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

Influence of the source content and encoding configuration on the perceived quality for scalable video coding

International audienceIn video coding, it is commonly accepted that the encoding paramaters such as the quantization step-size have an influence on the perceived quality. When dealing with Scalable Video Coding (SVC), the parameters used to encode each layer logically have an influence on the overall perceived quality. It is also commonly accepted that using given encoding parameters, the perceived quality does not change significantly according to the encoded source content. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of both SVC coding artifacts and source contents on the quality perceived by human observers. We exploit the outcomes of two subjective experiments designed and conducted under standard conditions in order to provide reliable results. The two experiments are aligned on a common scale using a set of shared processed video sequences, resulting in a database containing the subjective scores for 60 different sources combined with 20 SVC scenarios. We analyse the performance of several source descriptors in modeling the relative behaviour of a given source content when compared to the average of other source contents

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

A SEAMLESS MOBILE COMMUNITY SUPPORT SYSTEM

Abstract. Ubiquitous community support systems have the potential to ease daily life through delivering valuable interactive information and member contacts right in the place where they are needed. Since in real life humans move permanently between communities, we aim at building an interoperable community infrastructure which focuses on seamless switching between different community types. We show how federation can support environment adaptation, how we achieve common member understanding based on a global community ontology and how authentication based on digital certificates can enforce security amongst the community members without loss of privacy. 1

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