Gamifying the Rice Industry: The 'Riceville' Paradigm

The global agriculture industry remains underdeveloped due to a lack of education among farmers about best practices and technologies. Similarly, corporate gamification and the rise of serious games have demonstrated their effectiveness in education within our era. The implementation of gamification principles through accessible technological platforms has massive potential in building best practices in the agriculture industry. Rice agriculture has a resistance to the adoption of new methodologies and technologies. This paper introduces ‘Riceville’, a game used to simulate a virtual farming environment promoting the use of effective best-practices introduced by leading rice organisations like the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI). By gamifying best practices, the social norms of low adoption and perception of risk can be altered to boost the reception of novel practices within the industry. This will not only serve to modernize the rice industry but also improve yields for farmers while helping agriculture companies increase exposure

Massively Multiplayer Online Gamers’ Language: Argument for an M-Gamer Corpus

The past few decades have seen a steady, and sometimes rapid rise in the production and consumption of Massively Multiple Online Games (MMOGs), spanning a global arena. Players from a wide variety of demographical, economic, geographical, cultural and linguistic backgrounds congregate under the banner of MMOGs and spend a considerable amount of time interacting and communicating with one another, in the context of playing and socializing through such playing. It is only logical then, to see such players become part of larger and extended socio-communal landscapes, wherein they may appropriate multiple roles in conjunction with their MMOG player roles, such as teachers, learners, family members and workplace cohorts. It is also equally logical for a curious mind to speculate the effects of the communication and language characteristics of such gamers on themselves, and the greater communities they may inhabit, investigate the realms of such possibilities, and appropriate knowledge garnered from such investigations to share. That is precisely what this study and paper is about. In this paper, I report the findings of an investigation of the communication and language characteristics of MMOG players, using 23 participants for interviews and journal writing, as well as multiple online documents. The findings suggest that MMOG players share some unique communication and language patterns, based on which they can be justifiably categorized as a sub culture with their own corpus. Additionally, researcher and practitioner implications are also discussed

Design and Evaluation of Intelligent Reward Structures in Human Computation Games

Despite the ubiquity of artificial intelligence, some problems and procedures— such as building commonsense knowledge understanding or generating creative works— have no or few effective algorithmic solutions, yet are considered straightforward for humans to solve. Human computation games (HCGs) are playful, game-based interfaces for tackling these problems through crowdsourcing. HCGs have been used to solve tasks that were and still are considered complex for computational algorithms such as image tagging, protein synthesis, 3D structure reconstruction, and creative artifact generation. However, despite these successes, HCGs have not seen broad adoption compared to other types of serious digital games. Among the many reasons for this lack of adoption is the reality that these games are typically not seen as engaging or compelling to play, as well as the fact that creating HCGs comes at a high development cost to task providers who are typically not game development experts. This thesis is a step towards building and establishing a more formalized design understanding of how to create HCGs that both provide a compelling player experience and complete the underlying task effectively. In this thesis, I explore reward mechanics in HCGs. Reward mechanics are integral to HCGs due their associations with player motivation, compensation, and task validation. I first propose a framework for understanding HCG mechanics and advocate for an experimental methodology evaluating both player experience and task completion metrics to understand variations in HCG mechanics. I then use these tools to frame and design three experiments that explore small-scale variations of reward systems in HCGs: reward functions, reward distribution, and reward personalization. These studies demonstrate that even small variations in rewards (i.e., offering players the ability to choose the type of reward) may have significant positive effects on both player experience and task completion metrics. I also show that some variations (i.e., co-located, competitive reward scoring) may have both positive and negative tradeoffs across these metrics. Moreover, this work observes that existing, anecdotal design wisdom for HCGs may not always hold (i.e., allowing players to verbally collude actually predicts higher task solution accuracy). Altogether, this thesis demonstrates that certain aspects of reward systems in HCGs can be varied to improve the player experience without compromising task completion metrics, and builds more empirically-tested design knowledge for creating more engaging, effective HCGs.Ph.D

DefaultVR: the AI Expansion. An application of artificial intelligence in competitive gaming and virtual reality.

