EverQuest is a multiplayer online role playing game that serves as a practical incarnation of life as a cyborg in a posthuman community. Using cultural materialsim, this thesis demonstrates how the words of EverQuest interactants - from message boards, interviews, and player in-game communications - construct the world of EverQuest and the roles of the interactants as its citizens. More specifically, this thesis will argue that the EverQuest world serves to reify the ideas of consumer capitalism that informs the "real" world, even as EverQuest itself promises an escape from that world.

This thesis presents the implementation and functionality of the user interface for creating behavior trees in the Unreal Engine (version 4.10). The thesis analyzes the final version of the behavior trees in a game development project carried out over one year with a group ranging between four and seven members. The game which is analyzed is a third person adventure game which contains four types of simple behavior trees. These include two enemies who mainly move towards the player to attack whenever in range and two bosses with individual behavior. The thesis describes the various types of nodes available in the Unreal Engine as well as how the behavior trees in the game are structured. Focus is placed on how the structure achieves the required result and how the process resulted in the final version of the behavior trees. / Detta examensarbete beskriver implementationen och funktionaliteten av användargränssnittet för att skapa beteendeträd i Unreal Engine (version 4.10). Arbetet analyserar den slutgiltiga versionen av beteendeträden i ett spelutvecklingsprojekt som utfördes under ett år med en grupp vars antal växlade mellan fyra och sju medlemmar. Spelat som analyseras är ett tredjepersons äventyrsspel som innehåller fyra typer av grundläggande beteendeträd. Två fiender som huvudsakligen rör sig mot spelaren för att anfalla när de är inom räckhåll, och två bossar med individuella beteenden. Arbetet beskriver de olika typerna av noder tillgängliga i Unreal Engine och även hur beteendeträden i spelet är uppbyggda. Fokus läggs på hur strukturen uppnår det nödvändiga resultatet samt på hur processen resulterade i den slutgiltiga versionen av beteendeträden.

Learning to read body language is something we do throughout our whole life. It is a complex non-verbal language that can express more than words. In this study we investigate the possibility to use only body language to portray emotions to the viewer. In a background of a game project we have used a character that has his face covered, therefore, facial expression is not visible during the online survey, which we used as a method for our investigation. As a foundation we have created four character animations to portray anger, frustration, exhaustion and hurt. To find the answer if it is possible to recognize those five emotions in the character animations survey, participants were obligated to name the emotion expressed on each of the video clips. The results of this study show that the characters body language could be sufficient to portray those five emotions. However, it was concluded that body language could be enough to represent the character's emotional state to the viewer; but by including facial expressions we could help to portray the emotion even further.

Competitive computer gaming, under the name e-sport, have become a popular activity inSweden and worldwide. Within the e-sport community the question about the relationbetween the e-sport and sport has been discussed. Despite of this, very few sport scientistshave studied e-sport. The aim of this licentiate thesis is to create an understanding of thephenomenon e-sport. As a theoretical framework the concept of sportification was used. Inthree articles aspects of sportification in e-sport was studied. E-sport as a concept evolvedin the late 1990 and is used by many people and organizations. The reasons why theconcept of e-sport is used are probably manifold. In the thesis three reasons are presented,namely higher legitimacy, social recognition and autonomy. Furthermore, the results showsimilarities between e-sport and contemporary sport. E-sport has, in contrast tocontemporary sports, developed from commerce around computer games to sport, and notonly from spontaneous play. In conclusion, e-sport is e-sport. By that I mean that e-sport issomething that goes beyond contemporary sport. Probably, it is due to the fact that e-sportevolved in a time when industrial society was transformed into an information- andcommunication society.

The number of underprepared students entering post-secondary education continues to be a national problem community colleges struggle with by providing remedial instruction while having to satisfy the demands for effective teaching accountability. Reading is one identified area needing remediation; and, a goal for programs to address this shortcoming is to increase vocabulary to improve reading comprehension. The problem was that students placed into developmental courses are often discouraged learners with low motivation and eschew the practice requisite for vocabulary learning. Many educators are interested in re-creating the compelling environment found in games to parlay the power of digital games to required curriculum learning in order to engage their students. However, despite the preponderance of recent literature advocating digital games for classroom learning, especially the use of complex endogenous games, there is limited empirical evidence for using digital games to achieve defined learning outcomes. Further, no recent studies have examined digital games use with developmental populations. The study designed, developed, implemented, and evaluated the blending of computer-based games with traditional classroom instruction to provide the repetition and active processing required for students to acquire new vocabulary. The goal was to develop a blended learning design to integrate instructional design and blending design practices to support and improve learning for vocabulary acquisition of developmental readers. A mixed-method (quantitative and qualitative) approach was employed and instructional events for vocabulary lessons were designed and developed using the framework of established models. Pretests and posttest measured achievement in vocabulary gains using three methods of practice: paper-based worksheet, text-based digital game, and video-style digital game. Survey instruments were used to determine students' enjoyment of and motivation using different treatments. Results confirmed that students found digital games a motivating instructional method; however, no advantage in improving achievement was found using text-based or video-style games over the traditional paper-based worksheets method. A description of the analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation of digital games blended with traditional classroom instruction is provided to assist those interested in pursuing digital game-based learning with post-secondary developmental populations. Recommendations are also provided for future research and educational game development.

