Virtual MET Institution : assessing the potentials and challenges of applying multi-user virtual environment in maritime education and training

The dissertation is a study to assess the potentials and challenges in the use of Multi-User Virtual Environment (MUVE) in Maritime Education and Training (MET) context. Virtual technology is growing at fast pace. The applications of MUVE are being utilized by numerous institutions across many educational professions. However, the area of utilizing MUVE in MET is still very limited. At the time being, it is indicated that there is possibility to take advantages of MUVE to create: (1) an enhance learning environment, (2) collaboration tools to support the distributed knowledge community, and (3) new modes of distance learning. METs are facing with several contemporary issues. There are necessities to foster the learning experience of future seafarers, to promote expertise exchange, and to continuously support its community of practice from distance. The investigation of MUVE’s characteristics and its applications suggests chances to tackle the such issues. Obviously, assessing the potentials and challenges of applying MUVE in MET become critical. The assessment tasks are conducted by examining the potentials that an institution can benefit as well as challenges that it would face. Then it is repositioned into MET contexts by taking into account the reality of MET’s culture and practices. The outcomes of the assessments indicate the affordance of MUVE for educational activities in MET institutions. Being aware of the limitations of the research itself, a number of recommendations are made concerning the need for further investigation in the subject

Born Digital / Grown Digital: Assessing the Future Competitiveness of the EU Video Games Software Industry

This report reflects the findings of the JRC-IPTS study on the Video games Industry, with a focus on two specific activities: online and mobile video games. The report starts by introducing the technologies, their characteristics, market diffusion and barriers to take up, and their potential economic impact, before moving to an analysis of their contribution to the competitiveness of the European ICT industry. The research is based on internal and external expertise, literature reviews and desk research, several workshops and syntheses of the current state of the knowledge. The results were reviewed by experts and in dedicated workshops. The report concludes that the general expectations for the next years foresee a speeded up migration of contents and services to digital, in a scenario of rapidly increasing convergence of digital technologies and integration of media services taking advantage of improved and permanent network connections. The role of the so-called creative content industry is expected to increase accordingly. Communication services and media industry will co-evolve on the playground of the Internet of services, along with a product to service transformation of the software market in general. In this general context the Video games Software industry plays and is expected to play a major role. The games industry may become a major driver of the development of networks as it has been in the past for the development of computer hardware.JRC.DDG.J.4-Information Societ

The impact of video gaming on managers\u27 adaptive leadership skills: do millennials have an advantage?

The aging Baby Boomer Generation, coupled with the large coming of age Millennial Generation and the need for more adaptive and flexible employees in business, is presenting companies with a challenge of how to develop individuals in leadership positions within their organizations to properly demonstrate and implement adaptive leadership attributes. This study compared data previously gathered by the participating organization from individuals composed of multiple generations currently in leadership positions attending a leadership orientation course. Data were collected using a selected instrument measuring adaptive leadership skills. The focus of this study was to determine if the Millennial Generation has gained more experience with situations playing video games and, if so, if this resulted in enhanced adaptive leadership skills. Potentially acquiring leadership, organizational, and social skills, while learning to accomplish tasks in a rapidly changing and volatile simulated environment in a video game, could have a positive impact on the Millennials’ ability to employ adaptive leadership. The learning outcomes from video game play are accomplished either as a part of the individual video game design or via Internet games for multiple players. The applicability of this study could provide direction on how to better prepare more appropriate learning solutions to develop individuals as they move into leadership roles. The resulting analysis generated data finding no significant relationship between birth generations and scores from an instrument measuring adaptive leadership, or with the amount of video game play by generation. There was a positive relationship found between birth generation and the amount of video game play

Communicative Implications of the Modern Video Game: An Audience-Centered Approach

The advent of the home video game console and three decades of continuously evolving gaming technology has had a profound impact on American culture. While many studies have investigated various sociocultural outcomes and conducted behavioral correlation analyses of video games, few have examined how individuals talk about, or share meaning from the game outside of game play. This analysis first briefly reviews extant video game research and arguments for the increasingly immersive aspect of playing video games, then identifies a lack of focus in the literature on the communicative aspect of audience-centered analysis of these games via gamer-generated blogs and message board interactions. Subsequently, a rhetorical analysis of two independent blogs for World of Warcraft (WoW), a massively multiplayer online (MMO) video game examines, from a communication perspective, the inherent structure of the game, as well as the various methods by which the gamers discuss and share meaning about in-game and out-game experiences. A rhetorical analysis of gamers' out-game talk on WoW-centered message board forums and blogs is then conducted via the lens of dramatism. The theoretical underpinnings of this analysis further concretize the value and necessity of a communicative lens as a privileged voice in the field of video game studies

