Group items tagged

Abstract: "This paper presents data analysis from a course on Software Engineeri ng in an effort to identify metric s and techniques that would allow instructor to act proactively and identify patterns of low engagement and inefficient peer collaboration . Over the last two terms, 106 students in their second year of studies formed 20 groups and worked collaboratively to develop video games. Throughout the lab, students have to use a variety of tools for managing and developing their projects, such as software version control , static analysis tools , wikis, mailing lists, etc . The students are also supported by weekly meet ings with teaching assistants and instructors regarding group progress, code quality, and management issues. Through these meeting s and their interactions with the software tools, students leave a detailed trace of data related to their individual engageme nt and their collaboration behavior in their groups . The paper provides discussion on the different source of data that can be monitored , and present preliminary results on how the s e data can be used to analyze students' activity."

Abstract: "Player metrics are an invaluable resource for game designers and QA analysts who wish to understand players, monitor and improve game play, and test design hypotheses. Usually such metrics are collected in a straightforward manner by passively recording players; however, such an approach has several potential drawbacks. First, passive recording might fail to record metrics which correspond to an infrequent player behavior. Secondly, passive recording can be a costly, laborious, and memory intensive process, even with the aid of tools. In this paper, we explore the potential for an active approach to player metric collection which strives to collect data more efficiently, and thus with less cost. We use an online, iterative approach which models the relationship between player metrics and in-game situations probabilistically using a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and solves it for the best game configurations to run. To analyze the benefits and limitations of this approach, we implemented a system, called GAMELAB, for recording player metrics in Second Life."

"The U.S. government has hired a California-based company to hack into video game consoles, such as Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, to watch criminals, especially child predators, and learn how to collect evidence against them."

Abstract: "Obesity has become an outstanding public health issue in most countries around the world. Many attempts have been made to address this issue that ranges from taking medication to doing exercise to follow- ing a diet plan to playing games. Few approaches combine exercise and game to engage the obese people in playing fun-based games or pur- poseful games, also known as serious games, while monitoring their bio- signals. However, existing work hardly provides a configurable, scalable and context-aware serious game framework that can be used as a sup- port for obesity treatment. In this paper, we take an attempt to propose such a framework. The proposed framework facilitates bio-signal monitor- ing based on body sensor network, context-awareness based on perva- sive sensors, and on-the-spot activity recommendation based on current game-playing context. It uses the cloud computing platform as infrastruc- tural support that ensures the scalability of the framework. In order to demonstrate the suitability of the proposed framework, we developed a sample serious game; deploy it over a cloud platform; and experiment with it by capturing some psycho-physical data while the obese are en- gaged in game-play. We observed that the obese people were very much engaged in game-play and they had positive experience using the system"