Student Number : 9903601A - MAFA research report - School of Arts - Faculty of Humanities / This essay will explore the existing definitions of art games that are currently being used in the art game/art mod genre. It will identify the leading theorists within the field, and take into account their definitions whilst at the same time establishing a set of categories within which can be defined the dominant trends in the development of the field. It will also situate art games within an historical context, both within the commercial computer game field as well as the digital art field and attempt to establish some sort of timeline within which we can see the development and emergence of art games in relation to these two disciplines. Two examples of art games, both from different categories will be examined and critiqued in the context of Artistic Computer Game Modification – A 3D game called Escape From Woomera and an art mod or patch called SOD. The art game as an entity will be examined in relation to ideas of the ‘interactive’ and ‘play’, and the implications and potential for fine art practice will be investigated.

Summary Multi-Agent systems typically utilise simple, predictable agents. The usage of such agents in large systems allows for complexity to be achieved through the interaction of these agents. It is feasible, however, to utilise intelligent agents in smaller systems, allowing for more agent complexity and hence a higher degree of realism in the multi-agent model. By utilising the TD( ) Algorithm to train feedforward neural networks, intelligent agents were successfully trained within the reinforcement learning paradigm. A methodology for stabilising this typically unstable neural network training was found through first looking at the relatively simple problem of Tic-Tac-Toe. Once a stable training methodology was arrived at, the more complex task of tackling a multi-player, multi-stage card-game was tackled. The results illustrated that a variety of scenarios can be realistically investigated through the multi-agent model, allowing for solving of situations and better understanding of the game itself. Yet more startling, owing to the agent’s design, the agents learned on their own to bluff, giving much greater insight into the nature of bluffing in such games that lend themselves to the act.

We propose that for all situated agents, the process of task learning has many elements in common. A better understanding of these elements would be beneficial to both engineers attempting to design new agents for task learning and completion, and also to scientists seeking to better understand natural task learning. Therefore, this dissertation sets out our characterisation of agent-independent task learning, and explores its grounding in nature and utility in practise. We achieve this chiefly through the construction and demonstration of two novel task learning systems. Cross-Channel Observation and Imitation Learning (COIL; Wood and Bryson, 2007a,b) is our adaptation of Deb Roy’s Cross-Channel Early Lexical Learning System (CELL; Roy, 1999; Roy and Pentland, 2002) for agent-independent task learning by imitation. The General Task Learning Framework (GTLF) is built upon many of the principles learned through the development of COIL, and can additionally facilitate multi-modal, lifelong learning of complex skills and skill hierarchies. Both systems are validated through experiments conducted in the virtual reality-style game domain of Unreal Tournament (Digital Extremes, 1999). By applying agent-independent learning processes to virtual agents of this kind, we hope that researchers will be more inclined to consider them on a par with robots as tools for learning research.

Computer entertainment is a big business today. Due to the availability of broadband network connections, the Internet is already a platform for many high quality multimedia applications. For example, online theaters and multi-player online games (MOG) are two of the most popular multimedia applications on the Internet. Although the Internet provides us a very convenient channel for data dissemination, its open architecture leads to many security issues. The security problems are especially complicated for computer entertainment applications since we must address both efficiency and security at the same time. In this thesis, we tackle four security issues in different aspects of computer entertainment applications. Specifically, the issues are (1) "to provide secure multimedia streaming while allowing proxy caching by untrusted third parties", (2) "to detect cheating in MOGs other than using conventional labor-intensive methods", (3) "to synchronize game clients in highly-interactive MOGs while resisting cheating in both the application and protocol level", and (4) "to exchange messages in peer-to-peer (P2P) MOGs so that distributed simulation is allowed but information exposure is mitigated". For each of the above issues, we present an effective solution that preserves the architecture of that particular multimedia application and also is feasible and efficient to deploy on the Internet. / Yeung, Siu Fung. / Adviser: John C. S. Lui. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-09, Section: B, page: . / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 137-142). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / School code: 1307.

This thesis presents the playthrough evaluation framework, a novel framework for the reliable usability evaluation of first-person shooter console video games. The framework includes playthrough evaluation, a structured usability evaluation method adapted from heuristic evaluation. Usability evaluation can help guide developers by pointing out design issues that cause users problems. However, usability evaluation methods suffer from the evaluator effect, where separate evaluations of the same data do not produce reliably consistent results. This can result in a number of undesirable consequences affecting issues such as: • Unreliable evaluation: Without reliable results, evaluation reports risk giving incorrect or misleading advice. • Weak methodological validation: Typically new methods (e.g., new heuristics) are validated against user tests. However, without a reliable means to describe observations, attempts to validate novel methods against user test data will also be affected by weak reliability. The playthrough evaluation framework addresses these points through a series of studies presenting the need for, and showing the development of the framework, including the following stages, 1. Explication of poor reliability in heuristic evaluation. 2. Development and validation of a reliable user test coding scheme. 3. Derivation of a novel usability evaluation method, playthrough evaluation. 4. Testing the method, quantifying results. Evaluations were conducted with 22 participants, on 3 first-person shooter action console video games, using two methodologies, heuristic evaluation and the novel playthrough evaluation developed in this thesis. Both methods proved effective, with playthrough evaluation providing more detailed analysis but requiring more time to conduct.