Southern Africa Climate Over the Recent Decades:Description, Variability and Trends

South of 15°S, southern Africa has a subtropical climate, which is affected by temperate and tropical weather systems and comes under the influence of the Southern Hemisphere high-pressure systems. Most rainfall occurs in austral summer, but the southwest experiences winter rainfall. Much of the precipitation in summer is of convective origin forced by large-scale dynamics. There is a marked diurnal cycle in rainfall in summer. The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) influences interannual rainfall variability. In austral summer, drought tends to occur during El Niño, while above-normal rainfall conditions tend to follow La Niña. During El Niño, higher than normal atmospheric pressure anomalies, detrimental to rainfall, occur due to changes in the global atmospheric circulation. This also weakens the moisture transport from the Indian Ocean to the continent. The opposite mechanisms happen during La Niña. On top of the variability related to ENSO, the Pacific Ocean also influences the decadal variability of rainfall. Additionally, the Angola Current, the Agulhas Current, the Mozambique Channel and the southwest Indian Ocean affect rainfall variability. Over the last 40 to 60 years, near-surface temperatures have increased over almost the whole region, summer precipitation has increased south of 10°S, and winter precipitation has mostly decreased in South Africa. Meanwhile, the Agulhas Current and the Angola Current have warmed, and the Benguela Current has cooled

Exploring Twitter as a game platform; strategies and opportunities for microblogging-based games

Recent years have seen the massive daily engagement of players with games that are integrated with online social networking sites, such as Facebook. However, few games have successfully created engaging experiences through integration with microblogging websites. In this paper, we explore the opportunities and challenges in using Twitter as a platform for playing games, through the case study of the game Hashtag Dungeon, a dungeon-crawling game that uses Twitter for collaborative creation of game content. Two studies were carried out. A quantitative user study with 32 participants demonstrated that players found the game engaging and rewarding. A follow-up qualitative study with 8 participants suggests that Twitter integration in this game is meaningful, but that there are concerns over the impact of the game on players’ Twitter profiles. Based on findings from both studies, we propose strategies for the design of Microblogging-based games, and discuss wider implications of social media integration in games

Heuristic Evaluation for Gameful Design

© Lennart Nacke, 2016. This is the author’s version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in CHI PLAY Companion '16 Proceedings of the 2016 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play Companion Extended Abstracts, https://doi.org/10.1145/2968120.2987729Despite the emergence of many gameful design methods in the literature, there is a lack of evaluation methods specific to gameful design. To address this gap, we present a new set of guidelines for heuristic evaluation of gameful design in interactive systems. First, we review several gameful design methods to identify the dimensions of motivational affordances most often employed. Then, we present a set of 28 gamification heuristics aimed at enabling experts to rapidly evaluate a gameful system. The resulting heuristics are a new method to evaluate user experience in gameful interactive systemsNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of CanadaPeer-reviewe

Go with the flow: reinforcement learning in turn-based battle video games

Game flow represents a state where the player is neither frustrated nor bored. In turn-based battle video games it can be achieved by Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment (DDA), whose research has begun rising over the last decade. This paper introduces an idea for incorporating DDA through the use of Reinforcement Learning (RL) to agents of turn-based battle video games. We design and implement an RL agent that shows, in a simple environment, the idea of how a game could achieve balance through adequate choices in actions depending on the player's level of skill. For achieving this purpose, we incorporated the design and implementation of state-action-reward-state-action (SARSA) algorithm to the agent of our implemented game. In addition, we added tracking of the on-going games and depending on the frequency of the player's repeated wins or losses, the rewards of the RL agent are modified. This modification of the rewards has an impact on the RL agent's actions, which involves an increase/decrease of the difficulty of the battle game. The evaluation performed shows that the idea of the paper is demonstrated, since players face personalized challenges that we believe are in range of game flow

Player experience and deceptive expectations of difficulty adaptation in digital games

