The Impact of Perceived Interactivity and Vividness of Video Games on Customer Buying Behavior

About 60 percent of Americans (145 million people) play video games, and the age of 61 percent of all game players is 18 and over (IDSA, 200 1). As the competition to excel in the video game market increasingly becomes difficult for manufacturers, it is becoming more important for manufacturers and video game developers to understand what makes people play and buy games. The major challenge to the gaming industry is to figure out what features of games can catch the consumers\u27 attention. The purpose of this research was to examine what kinds of video games captivate consumers, determine whether more interactivity and vividness in games achieve more positive press, and evaluate how video games of the future should be developed. A survey of 228 game players in U.S.A. was conducted; research results were generated through the use of descriptive analysis, correlation analysis, and multiple regression analysis. The results of this study showed that a video game\u27s creativity, challenge, control, sensory gratification, socialization, audio effect, visual effect, and storytelling have positive relevance to engage consumers\u27 minds and stimulate their imagination to play or purchase video games. The results also showed that gender differences can influence the individual types of video games purchased. Three age groups (18 to 24,25 to 34, and 35 to 56) had different patterns of purchasing video games. The results showed that respondents\u27 buying behavior is significantly influenced by the characteristics of interactivity and vividness. This study contributed to developing the characteristics of video games by identifying to what extent consumers\u27 emotional responses and behaviors are directly affected by interactivity and vividness in gaming characteristics. The framework of this study can be used to analyze and evaluate customer buying behavior in various video games in the industry. To increase the video game marketplace, merging the features of interactivity and vividness may be a key to enhancing customers\u27 buying behavior and playing intentions

The effects of perceived childrearing practice, adult attachment style, and endorsed cultural value on self-construal

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Master of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.These studies examined the relative contributions of perceived childrearing practices with parents, adult attachment styles, endorsed cultural values to self-construals. The findings were verified by cross-examination in terms of both correlational and experimental designs, concepts being measured by more than one scale and method, two sources of data (self-report and friend-report), and two groups of sample (university students and married adults). Results showed that interdependent self-construal was significantly and positively predicted by endorsed collectivism cultural value but negatively predicted by endorsed individualism cultural value, whereas independent self-construal was unexpectedly positively predicted by endorsed collectivism cultural value. Endorsed collectivism cultural value in turn was significantly and positively predicted by secure attachment style, attachment close, and attachment anxiety, whilst endorsed individualism cultural value was significantly and positively predicted by dismissing attachment style. In addition to endorsed cultural values, independent self-construal was also predicted by secure attachment style whilst interdependent self-construal was predicted by both attachment close and attachment anxiety. The self-construal task showed no relationship between attachment security and the qualitative self-construal. In reference to the mediation function, endorsed collectivism cultural value partially mediated the link between secure attachment style and independent self-construal, and endorsed cultural value completely mediated the link between attachment anxiety and interdependent self-construal and the link between attachment close and interdependent self-construal. Across three studies, independent self-construal and interdependent self-construal were moderately to highly positive correlated, which were supposed to be two orthogonal dimensions in Singelis (1994). Attachment distributions varied in terms of the different attachment scales. Findings are discussed in terms of the complexity of the self-construal concept and the possible association between adult attachment styles and cultural values

Computation-Performance Optimization of Convolutional Neural Networks with Redundant Kernel Removal

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are widely employed in modern computer vision algorithms, where the input image is convolved iteratively by many kernels to extract the knowledge behind it. However, with the depth of convolutional layers getting deeper and deeper in recent years, the enormous computational complexity makes it difficult to be deployed on embedded systems with limited hardware resources. In this paper, we propose two computation-performance optimization methods to reduce the redundant convolution kernels of a CNN with performance and architecture constraints, and apply it to a network for super resolution (SR). Using PSNR drop compared to the original network as the performance criterion, our method can get the optimal PSNR under a certain computation budget constraint. On the other hand, our method is also capable of minimizing the computation required under a given PSNR drop.Comment: This paper was accepted by 2018 The International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS