The main motivational elements of the social network sites and the social network games will be shown according to studies already existent in the literature, highlighting the elements which motivate the players the most to play social Match 3-type games. Seven games have been analyzed: Diamond Dash, Collapse!Blast, Mystic Ice Blast, Bricks Breaking, Plock, Gem Clix, and Blast!. The results showed that asynchronous time, activities publishing, rewarding system, competition, and social status are the elements which motivate and stimulate the most the players to play.

Marcel Toshio Omori

Alan Salvany Felinto

Analysis of Motivational Elements of Social Games: A Puzzle Match 3-Games Study Case

This study aims at reviewing the published scientific literature on the topics of a game development-based learning (GDBL) method using game development frameworks (GDFs) with the perspective of (a) summarizing a guideline for using GDBL in a curriculum, (b) identifying relevant features of GDFs, and (c) presenting a synthesis of impact factors with empirical evidence on the educational effectiveness of the GDBL method. After systematically going through the available literature on the topic, 34 relevant articles were selected for the final study. We analyzed the articles from three perspectives: (1) pedagogical context and teaching process, (2) selection of GDFs, and (3) evaluation of the GDBL method. The findings from the 34 articles suggest that GDFs have many potential benefits as an aid to teach computer science, software engineering, art design, and other fields and that such GDFs combined with the motivation from games can improve the students&#x2019; knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behaviors in contrast to the traditional classroom teaching. Furthermore, based on the results of the literature review, we extract a guideline of how to apply the GDBL method in education. The empirical evidence of current findings gives a positive overall picture and can provide a useful reference to educators, practitioners, and researchers in the area of game-based learning.

Bian Wu

Alf Inge Wang

A Guideline for Game Development-Based Learning: A Literature Review

This paper describes an empirical study where the focus was on discovering differences and similarities in students working on development of social applications versus students working on development of games using the same Android development platform. In 2010-2011, students attending the software architecture course at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) could choose between four types of projects. Independently of the chosen type of project, all students had to go through the same phases, produce the same documents based on the same templates, and follow exactly the same process. This study focuses on one of projects&#x2014;Android project, to see how much the application domain affects the course project independently of the chosen technology. Our results revealed some positive effects for the students doing game development compared to social application development to learn software architecture, like motivated to work with games, a better focus on quality attributes such as modifiability and testability during the development, production of software architectures of higher complexity, and more productive coding working for the project. However, we did not find significant differences in awarded grade between students choosing the two different domains.

Comparison of Learning Software Architecture by Developing Social Applications versus Games on the Android Platform

Supporting collaborative activities among the online players are one of the major challenges in the area of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG), since they increase the richness of gaming experience and create more engaged communities. To this direction, our study has focused on the provision of services supporting and enhancing the players' in-game community and collaboration activities. We have designed and implemented innovative tools exploiting a game adaptation technology, namely, the In-game Graphical Insertion Technology (IGIT), which permits the addition of web-based applications without any need from the game developers to modify the game at all, nor from the game players to change their game installation. The developed tools follow a design adapted to the MMOG players&#x27; needs and are based on the latest advances on Web 2.0 technology. Their provision is performed through the core element of our system, which is the so-called Community Network Game (CNG) Server. One of the important features provided by the implemented system's underlying framework is the utilization of enhanced Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technology for the distribution of user-generated live video streams. In this paper, we focus on the architecture of the CNG Server as well as on the design and implementation of the online community and collaboration tools.

George Adam

Christos Bouras

Vaggelis Kapoulas

Andreas Papazois

Building Community and Collaboration Applications for MMOGs

More and more games today try to adjust their gameplay to fit individual players; however, little work has been carried out in the same direction towards game presenter characters. Game commentary should take into account players' personalities along with game progress in order to achieve social player-adapted comment delivery that boosts the overall gameplay, engages the players, and stimulates the audience. In our work, we discuss a framework for implementing artificial game presenter characters that are based on game actions and players' social profiles in order to deliver knowledgeable, socially oriented comments. Moreover, the presented framework supports emotional facial expressions for the presenters, allowing them to convey their emotions and thus be more expressive than the majority of the commentary systems today. We prove our concept by developing a presenter character for multiplayer tabletop board games which we further put under usability evaluation with 9 players. The results showed that game sessions with presenter characters are preferred over the plain version of the game and that the majority of the players enjoy personalized social-oriented comments expressed via multimedia and emotions.

