Bosses, spam, and griefers: a study of how old words adopt new meanings in online computer games

This essay investigates 20 gaming words generally present in the genres of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, Real Time Strategy, and First-Person Shooter. From each genre, one game was chosen as a representative for their respective genre, namely Guild Wars 2, StarCraft II, and Quake III Arena. The 20 words were chosen on the basis that they all occur in at least two of the three gaming genres, and that their use in the games differ from their original definition presented in Oxford English Dictionary. The aim of the study is to investigate how online multiplayer games adopt certain words and how they are used in their respective contexts. My hypothesis was that there would be differences in meanings of the words within the different games since the games, in themselves, are different from each other. However, only 8 of the 20 analysed words differed in use between the games, which does not fully support this initial hypothesis. The reasons for this are, according to this study, mainly twofold. The sample size is limited, thus making it difficult to draw any major conclusions. Moreover, gamers move between games, bringing acquired vocabulary with them. In this study, only verbs and nouns were adopted in the different genres, and they had changed from their definitions present in the Oxford English Dictionary mainly through widening and/or conversion

Disentangling the Influence of Recommender Attributes and News-Story Attributes: A Conjoint Experiment on Exposure and Sharing Decisions on Social Networking Sites

While news outlets still play an important role as a source of news, people increasingly receive their political information and news from social networking sites (SNSs). This study extends the literature on exposure and sharing decisions on SNSs by exploring how different attributes shape such decisions, how the two decision types differ, and by disentangling the role played by personal news recommendations and shared news stories on SNSs. As SNSs add a social dimension, exposure and sharing decisions are contingent not only upon the news story itself (news-story attributes) but also upon characteristics of the person who shares the story (recommender attributes). We designed a conjoint experiment to disentangle the effects of recommender and news-story attributes on the decision to recommend and read news and fielded it in a probability-based Norwegian online survey. The results suggest that committing to reading and sharing information are two similar yet distinct phenomena and that selective sharing is a stronger commitment than selective exposure. We also found evidence to suggest that selective sharing of news featuring a favored political party was contingent upon whether one also received information about the recommender attributes.publishedVersio

Serious Games – An Overview

Abstract This report discusses some issues concerning serious games, that is, (digital) games used for purposes other than mere entertainment. The starting point is the serious games concept itself, and what the actually means. Further, serious games allow learners to experience situations that are impossible in the real world for reasons of safety, cost, time, etc., but they are also claimed to have positive impacts on the players' development of a number of different skills. Subsequently, some possible positive (and negative) impacts of serious games are discussed. Further, some of the markets such games are used in are considered here, including, military games, government games, educational games, corporate games, and healthcare games. This report also identifies some (mainly academic) actors in the North American and the European serious games market. This report is part of the DISTRICT (Developing Industrial Strategies Through Innovative Cluster and Technologies) project: Serious Games Cluster and Business Network (SER3VG), which is part of the Interreg IIIC Programme

Do Polls Influence Opinions? Investigating Poll Feedback Loops Using the Novel Dynamic Response Feedback Experimental Procedure

Opinion polls may inadvertently affect public opinion, as people may change their attitudes after learning what others think. A disconcerting possibility is that opinion polls have the ability to create information cascades, wherein the majority opinion becomes increasingly larger over time. Testing poll influence on attitudes toward Syrian refugees and mandatory measles vaccination, we field survey experiments on a probability-based online survey panel. Through a novel automated procedure labeled the dynamic response feedback, we measure whether the answers from early poll respondents can influence the opinions of subsequent respondents who learn the answers of the previous respondents. Using this procedure, no feedback loops are identified.publishedVersio

A framework for identification, assessment and prioritization of climate change adaptation measures for roads and railways

Severe accidents and high costs associated with weather-related events already occur in today’s climate. Unless preventive measures are taken, the costs are expected to increase in future due to ongoing climate change. However, the risk reduction measures are costly as well and may result in unwanted impacts. Therefore, it is important to identify, assess and prioritize which measures are necessary to undertake, as well as where and when these are to be undertaken. To be able to make such evaluations, robust (scientifically based), transparent and systematic assessments and valuations are required. This article describes a framework to assess the cause-and-effect relationships and how to estimate the costs and benefits as a basis to assess and prioritize measures for climate adaptation of roads and railways. The framework includes hazard identification, risk analysis and risk assessment, identification, monetary and non-monetary evaluation of possible risk reduction measures and a step regarding distribution-, goal-and sensitivity analyses. The results from applying the framework shall be used to prioritize among potential risk reduction measures as well as when to undertake them

