of such virtual worlds, though they sometimes appear associated to reputation and recommendation systems. In addition, as far as we know, the user is not provided with a personal trust tool to sustain his/her decision making while he/she interacts with other users in the virtual or game world. In order to solve this problem, as well as those mentioned above, we propose herein a formal representation of these personal trust relationships, which are based on avataravatar interactions. The leading idea is to provide each avatar-impersonated player with a personal trust tool that follows a distributed trust model, i.e., the trust data is distributed over the societal network of a given VW/MMOG. Representing, manipulating, and inferring trust from the user/player point of view certainly is a grand challenge. When someone meets an unknown individual, the question is “Can I trust him/her or not?”. It is clear that this requires the user to have access to a representation of trust about others, but, unless we are using an open source VW/MMOG, it is difficult —not to say unfeasible— to get access to such data. Even, in an open source system, a number of users may refuse to pass information about its friends, acquaintances, or others. Putting together its own data and gathered data obtained from others, the avatar-impersonated player should be able to come across a trust result about its current trustee. For the trust assessment method used in this thesis, we use subjective logic operators and graph search algorithms to undertake such trust inference about the trustee. The proposed trust inference system has been validated using a number of OpenSimulator (opensimulator.org) scenarios, which showed an accuracy increase in evaluating trustability of avatars. Summing up, our proposal aims thus to introduce a trust theory for virtual worlds, its trust assessment metrics (e.g., subjective logic) and trust discovery methods (e.g., graph search methods), on an individual basis, rather than based on usual centralized reputation systems. In particular, and unlike other trust discovery methods, our methods run at interactive rates.MMOGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games, como por exemplo, World of Warcraft), mundos virtuais (VW, como por exemplo, o Second Life) e redes sociais (como por exemplo, Facebook) necessitam de mecanismos de confiança mais autónomos, capazes de assegurar a segurança e a confiança de uma forma semelhante à que os seres humanos utilizam na vida real. Como se sabe, esta não é uma questão fácil. Porque confiar em seres humanos e ou organizações depende da percepção e da experiência de cada indivíduo, o que é difícil de quantificar ou medir à partida. Na verdade, esses ambientes sociais carecem dos mecanismos de confiança presentes em interacções humanas presenciais. Além disso, as interacções mediadas por dispositivos computacionais estão em constante evolução, necessitando de mecanismos de confiança adequados ao ritmo da evolução para avaliar situações de risco. Em VW/MMOGs, é amplamente reconhecido que os utilizadores desenvolvem relações de confiança a partir das suas interacções no mundo com outros. No entanto, essas relações de confiança acabam por não ser representadas nas estruturas de dados (ou bases de dados) do VW/MMOG específico, embora às vezes apareçam associados à reputação e a sistemas de reputação. Além disso, tanto quanto sabemos, ao utilizador não lhe é facultado nenhum mecanismo que suporte uma ferramenta de confiança individual para sustentar o seu processo de tomada de decisão, enquanto ele interage com outros utilizadores no mundo virtual ou jogo. A fim de resolver este problema, bem como os mencionados acima, propomos nesta tese uma representação formal para essas relações de confiança pessoal, baseada em interacções avatar-avatar. A ideia principal é fornecer a cada jogador representado por um avatar uma ferramenta de confiança pessoal que segue um modelo de confiança distribuída, ou seja, os dados de confiança são distribuídos através da rede social de um determinado VW/MMOG. Representar, manipular e inferir a confiança do ponto de utilizador/jogador, é certamente um grande desafio. Quando alguém encontra um indivíduo desconhecido, a pergunta é “Posso confiar ou não nele?”. É claro que isto requer que o utilizador tenha acesso a uma representação de confiança sobre os outros, mas, a menos que possamos usar uma plataforma VW/MMOG de código aberto, é difícil — para não dizer impossível — obter acesso aos dados gerados pelos utilizadores. Mesmo em sistemas de código aberto, um número de utilizadores pode recusar partilhar informações sobre seus amigos, conhecidos, ou sobre outros. Ao juntar seus próprios dados com os dados obtidos de outros, o utilizador/jogador representado por um avatar deve ser capaz de produzir uma avaliação de confiança sobre o utilizador/jogador com o qual se encontra a interagir. Relativamente ao método de avaliação de confiança empregue nesta tese, utilizamos lógica subjectiva para a representação da confiança, e também operadores lógicos da lógica subjectiva juntamente com algoritmos de procura em grafos para empreender o processo de inferência da confiança relativamente a outro utilizador. O sistema de inferência de confiança proposto foi validado através de um número de cenários Open-Simulator (opensimulator.org), que mostrou um aumento na precisão na avaliação da confiança de avatares. Resumindo, a nossa proposta visa, assim, introduzir uma teoria de confiança para mundos virtuais, conjuntamente com métricas de avaliação de confiança (por exemplo, a lógica subjectiva) e em métodos de procura de caminhos de confiança (com por exemplo, através de métodos de pesquisa em grafos), partindo de uma base individual, em vez de se basear em sistemas habituais de reputação centralizados. Em particular, e ao contrário de outros métodos de determinação do grau de confiança, os nossos métodos são executados em tempo real