Increasingly, digital games are including adaptive features that adjust the level of difficulty to match the skills of individual players. The intention is to improve and prolong the player experience by allowing the player to have the feeling of challenge without it being overwhelming and leading to repeated failure and frustration. Previous work has shown that player experience is indeed improved by such adaptations but also that the player experience can be improved by simply claiming such an adaptation is present even when it is not. It is therefore possible that claims about adaptations and the actual adaptations could interact and not lead to the intended outcomes for the players or worse disappoint players. This paper reports on two studies that were conducted to experimentally investigate the interaction between game adaptations and player information about adaptations on the player experience, specifically their sense of immersion in the game. For this, two games were developed using two different kinds of adaptations to adjust difficulty based on players’ performance in the game. Participants were provided with information about game adaptations independently of whether the adaptations were present. The results suggest that players felt more immersed in the game when told that the game adapts to them, regardless of whether the adaptation was present in the game or not. This effect was observed in both games despite their different adaptations and it remained prominent even during longer gaming sessions. These findings demonstrate that players’ knowledge of adaptations influences their experience independently of adaptations. In this particular context, the knowledge reinforced the experience of the adaptations. This suggests that, at least in some circumstances, developers do not need to be concerned about negative effects of telling players about in-game adaptations

A Framework and Taxonomy of Videogame Playing Preferences

© Owners/Authors, 2017. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in CHI PLAY '17 - Proceedings of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play.Player preferences for different gaming styles or game elements has been a topic of interest in human-computer interaction for over a decade. However, current models suggested by the extant literature are generally based on classifying abstract gaming motivations or player archetypes. These concepts do not directly map onto the building blocks of games, taking away from the utility of the findings. To address this issue, we propose a conceptual framework of player preferences based on two dimensions: game elements and game playing styles. To investigate these two concepts, we conducted an exploratory empirical investigation of player preferences, which allowed us to create a taxonomy of nine groups of game elements and five groups of game playing styles. These two concepts are foundational to games, which means that our model can be used by designers to create games that are tailored to their target audience. In addition, we demonstrate that there are significant effects of gender and age on participants’ preferences and discuss the implications of these findings.NSERC || RGPIN-418622-2012 SSHRC || 895-2011-1014, IMMERSe CFI || 35819 Mitacs || IT07255 SWaGUR CNPq, Brazi

Disentangling Fun and Enjoyment in Exergames Using an Expanded Design, Play, Experience Framework: A Narrative Review

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High-throughput sequencing of the paired human immunoglobulin heavy and light chain repertoire.

Each B-cell receptor consists of a pair of heavy and light chains. High-throughput sequencing can identify large numbers of heavy- and light-chain variable regions (VH and VL) in a given B-cell repertoire, but information about endogenous pairing of heavy and light chains is lost after bulk lysis of B-cell populations. Here we describe a way to retain this pairing information. In our approach, single B cells (>5 × 104 capacity per experiment) are deposited in a high-density microwell plate (125 pl/well) and lysed in situ. mRNA is then captured on magnetic beads, reverse transcribed and amplified by emulsion VH:VL linkage PCR. The linked transcripts are analyzed by Illumina high-throughput sequencing. We validated the fidelity of VH:VL pairs identified by this approach and used the method to sequence the repertoire of three human cell subsets-peripheral blood IgG+ B cells, peripheral plasmablasts isolated after tetanus toxoid immunization and memory B cells isolated after seasonal influenza vaccinatio

Serious games for higher education: a framework for reducing design complexity

Westera, W., Nadolski, R., Hummel, H. G. K., & Wopereis, I. (2008). Serious games for higher education: a framework for reducing design complexity. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 24(5), 420-432.Serious games open up many new opportunities for complex skills learning in higher education. The inherent complexity of such games though, requires large efforts for their development. This paper presents a framework for serious game design, which aims to reduce the design complexity at both conceptual, technical and practical levels. The approach focuses on a relevant subset of serious games, labelled scenario-based games. At the conceptual level it identifies the basic elements that make up the static game configuration; it also describes the game dynamics, i.e. the state changes of the various game components in the course of time. At the technical level it presents a basic system architecture, which comprises various building tools. Various building tools will be explained and illustrated with technical implementations that are part of the Emergo toolkit for scenario-based game development. At the practical level, a set of design principles are presented for controlling and reducing game design complexity. The principles cover the topics of game structure, feedback and game representation, respectively. Practical application of the framework and the associated toolkit is briefly reported and evaluated