Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-26T18:15:37Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 AnaRabello.pdf: 2792677 bytes, checksum: cdf8213d13eaa9dd616bb78b3d974ad8 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2006-05-29 / The Massive Multiplayers On-line Game, a popularity worldwide communicational phenomenon are rapidly becoming an important socialization mechanism of all age people, nationality, ethnics and cultures. The object of this research is the Massive Multiplayer on-line Game Ragnarok on-line, an exclusive on-line game that has the constantly switch of information and ideas between players an essential condition for win. Analyze the communication interaction of societies build from these relations that can be producing new and challenging the actual rolls of social interaction and changing the verbal and non verbal dialog of communities in general. For participating communities, play by MMORPG can mean going in a complex social world, bringing together all of them real relationship problems and possibilities of problems existing in real life, possible by virtual representation of human figure. Analyze the relationship s characteristics of these communities, them building template, codes, representation systems and language adopted. Corpus of this analyze is constituted by interaction system made specifically in the game environment and implication about the communicational relationship pattern of these communities. The bibliography used evolve the know areas as follow: communication and information theory, communication media, theory of language, media studies, cyberculture, media culture, game theories / Os jogos multi-jogadores on-line, um fenômeno comunicacional de popularidade no mundo todo, estão rapidamente se tornando um importante mecanismo de socialização entre pessoas de diferentes idades, nacionalidades, etnias e culturas. A presente pesquisa tem por objeto o jogo eletrônico Ragnarok on-line , um jogo exclusivamente on-line onde as trocas de informações e conhecimentos entre jogadores são uma condição essencial à vitória. Analisam-se as interações comunicacionais das sociedades formadas a partir destas relações, que podem estar produzindo novas e desafiando as atuais regras de interação social e gerando grande alteração no diálogo verbal e não verbal das comunidades em geral. Para as comunidades participantes, jogar por meio de um jogo multi-usuário pode significar entrar em um complexo mundo social, trazendo junto todos os problemas e possibilidades de relacionamentos presentes em um mundo não virtual, que se faz possível pela representação virtual de sua figura humana. Analisam-se as características de relacionamento destas comunidades, seus padrões de formação, códigos, sistemas de representação e linguagem adotados. O corpus desta análise é constituído pelos sistemas de interação criados especificamente no ambiente do jogo e suas implicações sobre o padrão de relacionamento comunicacional destas comunidades. A bibliografia utilizada envolve as seguintes áreas do conhecimento: teoria da comunicação e da informação, meios de comunicação, teoria da linguagem, estudos sobre mediações, cibercultura, cultura das mídias, teoria dos jogos

Made available in DSpace on 2016-03-15T19:43:06Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Adriana Kei Ohashi Sato.pdf: 1422574 bytes, checksum: 540e2341a2b34d4eca47c4af926c8a33 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007-09-14 / This work intends to analyze design as the object that generates answers to the user's (gamer's) expectations based on the collective imaginarium. In turn, this imaginarium originates in a specific social-cultural context. Considering men as symbolic beings, they look for the reason of their existence by attribuing meaning to objects. Those meanings are interpreted by society, creating values, behaviors and cultural references. This work presents fundamental concepts about design and its presence in the social-cultural context, being design the language that interprets and re-signify the electronic game based on the collective imaginarium. / A presente pesquisa procura analisar o design como objeto gerador de respostas às expectativas do usuário (jogador) a partir do imaginário coletivo. Por sua vez, este imaginário, tem a sua origem em um determinado contexto sócio-cultural. Considerando o homem como um ser simbólico, este busca o sentido para sua existência por meio da atribuição de significados aos objetos. Tais significados são interpretados pela sociedade criando seus valores, comportamentos e referenciais culturais. Ao longo deste trabalho são apresentados conceitos fundamentais sobre o design e sua presença no contexto sócio-cultural, sendo o design, a linguagem que interpreta e resignifica, a partir do imaginário coletivo, um jogo eletrônico.

This study examines how professional social workers relate to problematic computer and video gaming as an addiction. It is a qualitative interview study aimed to describe and analyze how professional social workers, who in some way work with problematic computer gaming, relate to the player’s problems in terms of a concept of dependency. The theoretical approach is based on social constructivist theories of discourses, normality, the definition of dependency and diagnoses. The study was conducted through five qualitative half structured definition interviews with professional social workers that work directly or comes in contact with problematic computer gaming. The results portray a consistent, yet fragmented understanding of the problem. Daily life is described as "reality" and the problematic computer gaming as "escapism". The player can’t meet the normative requirements of its surroundings and is classified as addicted. The informants describe similar problems related to computer gaming, but have different ideas on how the problems arise. The study concludes that professionals specifically describing problematic gaming as an addiction explain their clients in terminology comparable to substance abuse. Those who don’t relate to the concept of dependence as firmly describe the problematic gaming as more of a consequence of the interaction between the player and its surroundings.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-18T21:39:48Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 3 Lia Carrari Rodrigues1.pdf: 2007869 bytes, checksum: 5127705a8183cb3056356f8cba16af6a (MD5) Lia Carrari Rodrigues2.pdf: 1875473 bytes, checksum: 48cfbdbc52e6db38b63fd8d1622c69ed (MD5) Lia Carrari Rodrigues3.pdf: 2987315 bytes, checksum: 7dacd97c56a6b31303f12c62c9657e92 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2009-02-11 / Fundo Mackenzie de Pesquisa / The current worldwide popularity of on-line games has resulted in the formation of virtual communities with hundreds of people. This is due to the daily interaction of people in games called Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs). These communities are culturally diverse and permeated by social ties estabilished through different ways in the game s virtual world. The present research held a study on the communities found in World of Warcraft through social network analysis. The goal of this approach was to define a typology of social ties and study the behavioural patterns related to the structure of these networks. This involved the construction of an efficient data collecting system, as well as analysis tools. That particular methodology verified that this kind of organization can be characterized as an emergent adaptive complex system. To that end, different theories were utilized, such as graph theory, Kohonen networks algebra and software engineering. / Atualmente a popularidade mundial de jogos on-line tem resultado na formação de comunidades virtuais com centenas de pessoas. Isso se deve à interação diária das pessoas em jogos chamados Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs). Estas comunidades são culturalmente diversificadas e permeadas por laços sociais estabelecidos de diferentes maneiras no ambiente virtual do jogo. A presente pesquisa realizou um estudo de comunidades do jogo World of Warcraft por meio da abordagem da análise de redes sociais. O intuito desta abordagem foi definir uma tipologia de laços sociais e estudar padrões de comportamento vinculados à estrutura destas. Isso envolveu a construção de um sistema de coleta de dados eficiente desta rede, assim como ferramentas de análise. Com esta metodologia, verificou-se que este tipo de organização pode ser caracterizada como um sistema complexo adaptativo emergente. Para isso, foram utilizadas diferentes teorias, como a teoria dos grafos, redes de Kohonen, álgebra e engenharia de software.

Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVEs) and Massively Multi-player On- line Games (MMOGs) are a popular, immersive genre of computer game. For some disabled users, eye-gaze offers the only input modality with the potential for sufficiently high bandwidth to support the range of time-critical interaction tasks required to play. Although, there has been much research into gaze interaction techniques for computer interaction over the past twenty years, much of this has focused on 2D desktop application control. There has been some work that investigates the use of gaze interaction as an additional input device for gaming but very little on using gaze on its own. Further, configuration of these techniques usually requires expert knowledge often beyond the capabilities of a parent, carer or support worker. The work presented in this thesis addresses these issues by the investigation of novel gaze-only interaction techniques. These are to enable at least a beginner level of game play to take place together with a means of adapting the techniques to suit an individual. To achieve this, a collection of novel gaze based interaction techniques have been evaluated through empirical studies. These have been encompassed within an extensible software architecture that has been made available for free download. Further, a metric of reliability is developed that when used as a measure within a specially designed diagnostic test, allows the interaction technique to be adapted to suit an individual. Methods of selecting interaction techniques based upon game task are also explored and a novel methodology based on expert task analysis is developed to aid selection.

This creative project explores some major issues about visual communication in digital games. The project will continue to address new questions and invite questions from my visual and communication design colleagues. My hope is that, through this document, designers will see digital games like photography was seen around the turn of the century, and movies in the 1950's and 60's. In other words, as a rich new medium that offers creative people a virtually unexplored environment in which to work and create.�

<p>This thesis tells the story of a design case creating an user interface for a MMORPG where the player are able control the body language of the avatar. By this the game can achieve a gameplay about drama and strong characterization. The thesis addresses considerations on what aspects of body language that can be important for computer games and other virtual environments. It also offers design considerations when designing interfaces for using gestures and other body signals to communicate emotions in virtual environments such as computer games. The main design consideration when creating the interface was to treat the player as an actor and the game world as a stage. The player needs to be in control of combinations of facial expressions, body posture and gestures as well as relative avatar positioning to other characters and objects. The interface was first tested as a paper prototype, re-designed, re-tested and then implemented into a computer prototype.</p>

To adolescents, online game provides a rich playground for developing competence in leadership, coordination, teamwork, and cooperation. Adopting the perspective of positive psychology and social cognitive theory, this research investigates how factors such as personal and social factors may impact adolescents' learning outcomes and subjective will-being. The results show that game efficacy, adolescents' game attitudes, and social influences are important factors that influence adolescents' online game behavior. Moreover, playing online games may improve adolescents' psychological affects and learning, which in turn enhance players' subjective well-being. These results provide a new perspective to game researchers, teachers and parents and can help game manufactures and government in designing games and making policies.