Cyberbullying on World of Warcraft:experiences of Finnish gamers

Abstract. We use Internet and play games over the Internet connection more than ever. Many researchers have noticed that cyberbullying on the Internet is increasing and it is a significant problem between young people, also on online games. In this thesis, I focus on a Finnish gamers of Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) named World of Warcraft (WoW), and examine 1) what kind of cyberbullying they have encountered or witnessed, 2) What kind of experiences they have concerning dealing with cyberbullying, and 3) what are their experiences of the support developers, service providers, or other parties are offering to cope and prevent cyberbullying. The research was carried out in two parts: First, a literature review was carried out in order to identify what kind of research is ongoing concerning cyberbullying in games, as well as support available to gamers experiencing cyberbullying. Then, empirical research was carried out through four semi-structured interviews with Finnish gamers. The data from the interviews was analysed using theory-guided content analysis. This thesis provides the reader up-to-date information about current situation of cyberbullying on MMOGs in Finland. The results of the thesis suggest that cyberbullying in WoW is very common issue between Finnish gamers. The results of the interviews showed that cyberbullying is a noteworthy issue and should be increasingly taken into account by both players and game providers to reduce it. The thesis also identifies new ways to cyberbully that were not discussed in earlier literature or were not found during the literature review process: steam sniping, racism and swatting. Racism is a comprehensive concept of cyberbullying act in games but one female participant said that someone called her as gay while another participant talked about racism in games in general level just like it might happen in real life. Stream sniping is way to do cyberbullying where player itself streams his/hers gaming over the Internet in real-time and other people are able to watch it live. On the aspect of WoW, stream sniping can be used as harass meanings. Streamer itself shows private game information to other people (e.g. game server and location in-game) so other players are able to use that private information of the streamer and then kill him/her for example. Swatting is part of live streaming as well where someone calls to the emergency service and does a false reporting of a serious law enforcement emergency about someone, on this case, a streamer and this is called as a criminal harassment tactic. So, because of this false report FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) or equivalent direction raids the streamer’s home while the stream is on. These phenomena warrant future research

Middleware services for distributed virtual environments

PhD ThesisDistributed Virtual Environments (DVEs) are virtual environments which allow dispersed users to interact with each other and the virtual world through the underlying network. Scalability is a major challenge in building a successful DVE, which is directly affected by the volume of message exchange. Different techniques have been deployed to reduce the volume of message exchange in order to support large numbers of simultaneous participants in a DVE. Interest management is a popular technique for filtering unnecessary message exchange between users. The rationale behind interest management is to resolve the "interests" of users and decide whether messages should be exchanged between them. There are three basic interest management approaches: region-based, aura-based and hybrid approaches. However, if the time taken for an interest management approach to determine interests is greater than the duration of the interaction, it is not possible to guarantee interactions will occur correctly or at all. This is termed the Missed Interaction Problem, which all existing interest management approaches are susceptible to. This thesis provides a new aura-based interest management approach, termed Predictive Interest management (PIM), to alleviate the missed interaction problem. PIM uses an enlarged aura to detect potential aura-intersections and iii initiate message exchange. It utilises variable message exchange frequencies, proportional to the intersection degree of the objects' expanded auras, to restrict bandwidth usage. This thesis provides an experimental system, the PIM system, which couples predictive interest management with the de-centralised server communication model. It utilises the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) middleware standard to provide an interoperable middleware for DVEs. Experimental results are provided to demonstrate that PIM provides a scalable interest management approach which alleviates the missed interaction problem

