A study of gamification effectiveness

Studies have shown that gamification increases motivation and user experience when it comes to a certain behavior or completing a process. Gamification is often deeply associated with naïve animations and stylized text. This paper addresses the effect that visual representation has on the motivation of a subject by measuring their motivation after completing a mundane process, with entertaining gamification elements as well as gamification elements presented in plain text. For the purposes of this study a within subject design was used to gather data. Participants completed a mundane task three times, once without any gamification elements, once with pragmatic feedback and once with entertaining feedback. After completion the participants filled out the same Likert scale survey. The results were evaluated using the Wilcoxon Signed-Ranks test method, indicated that there was not a significant difference in user motivation between the visually stylized and plain text feedback. If conducted on a larger scale, this discovery could lead to a reduction time and cost for gamification development

Socio-economic issues in future generation internet

Socio-Economic Issues in Future Generation Interne

PhyLab – a virtual reality laboratory for experiments in physics: a pilot study on intervention effectiveness and gender differences

IntroductionNew technologies have great potential to facilitate students’ understanding and appreciation of one of the most abstract and challenging school subjects – physics. This study aimed to examine the effects of a game-based virtual reality teaching method on secondary school students’ self-beliefs, interest, and performance in physics through a quasi-experimental design using pre- and post-test data. The evaluation is based on the systemic actiotope model that explains a person’s goal-oriented actions by an interplay of their environment, action repertoire (i.e., students’ performance and interest in physics), and subjective action space (i.e., students’ self-efficacy, self-concept, and implicit theories regarding physics).MethodA game-based virtual reality App to be used with Google cardboards was developed containing 10 teaching units from the secondary school physics class curriculum. Participants in the control group were taught using traditional teaching methods, while students in the experimental group went through the VR with the teacher and conducted the prepared VR experiments in addition to the traditionally presented content. Three tests measured students’ physics performance during the semester. In addition, students answered questionnaires assessing their interest, self-efficacy, self-concept, and entity implicit theories regarding physics before and after the intervention, resulting in a Pretest-Posttest Control Group Design.ResultsThere were no significant differences between the control and experimental group in test scores on the first and second tests but compared to the control group, the experimental group achieved higher scores on the third test. In addition, the results indicate differential effects of the game-based virtual reality teaching method on students’ interest and self-efficacy regarding physics to the advantage of students identifying as male, but no effects on students’ self-concept, and entity implicit theories regarding physics.DiscussionThe results of our pilot study suggest that incorporating innovative didactic methods into secondary school physics classes could potentially contribute to higher performance in and motivation for physics during this crucial period of adolescence when students develop educational and career aspirations. However, game-based virtual reality teaching methods seem to favor students identifying as male, which should be considered in their development and presentation. Other practical implications for practitioners and researchers are discussed

Procedural Attack! Procedural Generation for Populated Virtual Cities: A Survey

On the one hand, creating rich virtual worlds "by hand" like in the game Grand Theft Auto V is hugely expensive and limited to large studios. On the other hand, procedural content generation (PCG) allows tiny teams to create huge worlds like Hello Games did with only four people (in the beginning) for the recently released game No Man's Sky. Following in the footsteps of Hello Games, this paper tries to equip the reader with an overview about the state-of-the-art of how to build such a virtual world, i.e., a populated virtual city with buildings, streets, parks, vegetation, humans, and vehicles, using just PCG assets. Each PCG asset that is envisioned to bring the city to life is grouped and discussed in detail and the latest research trends in PCG are presented together with open questions. Using the above-mentioned PCG assets, instead of months, a city can be built in a mere couple of minutes by a user without much experience in designing 3D assets. The city can then be used for many applications like games, virtual reality (VR), or film

Modeling User Behavior: A Layered Approach

The simulation of computer systems requires representative, reliable workload models. When simulating computer systems or components that are influenced by user behavior, this very behavior has to be modeled by using mathematical means. In this article, we propose a user behavior model framework that is constructed in a top down manner, consisting of various layers. Layers offer services to the next higher layer and require services from the layers below. The framework is meant to enable the modeler to plug in his own models at the layers of his choice, thus choosing the right balance between the simulation complexity and creating representative results. We give a description of the layered framework and the corresponding methodology. The approach then will be demonstrated on modeling HTTP traffic to be used in network traffic simulation

A testbed for p2p gaming using time warp

ABSTRACT Peer-to-peer based gaming is a new paradigm for distributed multiplayer online gaming that has attracted attention in the last years. It is known that P2P based topologies offer good scaling properties and mitigate unfairness otherwise observed for peers being far away and thus having large network lags. However, removing inconsistencies for high paced action games like FPS or tank battle games requires the implementation of a Time Warp-like mechanism, which itself may hinder gameplay for high lags. In this paper we present a tank battle game named Panzer Battalion. Created from scratch, this game follows the P2P approach and implements Time Warp for removing inconsistencies. Panzer Battalion is meant as a testbed for creating rollbacks and understanding, how Time Warp rollbacks depend on network lag, and how gameplay is altered by them

Using Video Analysis and Machine Learning for Predicting Shot Success in Table Tennis

Coaching professional ball players has become more and more dicult and requires among other abilities also good tactical knowledge. This paper describes a program that can assist in tactical coaching for table tennis by extracting and analyzing video data of a table tennis game. The here described application automatically extracts essential information from a table tennis match, such as speed, length, height and others, by analyzing a video of that game. It then uses the well known machine learning library " to learn about the success of a shot. Generalization is tested by using a training and a test set. The program then is able to predict the outcome of shots with high accuracy. This makes it possible to develop and verify tactical suggestions for players as part of an automatic analyzing and coaching tool, completely independent of human interaction