The Influence of Perceived Belonging on Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games

While some service providers of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) lose significant numbers of players over time, others maintain a strong growth trajectory. Drawing from the Uses and Gratifications Theory and the Need to Belong theory, we believe that an individual’s Perceived Belonging (i.e., the degree to which a person feels connected to and accepted by others) positively influences his/her Actual MMORPG Usage, i.e., how often he/she plays MMORPGs. After collecting 71 online questionnaires and applying a structural equation modeling approach, we found that Perceived Belonging’s positive influence on Actual MMORPG Usage is fully mediated by Perceived Enjoyment. Overall, our study suggests that MMORPG service providers should include belonging-oriented aspects into their games, such as the possibility of interacting and cooperating with other players, in order to increase individuals’ game usage through their Perceived Belonging

On the Disadvantages of Media as a Service with Regard to Psychological Ownership

Media as a Service (MaaS), which enables customers to access entire media libraries over a subscription period, has become an important revenue driver for the entertainment industry. By using an experiment related to music consumption, our study suggests that MaaS services, and in particular the ones that are free of charge, cause customers to feel a lower degree of psychological ownership (PO) for the provided content than for content provided via physical media and media files. Since PO is known to be an important driver of customers’ behaviors and feelings such as their willingness to pay, these findings suggest that PO might hinder MaaS’ continuing success

The Effects of Different Emoticons on the Perception of Emails in the Workplace

Non-verbal communication cues, e.g. facial expressions, and their surrogates in computer-mediated communication, emoticons, influence how a message is understood. Based on the four-ear model of communication, we examine in detail how emoticons affect message perception. More specifically, we examine the different effects of three emoticons [:-) :-( ;-)] on the four levels that define communication. Using a factorial survey with a treatment control group design (N = 231), our findings suggest that emoticon usage does not influence the understanding of a message at the factual information and appeal levels. However, we show that the usage of happy and ironic emoticons significantly shapes the subtext of a message, namely the relationship and self-revelation level, whereas sad emoticons do not have such an effect. These findings hold practical implications: Most importantly, senders can use happy and ironic emoticons to soften their email messages’ illocutionary force at the relationship level and self-revelation level

PROSET — A Language for Prototyping with Sets

We discuss the prototyping language PROSET(Prototyping with Sets) as a language for experimental and evolutionary prototyping, focusing its attention on algorithm design. Some of PROSET’s features include generative communication, flexible exception handling and the integration of persistence. A discussion of some issues pertaining to the compiler and the programming environment conclude the pape

Autonomous Car Acceptance: Safety vs. Personal Driving Enjoyment

Due to the passiveness of the passengers, autonomous cars promise benefits in terms of traffic safety, but also drawbacks in terms of the enjoyment people experience when driving a car themselves. We postulate that both Perceived Traffic Safety and Personal Driving Enjoyment play an important role in people’s acceptance of autonomous cars. After collecting 100 questionnaires and applying a SEM approach, our findings indicate that Personal Driving Enjoyment has a negative influence on the Perceived Enjoyment of autonomous cars and that Perceived Traffic Safety has a positive influence on both their Perceived Usefulness and Perceived Enjoyment. Additionally, both Perceived Usefulness and Perceived Enjoyment were confirmed to positively influence autonomous car acceptance. These findings suggest that autonomous cars should optionally enable people to act as drivers, that manufacturers need to actively manage people’s safety perceptions, and that they also need to emphasize the alternative hedonic benefits that the driverless experience offers

Gender Stereotyping’s Influence on the Perceived Competence of Siri and Co.

Some users express frustration with regard to virtual assistants due to their lack of perceived competence. To address this negative perception, we believe that technology companies should be aware of gender stereotypes. More specifically, it has been shown that males are attributed with rational competence more often than females. Drawing from the CASA paradigm, which states that people regularly assign human traits to computers, we expect that this stereotype might also be present for virtual assistants, i.e., male-voice virtual assistants are perceived as being more competent than female-voice virtual assistants. We test this hypothesis by conducting a controlled experiment which simulates a realistic interaction with differently voiced virtual assistants. The results indicate that gender stereotypes indeed play a role in the perception of the interaction. Male-voiced assistants are perceived more competent than their female-voiced counterpart which has practical implications in the design and development of devices that utilize these assistants

Factors Driving Prosocial Online Behavior

In this article, we draw from the Social Identity Theory and the Theory of Reasoned Action to propose a research model that postulates Social Similarity, Perceived Status Enhancement, and Social Norm to be important drivers of people’s prosocial online behavior. We also provide an outlook on three experiments that we plan to use to evaluate our hypotheses. Overall, our study promises important practical implications for multiple parties such as non-governmental organizations and nonprofit organizations. More specifically, if successful, our study would emphasize the importance of several factors that would help drive prosocial online behavior: (1) matching beneficiaries with benefactors’ demographic background, (2) providing a functionality that enables benefactors to share their prosocial actions with others, and (3) displaying information about other benefactors

Hamiltonian knot projections and lengths of thick knots

AbstractFor a knot or link K, L(K) denotes the rope length of K and Cr(K) denotes the crossing number of K. An important problem in geometric knot theory concerns the bound on L(K) in terms of Cr(K). It is well known that there exist positive constants c1, c2 such that for any knot or link K, c1·(Cr(K))3/4⩽L(K)⩽c2·(Cr(K))2. In this paper, we prove that there exists a constant c>0 such that for any knot or link K, L(K)⩽c·(Cr(K))3/2. This is done through the study of regular projections of knots and links as 4-regular plane graphs. We show that for any knot or link K there exists a knot or link K′ and a regular projection G of K′ such that K′ is of the same knot type as that of K, G has at most 4·Cr(K) crossings, and G is a Hamiltonian graph. We then use this result to develop an embedding algorithm. Using this algorithm, we are able to embed any knot or link K into the simple cubic lattice such that the length of the embedded knot is of order at most O((Cr(K))3/2). This result in turn establishes the above mentioned upper bound on L(K) for smooth knots and links. Moreover, for many knots and links with special Hamiltonian projections, our embedding algorithm ensures that the bound on L(K) can be of order O(Cr(K)). The study of Hamilton cycles in a regular knot projection plays a very important role and many questions can be raised in this direction