Middleware services for distributed virtual environments

PhD ThesisDistributed Virtual Environments (DVEs) are virtual environments which allow dispersed users to interact with each other and the virtual world through the underlying network. Scalability is a major challenge in building a successful DVE, which is directly affected by the volume of message exchange. Different techniques have been deployed to reduce the volume of message exchange in order to support large numbers of simultaneous participants in a DVE. Interest management is a popular technique for filtering unnecessary message exchange between users. The rationale behind interest management is to resolve the "interests" of users and decide whether messages should be exchanged between them. There are three basic interest management approaches: region-based, aura-based and hybrid approaches. However, if the time taken for an interest management approach to determine interests is greater than the duration of the interaction, it is not possible to guarantee interactions will occur correctly or at all. This is termed the Missed Interaction Problem, which all existing interest management approaches are susceptible to. This thesis provides a new aura-based interest management approach, termed Predictive Interest management (PIM), to alleviate the missed interaction problem. PIM uses an enlarged aura to detect potential aura-intersections and iii initiate message exchange. It utilises variable message exchange frequencies, proportional to the intersection degree of the objects' expanded auras, to restrict bandwidth usage. This thesis provides an experimental system, the PIM system, which couples predictive interest management with the de-centralised server communication model. It utilises the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) middleware standard to provide an interoperable middleware for DVEs. Experimental results are provided to demonstrate that PIM provides a scalable interest management approach which alleviates the missed interaction problem

Service scenarios - A socio-technical approach to business service modeling

Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) is a unique categorization of electronic game which allows thousands of players to play simultaneously through the Internet in the same virtual environment. A number of researchers have started to introduce the use of MMOG as a new generation of educational platform, allowing players to interact and to learn together through collaborative game-play. However, the answers for the occurrence of collaborative learning behaviour and the motivational drivers for learning collaboratively in a MMOG are still underresearched. Motivated by such concerns, this study tests a theoretical model to explain individual’s intention to learn by peer motivations. The model employs motivational theories to propose two external motivational factors, namely peer intrinsic motivation and peer extrinsic motivation, and investigates effects of the two new constructs on MMOG players’ intention to learn individually and intention to learn collaboratively by building on the cognitive learning theory. Based on a study with 94 valid current MMOG player responses, PLS analysis shows that peer intrinsic motivation to play has a significant positive influence on the intention to learn collaboratively, while peer extrinsic motivation to play has a significant positive influence on the intention to learn individually. The results of our findings indicate potential implications to researchers, educators and game developers

Modeling Human Group Behavior In Virtual Worlds

Virtual worlds and massively-multiplayer online games are rich sources of information about large-scale teams and groups, offering the tantalizing possibility of harvesting data about group formation, social networks, and network evolution. They provide new outlets for human social interaction that differ from both face-to-face interactions and non-physically-embodied social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter. We aim to study group dynamics in these virtual worlds by collecting and analyzing public conversational patterns of users grouped in close physical proximity. To do this, we created a set of tools for monitoring, partitioning, and analyzing unstructured conversations between changing groups of participants in Second Life, a massively multi-player online user-constructed environment that allows users to construct and inhabit their own 3D world. Although there are some cues in the dialog, determining social interactions from unstructured chat data alone is a difficult problem, since these environments lack many of the cues that facilitate natural language processing in other conversational settings and different types of social media. Public chat data often features players who speak simultaneously, use jargon and emoticons, and only erratically adhere to conversational norms. Humans are adept social animals capable of identifying friendship groups from a combination of linguistic cues and social network patterns. But what is more important, the content of what people say or their history of social interactions? Moreover, is it possible to identify whether iii people are part of a group with changing membership merely from general network properties, such as measures of centrality and latent communities? These are the questions that we aim to answer in this thesis. The contributions of this thesis include: 1) a link prediction algorithm for identifying friendship relationships from unstructured chat data 2) a method for identifying social groups based on the results of community detection and topic analysis. The output of these two algorithms (links and group membership) are useful for studying a variety of research questions about human behavior in virtual worlds. To demonstrate this we have performed a longitudinal analysis of human groups in different regions of the Second Life virtual world. We believe that studies performed with our tools in virtual worlds will be a useful stepping stone toward creating a rich computational model of human group dynamics

La gestion d'effet : une méthode de filtrage pour les environnements virtuels répartis