This works presents the development of DefaultVR: The AI Expansion, an expansion of the first degree thesis DefaultVR, a virtual reality tactical shooter online game. In particular, this expansion aims to include an artificial agent, called Eve, capable of learning to play in the virtual reality world through reinforcement learning techniques. The agent learns to navigate the game environment, make decisions based on pseudo-visual information, and optimize its actions to maximize rewards. The development utilizes a deep reinforcement learning framework with the Proximal Policy Optimization algorithm included with Units’s ML-Agents. Extensive experiments were conducted to evaluate the agent’s performance, comparing it against itself and human players. The results demonstrate the agent’s ability to adapt and improve over time, achieving competitive gameplay skills comparable to both new and experienced human VR players. The training process involved iterative optimization and analysis of various hyperparameters, observations’ and actions’ spaces, and training configurations. The successful development of the artificial agent has significant implications for the field of gaming AI, showcasing its potential for creating engaging and challenging gameplay experiences. The research contributes to the broader understanding of reinforcement learning techniques and their application in training intelligent agents for real-world tasks

Program Management Through the Lens of a Massive Multiplayer Online Gamer: A Pilot Study

Learning can occur through many media types. This thesis explores the possibility that guild leaders in the Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) video game World of Warcraft learn and use similar skills to those that professional program managers learn and use in the corporate world. I evaluate World of Warcraft literature, present guild member interviews and use online forums to compare gaming leadership attributes to attributes in the program manager competency model described by Partington, Pellegrinelli, and Young (2005). The results provide preliminary support for the hypothesis that a bridge exists between these two leadership roles

Komunikace a komunity ve World of Warcraft: Etnografie gildy

Tato práce je etnografickým pohledem do světa komunit uvnitř počítačových online her žánru MMORPG. Jejím cílem je představení MMORPG jako zajímavého pole pro antropologický výzkum a pohled na fungování herních komunit - hráčských raidicích guild ve hře World of Warcraft. V práci jsou zkoumány otázky toho, jakým způsobem se guildy drží pohromadě, co motivuje hráče k formování takových seskupení a co všechno jim v tom naopak překáží. Při výzkumu byly použity metody zúčastněného pozorování virtuálního prostředí uvnitř hry, zkoumání prostředí v Internetu kolem hry a rozhovory s hráči. Celý výzkum byl proveden online. Klíčová slova: MMORPG, digitální etnografie, digitální antropologie, gildy, World of WarcraftThis thesis is an ethnographic look at the player communities inside of the setting of digital online games in the MMORPG genre. The goal of this work is introducing MMORPG as an interesting and vibrant field for anthropological research. Another goal is an inquiry into player raiding communities in the game World of Warcraft. Thesis is researching questions of what is motivating players to join into guilds, how are they staying together and why do they fall apart. Research was conducted through methods of participant observation inside of the game's virtual environment, interviews with players, and the Internet space formed around the game was also observed. Whole research was conducted online. Key words: MMORPG, digital ethnography, digital anthropology, guilds, World of WarcraftInstitute of EthnologyÚstav etnologieFaculty of ArtsFilozofická fakult

The Labor of Play: the Political Economy of Computer Game Culture

This dissertation questions the relationship between computer game culture and ideologies of neoliberalism and financialization. It questions the role computer games play in cultivating neoliberal practices and how the industry develops games and systems making play and work indistinguishable activities. Chapter 1 examines how computer game inculcate players into neoliberal practice through play. In chapter 2, the project shows Blizzard Entertainment systematically redevelops their games to encourage perpetual play aimed at increasing the consumption of digital commodities and currencies. Chapter 3 considers the role of esports, or professional competitive computer game play, to disperse neoliberal ideologies amongst nonprofessional players. Chapter 4 examines the streaming platform Twitch and the transformation of computer gameplay into a consumable commodity. This chapter examines Twitch’s systems designed at making production and consumption inseparable practices. The dissertation concludes by examining the economic, conceptual, and theoretical collapses threatening game culture and the field of game studies