The current study investigated how the constructs of social anxiety, relationship support, self-esteem, and personality traits may be related to overall Internet use, and using the Internet for communication, information seeking, entertainment and online gaming. Participants were 258 undergraduate college students (142 males, 116 females) at a Midwestern University, who identified as predominantly European-American (48.1%) or African-American (37.6%). Students completed self-report questionnaires in online format. Results were generally contrary to the study's hypotheses. This investigation found a positive relationship between the personality trait of Openness and student's overall time using the Internet (p < .01), as well as time spent engaging in online gaming (p < .05) and online information seeking (p < .01). Additionally, demographic variables were related to Internet usage such that a positive relationship was found between student's identification as an African-American and overall time using the Internet (p < .01), time spent communicating online (p < .01), and time spent utilizing online entertainment (p < .01). A positive relationship was also found between gender and time spent online gaming (p < .01), indicating that males engaged in online gaming at higher rates than females. This study also examined motivations for Internet usage and results indicated that frequently endorsed motivations were communicating with others, seeking entertainment, looking for information online, and coping with problems. Prior research has supported potential relationships between social anxiety, relationship support, self-esteem, and particular personality traits and Internet usage; however, the current study failed to find many of these relationships. The failure to find hypothesized relationships between numerous psychological variables and Internet usage could be related to numerous factors, such as changes in Internet usage over time, measurement concerns regarding instruments used in the current study, or differences in sample composition relative to previous research investigating these relationships.

Background. Aliasing is a problem that every 3D game has because of the resolutions that monitors are using right now is not high enough. Aliasing is when you look at an object in a 3D world and see that it has jagged edges where it should be smooth. This can be reduced by a technique called anti-aliasing. Objectives. The object of this study is to compare three different techniques, Fast approximate anti-aliasing (FXAA), Subpixel Morphological Anti Aliasing (SMAA) and Temporal anti-aliasing (TAA) in motion to see which is a good default for games. Methods. An experiment was run where 20 people participated and tested a real-time prototype which had a camera moving through a scene multiple times with different anti-aliasing techniques. Results. The results showed that TAA was consistently performing best in the tests of blurry picture quality, aliasing and flickering. Both SMAA and FXAA were only comparable to TAA in the blur area of the test and falling behind all the other parts. Conclusions. TAA is a great anti-aliasing technique to use for avoiding aliasing and flickering while in motion. Blur was thought to be a problem but as the test shows most people did not feel that blur was a problem for any of the techniques that were used.

O presente estudo tem como objetivo pesquisar as condições de possibilidade para o surgimento e sustentação de uma cena cultural independente de criadores/as de jogos digitais queer. Levando em consideração que os jogos digitais têm como público reconhecido principalmente homens, cissexuais, heterossexuais e brancos – e de que a manutenção de uma exclusividade é importante tanto para a indústria de jogos quanto para a manutenção de uma “identidade nerd” centrada nessas características - interrogo de que maneira seria possível uma produção nessa culturas fora dessas posições de sujeito. Compreendendo que a cis-heteronormatividade é uma entidade organizadora de discursos e visibilidades, que os dispõe e organiza em nossa cultura, produzindo assim processos de subjetivação e possibilidades materiais que compõem como legítimos e privilegia sujeitos cissexuais e heterossexuais. Contudo, sendo essas organizações contingentes, as possibilidades de sujeitos que se estabelecem à margem dessa é de negociar com suas regras e ao mesmo tempo subverte-las, podendo assim produzir subjetivações e materializações diferenciais. Dessa maneira, investigo contextualmente como jogos produzidos dentro da cena de jogos digitais da Baía de San Francisco negociam, resistem, deslocam e desarticulam a cis-heteronormatividade e as próprias singularidades dos jogos digitais, compreendendo uma produção que legitimaria sujeitos, vivências e coletivos que não se enquadram na cis-heteronormatividade. Por fim, enfoco nos impactos que essas produções diferencias tem nas organizações de coletivos dentro dessas culturas – tanto queer quanto na mainstream - promovendo então novas potencialidades éticas, estéticas e políticas. / This dissertation’s objective is to research the conditions of possibility for the existence of a digital gaming indie queer cultural scene. Taking into consideration that white, straight cisexual men are recognized as the digital games’ public – and that this exclusivity gaming is an important statement for the industry and the maintenance of a “nerd identity” alike – this project inquiries about viable possibilities for access and production of other subject positions within this cultures. The cis-heteronormativity is an organizing entity that regulates discourses and visibilities, creating subjectivation processes and material possibilities that produce heterosexuality and cissexuality as the only legitimate and privileged subject positions. However, being these processes and possibilities contingent positions, the possibility of living at its margins is to both negotiate and subvert the legitimacy gender / sexuality norms. Being so, this project investigates the San Francsico Bay Area queer gaming scene, and how this scene negotiates, resists, desidentifies and rearticulates both the cis-normativity and digital gaming customs, producing non-normative gaming collectives and experiences. At least, this project focus on the impacts of these productions in the queer and mainstream digital gaming, and how they can promote new reflections about ethics, aesthetics and political meanings in the culture.

Background. The rendering of games takes a lot of processing power and requires expensivehardware to be able to perform this task in a real-time with an acceptableframe-rate. Games often also require an anti-cheat system that require extrapower to be able to always verify that the game has not been modified. With the help ofgame streaming these disadvantages could be removed from the clients. Objectives. The objective of this thesis is to create a game streaming server and client tosee if a game streaming server could scale with the amount of coresit has access to. Methods. The research question will be answered using the implementation methodology, and an experiment will be conducted using that implementation. Two programs are implemented, the server program and the client program.The servers implement the management of clients, the game logic, the rendering and the compression. Each client can only be connected to one server and the server and its clients live inside of a game instance. Everyone that is connected to one server play on the same instance.The implementation is implemented in the D programming language, and it uses the ZLib and the SDL2 libraries as the building blocks.With all of these connected an experiment is designed where as many clients as possible connect to the server. With this data a plot is create in the result section. Results. The output data shows that the implementation scale and a formula was made-up to match the scalability. The formula is <img src="http://www.diva-portal.org/cgi-bin/mimetex.cgi?f(x)%20=%208%20+%205x%20-%200.11x%5E2" />. Conclusions. The experiment was successful and showed that the game server successfully scaledbased on the number of cores that where allocated. It does not scale as good as expected,but it is still an success. The test results are limited as it was only tested on one setup. More research is needed to test it on more hardware and to be able find more optimized implementations.

Arbetets syfte är att studera om en ansats baserad på serious gaming kan göra ett datorbaserat träningsverktyg mer självständigt och mer motiverande för användaren.  I detta arbete beskrivs erfarenheterna från en fallstudie där ett speciellt träningsverktyg, Eco2Trainer, utvärderades med hjälp av användartest. Eco2Trainer är ett träningsverktyg för sparsam körning med buss. Träningen görs framför en dator med en ratt och pedaler. Arbetets syfte är att med hjälp av serious gaming göra Eco2Trainer självständig och mer motiverande för användaren. Arbetet baseras på ett uppdrag av StageIT AB och innefattar flera intressanta och aktuella delar. Serious gaming är en aktuell ansats som lämpar sig bra för just detta projekt och även psykologiska faktorer som driver en tv- och datorspelare generellt och hur dessa gynnsamma faktorer kan implementeras i ett träningsverktyg som Eco2Trainer beskrivs. Arbetet innefattar litteraturstudier men också användarstudier i form av två användartest med personer i målgruppen. Under användartesten gjordes observationer och frågeformulär besvarades av testdeltagarna. All information samlades ihop och analyserades för att sedan användas för vidare utveckling. Resultatet av arbetet blev en ny version av Eco2Trainer som bygger på ett upplägg baserat på serious gaming. Det nya upplägget testades i ett andra användartest och fick gott betyg av deltagarna. Eco2Trainer visade sig vara självständig och testdeltagarna var motiverade och tyckte det var underhållande. Slutsatsen är därför att projektet har lyckats uppnå sina mål och varit med och skapat en produkt som kan bidraga till en mer miljömedveten framtid. / Eco2Trainer is a tool for practicing Ecodriving, developed for busses. In front of a computer screen, with a steering wheel and pedals the training is performed. This method has advantages compared to practicing Ecodriving in a vehicle. No CO2 discharge, no exhaust fumes and no fuel expenses makes Eco2Trainer a tool of today. Making Eco2Trainer more independent and motivating for the user is the purpose of this paper. The project is an assignment for StageIT AB and contains interesting and current topics. Environmental matters are the background of the whole Eco2Trainer project. Serious gaming is another current subject that is brought up and adapt to the project as well as the psychology behind what makes a videogame player, play on. The paper includes literary studies and user studies. The result of this project is a new version of Eco2Trainer were the structure is based on serious gaming. The new version of Eco2Trainer was well liked at the last user test and therefore the conclusion is that the project was successful. The test also shows that the project reaches its goals and helped creating a tool for a more aware future.

The policy and practice of media regulation in China is quickly evolving to cope with the regulatory challenges presented by the rapid development and convergence of new media technology. These challenges include the increasing economic power of international and private stakeholders within this space, as well as the constantly evolving uses of highly converged media. Online games are a central part of this evolving dynamic, which is characterized by strong tensions between producers and operators, government regulators, and users of online games. This research explores the changing dynamic of online games regulation in China as it responds to the forces of internationalization and privatization. It also seeks to identify critical issues for policy development in China that are raised by the new and innovative ways that this media is being used. It draws from and contributes to scholarship from a number of disciplines, but primarily approaches the research from a media studies and area studies perspective. The thesis is presented in five chapters. Chapter I begins with a discussion of emerging practice in online games and its wider policy implications. This is followed by a literature review and an explanation of the methodological approach, which included: case study methodology, participant observation, and key informant Interviews with policy, legal, and game industry experts in China. The core research is then presented in three chapters. Chapter II is a detailed contextual narrative that describes China’s online games policy and places it in historical perspective. Chapter III is an exploratory analysis of key institutions, stakeholder interests, and interactions that shape practical regulation of online games in China. Chapter IV presents a focused analysis and discussion of the gold farming case. The thesis concludes with a summary and discussion of research contributions in Chapter V. The final discussion highlights how the thesis contributes to knowledge in three key areas: new media in China, policy studies of China, and media convergence.

Historically budgets have been seen as an indispensible control mechanism for businesses. Both the business and academic press continue to report on problems related to budgeting. This research report investigated whether or not local managers and finance practitioners believe that budgets add value to South African manufacturing companies A gap in previous research was that investigations were limited to finance practitioners. This study investigated the experiences and views of non-financial managers in addition to those of finance professionals. In order to understand the views of both sets of managers, Qualitative research, in the form of semi-structured expert interviews was undertaken. The findings reflect managers believe budget and planning processes add value, their reasons for what drives value in the process differs from the international literature on the subject. The processes and procedures followed locally align with global practices to a large extent. It was surprising to find that local managers do not report the same levels of problems experienced with budgets as their international counterparts. Participative budgetary practices were found to be a problem, leading to problems with budgetary alignment, efficiency and buy-in. The most surprising finding was that non-financial managers are positive about budgeting and planning processes. The key finding being that the process is used to gain information that drives their understanding of their business and this enables them to more meaningfully review and update their strategies. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted

Problematiskt datorspelande är ett beteende som ökar hos våra barn och unga. Några utvecklar beroende, diagnosen är ny och benämns gaming disorder. De barn och unga som utvecklar gaming disorder lider av ohälsa både fysiskt, psykiskt och socialt. Sjuksköterskan har en betydande roll vid beroendesjukdomar och dess interventioner. Syftet var att sammanställa och beskriva det vetenskapliga underlaget gällande vilka interventioner som används och dessa interventioners effekt hos barn och unga när det gäller gaming disorder. Beskrivande litteraturöversikt har använts som metod, där 11 vetenskapliga artiklar med kvantitativ metod söktes i databaserna Cinahl, APA Psykinfo och Pubmed (n=9) och en manuell litteratursökning av referenslistor (n=2) som besvarade syftet för examensarbetet. Elva artiklar granskades och analysen resulterade i två övergripande kategorier; interventioner vid gaming disorder och interventioners effekt, med tillhörande underkategorier. Interventioner som användes vid gaming disorder var olika former av kognitiv beteendeterapi (KBT) samt behandling med farmaka eller mindfulness. Resultatet visade att dessa interventioners effekt gav olika grad av symtomreducering vilket ledde till ökad hälsa. Slutsatsen av litteraturstudien är att den intervention som främst användes vid gaming disorder var KBT. Den viktigaste effekten av interventionerna var att få symtomreducering av svårighetsgraden. Även familjemedverkan spelade en viktig roll för interventionsresultatet. Denna studie kommer att kunna användas av sjuksköterskor som arbetar dels preventivt med barn och unga samt inom primärvård och barnpsykiatrisk vård. Studien kommer att ge dem en överblick över vilka interventioner som finns och vilka effekter som kan förväntas av initierad intervention.

Computer gaming is an important and growing form of popular media that has many cognitive and social benefits for players. It has also developed a reputation for being a white-male pastime and barring access for people who fall outside of that social grouping. While statistics show that this is increasingly not the case, certain games, particularly those that fall under the category of eSports, do attract largely male player bases. League of Legends is one such game. With Butler's Performativity Theory as a theoretical starting point, a qualitative sociolinguistic study was undertaken into the gendered dynamics of a male-dominated clan of League of Legends players. The data, collected primarily via audio-recordings of player interactions between games, is used as the basis for a sociolinguistic case study that looks at how performativity plays itself out in an environment that is characterised by a strong gender bias. With a focus on a Coloured female gamer in a League of Legends team, this paper explores the ways in which she and her teammates construct their own genders within this particular sociolinguistic context. The relationship between identity and desire, which has been a point of debate in sociolinguistics, is discussed in the context of the clan's interactions. Here I focus on the debate between Cameron and Kulick on the one hand and Bucholtz and Hall on the other. The paper looks into ways in which desire and identity interact with each other during sociolinguistic interaction. Moreover, issues around the construction of gender, race and sexuality are central to the study. The paper uses the data collected to look into the ways that social identities are collaboratively constructed, and contested. The discussion shows that while the team members replicate the gender binary, they do so by simultaneously reifying and challenging gendered norms. The study provides a compelling look into the ways in which gender identities are played with in interaction, and sheds some light on the fluidity of performative identity while simultaneously sketching out the ways that such performance is limited by its environment.

Online-gaming (OG) is a fast-growing phenomenon that could have a major impact in people's life. This study analyses the impact online-gaming has on cohabitational-love relationships and outsiders of the OG world. The study is based on six qualitative interviews with couples engaged in the world of internet-usage and OG. The interviews were performed both individually and together with their partner. There are many positive effects that comes with internet and OG, but there are also plenty of negative. Central questions for this study are therefore how OG are perceived within the relationships and how the potential consequences it leads to are dealt with. The study also discusses who the problem initiator is, and how the negotiation within the relationship looks like. Previous research shows conflict as a result of too much time spent with online-gaming. The result of this study therefore aspires to add a complementary layer to what may be the cause of these conflicts. The result shows that a lack of accountability and too much time spent involved with OG creates reasons for conflict. The presented solution included mutual agreement for what is to be seen as a fair amount of time spent with OG. If the time exceeds stated agreement, it seemed to be a reason for conflict. But if not, OG would mostly be seen as something positive for both parties when it comes to their individual well-being.