Les environnements virtuels distribués (EVDs) sont destinés à fournir à leurs utilisateurs une expérience immersive au sein d'un environnement virtuel partagé. Pour cette raison, les EVDs essaient d'apporter aux différents participants des vues cohérentes du monde partagé. Ceci nécessite un échange intense de messages en particulier pour les EVDs fortement peuplés. Cet important échange de messages consomme beaucoup de ressources de calcul et réseau, ce qui ralentit le système et limite l'interactivité. Ainsi, la cohérence, l'interactivité et le passage à l'échelle sont trois besoins primordiales pour les EVDs. Par contre, ces besoins sont contradictoires : le besoin de cohérence requiert un échange plus important de messages alors que ceux d'interactivité et de passage à l'échelle demandent de diminuer au minimum ces échanges. Pour gérer l'échange de messages d'une manière intelligente, les systèmes d'EVDs utilisent des méthodes de filtrage différentes. Parmi ces méthodes, les méthodes de gestion d'intérêt filtrent les messages en se basant sur les intérêts des utilisateurs dans le monde. Dans ce document, nous présentons notre méthode de gestion d'intérêt, la gestion d'effet. Cette méthode exprime les intérêts et les manifestations des participants dans les différents média à travers les zones de conscience et d'effet. Lorsque la zone de conscience d'un participant chevauche la zone d'effet d'un autre dans un média, le premier devient conscient du second dans ce média. De plus, pour un passage à l'échelle continu, la gestion d'effet a été développée au sein d'une architecture client/multi-serveurs qui gère les intérêts des participants à travers les serveurs. La principale originalité de notre méthode réside dans le fait qu'elle répond aux différents besoins des applications d'EVDs comme l'expression de la manifestation, les relations asymétriques, l'adaptation aux environnements ouverts et aux architectures emboîtées, l'utilisation du multicast... Ces aspects permettent à la gestion d'effet d'effectuer un filtrage réaliste et efficace et d'être applicable dans différents types d'environnements.Distributed virtual environments (DVEs) are intended to provide an immersive experience to their users within a shared virtual environment. For this purpose, DVEs try to supply participants with coherent views of the shared world. This requires a heavy message exchange between participants especially with the increasing popularity of massively multiplayer DVEs. This heavy message exchange consumes a lot of processing power and bandwidth, slowing down the system and limiting interactivity. Indeed, coherence, interactivity and scalability are basic requirements of DVEs. However, these requirements are conflicting because coherence requires the more important exchange of messages that we can have while interactivity and scalability demand to decrease this exchange to minimum. For this reason, the management of message exchange is essential for distributed virtual environments. To manage message exchange in an intelligent way, DVE systems use various filtering techniques. Among them, interest management techniques filter messages according to users' interests in the world. In this document, we present our interest management technique, the effect management. This technique expresses the interests and manifestations of participants in various media through conscience and effect zones. When the conscience zone of a participant collides the effect zone of another participant in a given medium, the first one becomes conscious of the second. This principle allows an efficient and realistic decrease of message exchange. Furthermore, in order to extend scalability, effect management is used within a client/multi-server architecture that manages the interests of participants between servers. The main originality of our technique relies in the fact that it satisfies varied requirements of DVE applications such as the expression of manifestation, asymmetrical relations, adaptation to open and closed environments, the use of multicast... These aspects allow effect management to be applied in various kinds of virtual environments in a simple and efficient way

An Information-Theoretic Framework for Consistency Maintenance in Distributed Interactive Applications

Distributed Interactive Applications (DIAs) enable geographically dispersed users to interact with each other in a virtual environment. A key factor to the success of a DIA is the maintenance of a consistent view of the shared virtual world for all the participants. However, maintaining consistent states in DIAs is difficult under real networks. State changes communicated by messages over such networks suffer latency leading to inconsistency across the application. Predictive Contract Mechanisms (PCMs) combat this problem through reducing the number of messages transmitted in return for perceptually tolerable inconsistency. This thesis examines the operation of PCMs using concepts and methods derived from information theory. This information theory perspective results in a novel information model of PCMs that quantifies and analyzes the efficiency of such methods in communicating the reduced state information, and a new adaptive multiple-model-based framework for improving consistency in DIAs. The first part of this thesis introduces information measurements of user behavior in DIAs and formalizes the information model for PCM operation. In presenting the information model, the statistical dependence in the entity state, which makes using extrapolation models to predict future user behavior possible, is evaluated. The efficiency of a PCM to exploit such predictability to reduce the amount of network resources required to maintain consistency is also investigated. It is demonstrated that from the information theory perspective, PCMs can be interpreted as a form of information reduction and compression. The second part of this thesis proposes an Information-Based Dynamic Extrapolation Model for dynamically selecting between extrapolation algorithms based on information evaluation and inferred network conditions. This model adapts PCM configurations to both user behavior and network conditions, and makes the most information-efficient use of the available network resources. In doing so, it improves PCM performance and consistency in DIAs

Virtual identity as practice : exploring the relationship between role-players and their characters in the massively multiplayer online game 'Star Wars Galaxies'

The objective of this research is firstly, to evaluate claims that cyberspace, due to its inherent qualities, has had an unprecedented effect on how we construct, present and think about our collective and individual identities online and offline. Secondly, it will highlight how people use shared understandings of popular culture products in order to maintain social formations in cyberspace.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo