UNDERSTANDING SEXUAL HARASSMENT IN MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER ONLINE ROLE-PLAYING GAMES: CRIME OPPORTUNITY AND AFFORDANCE PERSPECTIVES

With the popularity of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), in-game sexual harassment has drawn tremendous attention from game players, game developers, and governments. Because of its devastating impact on victims, researchers from various disciplines have advocated the importance of understanding sexual harassment in MMORPGs. While information systems (IS) researchers have begun to investigate user behaviors in MMORPGs, research on deviant behaviors in MMORPGs remains scarce in the IS literature. With the inherent focus on sociotechnical factors in the IS discipline, we believe it is crucial to consider both the social and technical elements of sexual harassment in MMORPGs. Thus, our research aims to integrate crime opportunity theory and affordance theory to explain how MMORPG affordances give rise to the evaluation of favorable MMORPG environmental conditions for in-game sexual harassment and the inclination to sexually harass others in the games. This research-in-progress paper proposes a research model and presents our research design for examining sexual harassment in MMORPGs

ESL/EFL Student Anxiety: How Can the Implementation of MMORPGs Help Anxious Students?

Language anxiety is a serious issue for many students wishing to acquire a second or foreign language (L2); it can take many forms and affect many L2 learners in several different ways. The construct of language anxiety is composed of test anxiety, social anxiety, and computer anxiety; past researchers have tried to address the problem of language anxiety through traditional teaching methods employed in ESL/EFL classrooms, however these methods have limitations that can be addressed through the implementation of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) and Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC). Given the limitations of the traditional, or non-technical, teaching methods in addressing language anxiety, the present study examines the unique contributions of MMROPGs and CMC by synthesizing the results of previous studies to show how the implementation of MMORPGs and CMC can help alleviate anxiety in language learners. To this end, this paper specifically examines the electronic environment created in MMORPGs and its effect on anxious language learners, as well as what effect synchronous and asynchronous CMC communication strategies have on anxious language learners. The synthesized results show that online communication tools do have positive effects in lowering learner anxiety through several aspects including anonymity, slower conversation pace, and added control. Finally, the study offers a caveat, the online communication tools are not a panacea; there are limitations through competitive anxiety, power distances between cultures, miscommunication, public nature of discussion forums, and lack of intercultural knowledge

Not all the bots are created equal:the Ordering Turing Test for the labelling of bots in MMORPGs

This article contributes to the research on bots in Social Media. It takes as its starting point an emerging perspective which proposes that we should abandon the investigation of the Turing Test and the functional aspects of bots in favor of studying the authentic and cooperative relationship between humans and bots. Contrary to this view, this article argues that Turing Tests are one of the ways in which authentic relationships between humans and bots take place. To understand this, this article introduces the concept of Ordering Turing Tests: these are sort of Turing Tests proposed by social actors for purposes of achieving social order when bots produce deviant behavior. An Ordering Turing Test is method for labeling deviance, whereby social actors can use this test to tell apart rule-abiding humans and rule-breaking bots. Using examples from Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, this article illustrates how Ordering Turing Tests are proposed and justified by players and service providers. Data for the research comes from scientific literature on Machine Learning proposed for the identification of bots and from game forums and other player produced paratexts from the case study of the game Runescape

Analyzing the effect of tcp and server population on massively multiplayer games

Many Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) use TCP flows for communication between the server and the game clients. The utilization of TCP, which was not initially designed for (soft) real-time services, has many implications for the competing traffic flows. In this paper we present a series of studies which explore the competition between MMORPG and other traffic flows. For that aim, we first extend a source-based traffic model, based on player’s activities during the day, to also incorporate the impact of the number of players sharing a server (server population) on network traffic. Based on real traffic traces, we statistically model the influence of the variation of the server’s player population on the network traffic, depending on the action categories (i.e., types of in-game player behaviour). Using the developed traffic model we prove that while server population only modifies specific action categories, this effect is significant enough to be observed on the overall traffic. We find that TCP Vegas is a good option for competing flows in order not to throttle the MMORPG flows and that TCP SACK is more respectful with game flows than other TCP variants, namely, Tahoe, Reno, and New Reno. Other tests show that MMORPG flows do not significantly reduce their sending window size when competing against UDP flows. Additionally, we study the effect of RTT unfairness between MMORPG flows, showing that it is less important than in the case of network-limited TCP flows