Effie Karouzaki

Anthony Savidis

A Framework for Adaptive Game Presenters with Emotions and Social Comments

Dynamic balancing of game difficulty can help cater for different levels of ability in players. However, performance in some game tasks depends on not only the player's ability but also their desire to take risk. Taking or avoiding risk can offer players its own reward in a game situation. Furthermore, a game designer may want to adjust the mechanics differently for a risky, high ability player, as opposed to a risky, low ability player. In this work, we describe a novel modelling technique known as particle filtering which can be used to model various levels of player ability while also considering the player's risk profile. We demonstrate this technique by developing a game challenge where players are required to make a decision between a number of possible alternatives where only a single alternative is correct. Risky players respond faster but with more likelihood of failure. Cautious players wait longer for more evidence, increasing their likelihood of success, but at the expense of game time. By gathering empirical data for the player's response time and accuracy, we develop particle filter models. These models can then be used in real-time to categorise players into different ability and risk-taking levels.

Guy Hawkins

Keith Nesbitt

Scott Brown

Dynamic Difficulty Balancing for Cautious Players and Risk Takers

Flow (FCF) theory has received considerable attention in recent decades. In addition to flow, FCF theory proposed three influential factors, that is, boredom, frustration, and apathy. While these factors have received relatively less attention than flow, Internet applications have grown exponentially, warranting a closer reexamination of the applicability of the FCF theory. Thus, this study tested the theory that high/low levels of skill and challenge lead to four channels of flow. The study sample included 253 online gamers who provided valid responses to an online survey. Analytical results support the FCF theory, although a few exceptions were noted. First, skill was insignificantly related to apathy, possibly because low-skill users can realize significant achievements to compensate for their apathy. Moreover, in contrast with the FCF theory, challenge was positively related to boredom, revealing that gamers become bored with difficult yet repetitive challenges. Two important findings suggest new directions for FCF theory.

Ching-I Teng

Han-Chung Huang

More Than Flow: Revisiting the Theory of Four Channels of Flow

Cheating in chess can take many forms and has existed almost as long as the game itself. The advent of computers has introduced a new form of cheating into the game. Thanks to the computational power of modern-day computers, a player can use a program to calculate thousands of moves for him or her, and determine the best possible scenario for each move and countermove. These programs are often referred to as “bots,” and can even play the game without any user interaction. In this paper, we describe a methodology aimed at preventing bots from participating in online chess games. The proposed approach is based on the integration of a CAPTCHA protocol into a game scenario, and the subsequent inability of bots to accurately track the game states. This is achieved by rotating the images of the individual chess pieces and adjusting their resolution in an attempt to render them unreadable by a bot. Feedback from users during testing shows that there is minimal impact on their ability to play the game. Players rated the difficulty of reading the pieces on a scale of one to ten, with an average rank of 6.5. However, the average number of moves to adjust to the distorted pieces was only 3.75. This tells us that, although it is difficult to read the pieces at first, it is easy to adjust quickly to the new image.

Ryan McDaniel

Roman V. Yampolskiy

Development of Embedded CAPTCHA Elements for Bot Prevention in Fischer Random Chess

Example-based mesh deformation techniques produce natural and realistic shapes by learning the space of deformations from examples. However, skeleton-based methods cannot manipulate a global mesh structure naturally, whereas the mesh-based approaches based on a translational control do not allow the user to edit a local mesh structure intuitively. This paper presents an example-driven mesh editing framework that achieves both global and local pose manipulations. The proposed system is built with a surface deformation method based on a two-step linear optimization technique and achieves direct manipulations of a model surface using translational and rotational controls. With the translational control, the user can create a model in natural poses easily. The rotational control can adjust the local pose intuitively by bending and twisting. We encode example deformations with a rotation-invariant mesh representation which handles large rotations in examples. To incorporate example deformations, we infer a pose from the handle translations/rotations and perform pose space interpolation, thereby avoiding involved nonlinear optimization. With the two-step linear approach combined with the proposed multiresolution deformation method, we can edit models at interactive rates without losing important deformation effects such as muscle bulging.

Yusuke Yoshiyasu

Nobutoshi Yamazaki

Pose Space Surface Manipulation

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International Journal of Computer Games Technology publishes original research and review articles on both the research and development aspects of games technology covering the whole range of entertainment computing and interactive digital media.

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International Journal of Computer Games Technology - Table of contents 2012

International Journal of Computer Games Technology | Hindawi

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International Journal of Computer Games Technology publishes original research and review articles on both the research and development aspects of games technology covering the whole range of entertainment computing and interactive digital media.

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International Journal of Computer Games Technology

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International Journal of Computer Games Technology