Obwohl sich aus medienpsychologischer Sicht auch nach der vorliegenden Untersuchung bisher nur eine eingeschränkte Perspektive zur Bewertung von prosozialen Verhaltensweisen in MMORPGs ergibt, zeigen die ersten Ergebnisse, dass die Problematik eine nicht zu unterschätzende Relevanz in der Erklärung sozialer Präsenz in virtuellen Welten hat. Prosoziales Verhalten tritt in allen MMORPGs auf und ist wahrscheinlich ein konstituierender Faktor sozialer Präsenz. Diese wiederum scheint das Spielerlebnis von "World of Warcraft" und ähnlichen Spielen entscheidend zu prägen und erklärt, unter Umständen, ihren Reiz für die Spieler. Daher müssen weitere Anstrengungen unternommen werden, den scheinbaren Widerspruch zwischen prosozialem Verhalten in MMORPGs und deren Regelspielcharakter aufzulösen und das Phänomen Altruismus in virtuellen Welten stärker zu operationalisieren. In diesem Kontext ist anzunehmen, dass Erfolg im Spiel nicht nur durch das Erreichen von expliziten Spielzielen, sondern auch in Form eines verdeckten Prestiges als sozialer Status manifestiert wird. Beide Bewertungskategorien des Erfolges stehen dabei in Interdependenz. Wie in der wirklichen Gesellschaft, kann ich Hilfe in schwierigen Situationen nur erwarten, wenn ich selbst bereit bin zu helfen.

In the wake of recent discourses growing around metaphors like globalization and information age, information society, information and communication technologies move into cyber anthropology's focus. Although online games and online gaming communities are not new, the rising interest in online games and the number of people playing online games means that such games and the corresponding communities that seem to evolve out of then have potential to be fertile ground for social researchers. One particularly useful method is that of virtual ethnographies, or participant observation in the game itself. Through an ethnographical research of the Lord of the Rings Online and an online gaming community that has emerged within this game, this work attempts outline the process of virtual ethnography that combines emic and etic methods of data gathering adapted to the virtual context to provide a ‘true’ accounting of the social constructs inherent in the virtual world. Massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) are present for almost a decade now, but they have become significantly popular only over the past through years. During the past 6 years the MMORPG turned into a thriving cultural phenomenon with over 20 million people daily involved in various social interactions. MMORPGs provide a unique space for social interaction as players no longer share the same physical environment and the non-verbal communication in no longer available. In such games players also are no... [to full text] / Pastaruoju metu vis dažnesnis diskursas tokiomis temomis kaip globalizacija ir informacijos amžius, informacinė visuomenė, informacinės ir ryšių technologijos pereina pereina į kiber-antropologijos sritį. Nors internetiniai žaidimai ir internetinės žaidėjų bendruomenės nėra naujiena, tačiau vis augantis visuomenės domėjimasis žaidimais ir vis didėjantis žaidėjų skaičius parodo, kad šie žaidimai ir su jais susijusios bendruomenės sukuria gerą tyrimo pagrindą socialinių mokslų atstovams. Vienas iš itin naudingų metodų yra virtuali etnografija bei dalyvaujamas stebėjimas pačiame žaidime. Šiame darbe siekiama pateikti tikrą socialinių konstruotų virtualioje erdvėje formavimosi aprašą remiantis etnografiniu Žiedų valdovo internetinio žaidimo (Lordo of the Rings Online) bei tame žaidime susikūrusios bendruomenės tyrimu naudojantis virtualios etnografijos metodu apjungiančiu eminę ir etinę perspektyvą. Internetiniai žaidimai (MMORPGs) gyvuoja jau beveik dešimtmetį, tačiau pastaraisiais metais itin išpopuliarėjo. Per paskutinius 6 metus žaidimai virto klestinčiu kultūriniu fenomenu su daugiau kaip 20 milijonu žmonių kas dieną įsitraukusių į įvairias socialines sąveikas. Internetiniai žaidimai sukuria socialinių sąveikų unikalią aplinką, nes žaidėjų nebesieja ta pati fizinė aplinka, o neverbalinė komunikacija tampa nebeįmanoma. Internetiniai žaidimai leidžia žaidėjams bendrauti su kitais pasaulio žaidėjais, o pats žaidimas nebėra asmeniškas ar privatus, nes jame susitinka daugybė... [toliau žr. visą tekstą]