How the public understands news media trust: An open-ended approach

Despite the central role that ordinary citizens play as ‘trustors’ (i.e. the actor that places trust) in the literature on news media trust, prior quantitative studies have paid little attention to how ordinary citizens understand and define news media trust. Here, trust tends to be studied from a researcher-defined – rather than an audience-defined – perspective. To address this gap, we investigate how the public describes news media trust in their own words by asking them directly. We analyse 1500 written responses collected through a Norwegian online probability-based survey, here using a semisupervised quantitative text analysis technique called structural topic modelling (STM). We find that citizens’ own understanding of news media trust can be categorised into four distinct topics that, in some instances, are comparable to academic and professional discourse. We show that citizens’ written descriptions of news media trust vary by many of the same variables that prior research has found to be important predictors of levels of trust. Respondents’ written descriptions of news media trust vary by education and satisfaction with democracy but not other known predictors of trust, such as ideological self-placement and political preferences.publishedVersio

Do citizens make inferences from political candidate characteristics when aiming for substantive representation?

We elicit citizens' preferences over hypothetical candidates by applying conjoint survey experiments within a probability-based online panel of the Norwegian electorate. Our experimental treatments differ in whether citizens receive information about candidates' social characteristics only, candidates' issue positions only, or both. From this, we identify whether citizens are able to infer substantive policy positions from the descriptive characteristics of potential representatives and use that information to make candidate choices that achieve substantive representation. We find that candidate choice is driven more by knowledge about candidates' issue positions than by knowledge about their social characteristics and that citizens value substantive representation more robustly than descriptive representation. Importantly, while the direct experimental test of whether voters use the information they obtain from descriptive markers to choose a candidate that gives them substantive representation is inconclusive, we find that voters form beliefs about candidates' issue positions based solely on candidates’ social characteristics

Creative destruction in science

Drawing on the concept of a gale of creative destruction in a capitalistic economy, we argue that initiatives to assess the robustness of findings in the organizational literature should aim to simultaneously test competing ideas operating in the same theoretical space. In other words, replication efforts should seek not just to support or question the original findings, but also to replace them with revised, stronger theories with greater explanatory power. Achieving this will typically require adding new measures, conditions, and subject populations to research designs, in order to carry out conceptual tests of multiple theories in addition to directly replicating the original findings. To illustrate the value of the creative destruction approach for theory pruning in organizational scholarship, we describe recent replication initiatives re-examining culture and work morality, working parents\u2019 reasoning about day care options, and gender discrimination in hiring decisions. Significance statement It is becoming increasingly clear that many, if not most, published research findings across scientific fields are not readily replicable when the same method is repeated. Although extremely valuable, failed replications risk leaving a theoretical void\u2014 reducing confidence the original theoretical prediction is true, but not replacing it with positive evidence in favor of an alternative theory. We introduce the creative destruction approach to replication, which combines theory pruning methods from the field of management with emerging best practices from the open science movement, with the aim of making replications as generative as possible. In effect, we advocate for a Replication 2.0 movement in which the goal shifts from checking on the reliability of past findings to actively engaging in competitive theory testing and theory building. Scientific transparency statement The materials, code, and data for this article are posted publicly on the Open Science Framework, with links provided in the article

Examining the generalizability of research findings from archival data

This initiative examined systematically the extent to which a large set of archival research findings generalizes across contexts. We repeated the key analyses for 29 original strategic management effects in the same context (direct reproduction) as well as in 52 novel time periods and geographies; 45% of the reproductions returned results matching the original reports together with 55% of tests in different spans of years and 40% of tests in novel geographies. Some original findings were associated with multiple new tests. Reproducibility was the best predictor of generalizability—for the findings that proved directly reproducible, 84% emerged in other available time periods and 57% emerged in other geographies. Overall, only limited empirical evidence emerged for context sensitivity. In a forecasting survey, independent scientists were able to anticipate which effects would find support in tests in new samples