Virtual Reality Games for Motor Rehabilitation

This paper presents a fuzzy logic based method to track user satisfaction without the need for devices to monitor users physiological conditions. User satisfaction is the key to any product’s acceptance; computer applications and video games provide a unique opportunity to provide a tailored environment for each user to better suit their needs. We have implemented a non-adaptive fuzzy logic model of emotion, based on the emotional component of the Fuzzy Logic Adaptive Model of Emotion (FLAME) proposed by El-Nasr, to estimate player emotion in UnrealTournament 2004. In this paper we describe the implementation of this system and present the results of one of several play tests. Our research contradicts the current literature that suggests physiological measurements are needed. We show that it is possible to use a software only method to estimate user emotion

Models, methods, and tools for developing MMOG backends on commodity clouds

Online multiplayer games have grown to unprecedented scales, attracting millions of players worldwide. The revenue from this industry has already eclipsed well-established entertainment industries like music and films and is expected to continue its rapid growth in the future. Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) have also been extensively used in research studies and education, further motivating the need to improve their development process. The development of resource-intensive, distributed, real-time applications like MMOG backends involves a variety of challenges. Past research has primarily focused on the development and deployment of MMOG backends on dedicated infrastructures such as on-premise data centers and private clouds, which provide more flexibility but are expensive and hard to set up and maintain. A limited set of works has also focused on utilizing the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) layer of public clouds to deploy MMOG backends. These clouds can offer various advantages like a lower barrier to entry, a larger set of resources, etc. but lack resource elasticity, standardization, and focus on development effort, from which MMOG backends can greatly benefit. Meanwhile, other research has also focused on solving various problems related to consistency, performance, and scalability. Despite major advancements in these areas, there is no standardized development methodology to facilitate these features and assimilate the development of MMOG backends on commodity clouds. This thesis is motivated by the results of a systematic mapping study that identifies a gap in research, evident from the fact that only a handful of studies have explored the possibility of utilizing serverless environments within commodity clouds to host these types of backends. These studies are mostly vision papers and do not provide any novel contributions in terms of methods of development or detailed analyses of how such systems could be developed. Using the knowledge gathered from this mapping study, several hypotheses are proposed and a set of technical challenges is identified, guiding the development of a new methodology. The peculiarities of MMOG backends have so far constrained their development and deployment on commodity clouds despite rapid advancements in technology. To explore whether such environments are viable options, a feasibility study is conducted with a minimalistic MMOG prototype to evaluate a limited set of public clouds in terms of hosting MMOG backends. Foli lowing encouraging results from this study, this thesis first motivates toward and then presents a set of models, methods, and tools with which scalable MMOG backends can be developed for and deployed on commodity clouds. These are encapsulated into a software development framework called Athlos which allows software engineers to leverage the proposed development methodology to rapidly create MMOG backend prototypes that utilize the resources of these clouds to attain scalable states and runtimes. The proposed approach is based on a dynamic model which aims to abstract the data requirements and relationships of many types of MMOGs. Based on this model, several methods are outlined that aim to solve various problems and challenges related to the development of MMOG backends, mainly in terms of performance and scalability. Using a modular software architecture, and standardization in common development areas, the proposed framework aims to improve and expedite the development process leading to higher-quality MMOG backends and a lower time to market. The models and methods proposed in this approach can be utilized through various tools during the development lifecycle. The proposed development framework is evaluated qualitatively and quantitatively. The thesis presents three case study MMOG backend prototypes that validate the suitability of the proposed approach. These case studies also provide a proof of concept and are subsequently used to further evaluate the framework. The propositions in this thesis are assessed with respect to the performance, scalability, development effort, and code maintainability of MMOG backends developed using the Athlos framework, using a variety of methods such as small and large-scale simulations and more targeted experimental setups. The results of these experiments uncover useful information about the behavior of MMOG backends. In addition, they provide evidence that MMOG backends developed using the proposed methodology and hosted on serverless environments can: (a) support a very high number of simultaneous players under a given latency threshold, (b) elastically scale both in terms of processing power and memory capacity and (c) significantly reduce the amount of development effort. The results also show that this methodology can accelerate the development of high-performance, distributed, real-time applications like MMOG backends, while also exposing the limitations of Athlos in terms of code maintainability. Finally, the thesis provides a reflection on the research objectives, considerations on the hypotheses and technical challenges, and outlines plans for future work in this domain