"The appearance of collaboration tools such as blogs, wikis, social media, and video games has altered the way individuals and organizations relate to one another.[i] There is no longer any need to wait on professionals to share material and report on new developments. Today, people communicate directly in an unmediated and unfiltered manner."
Abstract: "Search-based procedural content generation methods allow
video games to introduce new content continually, thereby
engaging the player for a longer time while reducing the burden
on developers. However, games so far have not explored
the potential economic value of unique evolved artifacts.
Building on this insight, this paper presents for the first time a
Facebook game called Petalz in which players can share flowers
they breed themselves with other players through a global
marketplace. In particular, the market in this social game allows
players to set the price of their evolved aestheticallypleasing
flowers in virtual currency. Furthermore, the transaction
in which one player buys seeds from another creates
a new social element that links the players in the transaction.
The combination of unique user-generated content and social
gaming in Petalz facilitates meaningful collaboration between
users, positively influences the dynamics of the game,
and opens new possibilities in digital entertainment."
This seems the takeaway: ""We don't have a lot of control over how people interpret our findings," Bushman told Ars. ... Still, Bushamn suggests that the basic idea that virtual shooting can help improve real-world shooting performance shouldn't be that controversial at its core. "If you want to learn how to fly an airplane and you want to use the media to help you learn, what would be the best way: read a book about it, watch a TV program about it, or play a flight simulator video game?" he asked rhetorically. "Clearly the more interactive the media, the more you're going to learn. Does that mean by playing flight simulator you're going to be good enough to fly a real plane? I don't know, that's a relative decision, but better than if you'd watched a TV program or read a book about it, I would say.""
"The University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) has launched the Center for Digital Games Research to study digital media and games from a multidisciplinary approach. Launched with seed funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the center brings together 30 faculty members with expertise in "human-computer interaction, virtual environments, simulations, social networks, data mining, interactive storytelling and narrative, media neuroscience and behavioral health," among others, according to a news release."
From the abstract: "Collective Artificial Intelligence (CAI) simulates human intelligence from data contributed by many
humans, mined for inter-related patterns. This thesis applies CAI to social role-playing, introducing an
end-to-end process for compositing recorded performances from thousands of humans, and simulating
open-ended interaction from this data. The CAI process combines crowdsourcing, pattern discovery, and
case-based planning. Content creation is crowdsourced by recording role-players online. Browser-based
tools allow non-experts to annotate data, organizing content into a hierarchical narrative structure.
Patterns discovered from data power a novel system combining plan recognition with case-based
planning. The combination of this process and structure produces a new medium, which exploits a
massive corpus to realize characters who interact and converse with humans. This medium enables new
experiences in videogames, and new classes of training simulations, therapeutic applications, and social
robots. .... As a proof of concept, a CAI system has been evaluated by recording over 10,000 performances
in The Restaurant Game, automating an AI-controlled waitress who interacts in the world, and
converses with a human via text or speech. Quantitative results demonstrate CAI supports significantly
open-ended interaction with humans, while focus groups reveal factors for improving engagement."
First chapter of Bohyun Kim's recently published Understanding Gamification (remaining chapters require purchase or subscription,) an issue of the journal Library Technology Reports. Topics include game mechanics, gamification in libraries and education, and elements of design.
Wordplay and the Discourse of Video Games: Analyzing Words, Design and Play Routledge Studies in New Media and Cyberculture, 2012 Publisher Description: In this timely new book, Christopher Paul analyzes how the words we use to talk about video games and the structures that are produced within games shape a particular way of gaming by focusing on how games create meaning, lead to identification and division, persuade, and circulate ideas.
"Editor's note: Ann DeMarle is director of the Emergent Media Center and associate professor of communication and creative media at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont. "(CNN) Talking about Champlain's game development degree programs.
This is the blog of Games and Learning Alliance (GaLA), Network of Excellence for Serious Games, a project " to shape the scientific community and build a European Virtual Research Centre aimed at gathering, integrating, harmonizing and coordinating research on SGs and disseminating knowledge, best practices and tools as a reference point at an international level.
The other key focuses of the project are: the support to deployment in the actual educational and training settings; the fostering of innovation and knowledge transfer through research-business dialogue; the development high-quality didactics on SG by promoting and supporting courses at Master and PhD level."
Virginia state attorney general enlists George Mason game design students to create games to combat aggressive online game and social media recruiting tactics employed by street gangs
Abstract: "The most popular Facebook games are being played by millions of users, sometimes
only a few weeks after introduction. Although several of these games and
their users have been studied, there currently exists no open-source version of such
a game.
In this thesis we present the design, implementation, and performance analysis
of WebHack, a Facebook-integrated multiplayer game. WebHack is built upon the
classic, but still popular, game of Nethack. We discuss the technical difficulties
with file handles, process limits, communication networks, and handling failures.
Further, we consider aspects specific to legacy applications, for example legal
issues and technical limitations. We propose methods to circumvent these issues,
and show a successful integration of the legacy game Nethack into our Facebookintegrated
game system.
We present the design of our system and evaluate the performance of the design
in various scenarios. Among other results, we show that WebHack is a highperformance
system, able to support over 300,000 concurrent players, handle arrival
rates for up to 1,750 new players per second for over 60 seconds, and is able
to recover within 10 seconds from a server failure."