Video game development is a high-risk effort with low probability of success. The interactive nature of the resulting artifact increases production complexity, often doing so in ways that are unexpected. New methodologies are needed to address issues in this domain.<p> Video game development has two major phases: preproduction and production. During <i>preproduction</i>, the game designer and other members of the creative team create and capture a vision of the intended player experience in the game design document. The game design document tells the story and describes the game - it does not usually explicitly elaborate all of the details of the intended player experience, particularly with respect to how the player is intended to feel as the game progresses. Details of the intended experience tend to be communicated verbally, on an as-needed basis during iterations of the production effort.<p> During <i>production</i>, the software and media development teams attempt to realize the preproduction vision in a game artifact. However, the game design document is not traditionally intended to capture production-ready requirements, particularly for software development. As a result, there is a communications chasm between preproduction and production efforts that can lead to production issues such as excessive reliance on direct communication with the game designer, difficulty scoping project elements, and difficulty in determining reasonably accurate effort estimates.<p> We posit that defining and capturing the intended player experience in a manner that is influenced and informed by established requirements engineering principles and techniques will help cross the communications chasm between preproduction and production. The proposed experience requirements methodology is a novel contribution composed of:<p> <ol> <li>a model for the elements that compose experience requirements,</li> <li>a framework that provides guidance for expressing experience requirements, and</li> <li>an exemplary process for the elicitation, capture, and negotiation of experience requirements.</li> <ol><p> Experience requirements capture the designer' s intent for the user experience; they represent user experience goals for the artifact and constraints upon the implementation and are not expected to be formal in the mathematical sense. Experience requirements are evolutionary in intent - they incrementally enhance and extend existing practices in a relatively lightweight manner using language and representations that are intended to be mutually acceptable to preproduction and to production.

This project is a study on the effect on motivation when adding positive reinforcements, in the form of audiovisual rewards, to an e-learning application. Two e-learning applications (designed to teach Japanese Kanji) were created; one experimental version with audiovisual rewards (to act as positive reinforcements) and one control version without. Two groups of test subjects were gathered, one using the control version, the other using the experimental version. Using questionnaires their experiences and progress were measured, compared and analyzed. The study indicated that the experimental group learned slightly more than the control group, but that there were no difference in overall motivation between the groups.

Video game development is a high-risk effort with low probability of success. The interactive nature of the resulting artifact increases production complexity, often doing so in ways that are unexpected. New methodologies are needed to address issues in this domain.<p> Video game development has two major phases: preproduction and production. During <i>preproduction</i>, the game designer and other members of the creative team create and capture a vision of the intended player experience in the game design document. The game design document tells the story and describes the game - it does not usually explicitly elaborate all of the details of the intended player experience, particularly with respect to how the player is intended to feel as the game progresses. Details of the intended experience tend to be communicated verbally, on an as-needed basis during iterations of the production effort.<p> During <i>production</i>, the software and media development teams attempt to realize the preproduction vision in a game artifact. However, the game design document is not traditionally intended to capture production-ready requirements, particularly for software development. As a result, there is a communications chasm between preproduction and production efforts that can lead to production issues such as excessive reliance on direct communication with the game designer, difficulty scoping project elements, and difficulty in determining reasonably accurate effort estimates.<p> We posit that defining and capturing the intended player experience in a manner that is influenced and informed by established requirements engineering principles and techniques will help cross the communications chasm between preproduction and production. The proposed experience requirements methodology is a novel contribution composed of:<p> <ol> <li>a model for the elements that compose experience requirements,</li> <li>a framework that provides guidance for expressing experience requirements, and</li> <li>an exemplary process for the elicitation, capture, and negotiation of experience requirements.</li> <ol><p> Experience requirements capture the designer' s intent for the user experience; they represent user experience goals for the artifact and constraints upon the implementation and are not expected to be formal in the mathematical sense. Experience requirements are evolutionary in intent - they incrementally enhance and extend existing practices in a relatively lightweight manner using language and representations that are intended to be mutually acceptable to preproduction and to production.

Given a graph G = (V, E), two players, Alice and Bob, alternate their turns to choose uncolored edges to be colored. Whenever an uncolored edge is chosen, it is colored by the least positive integer so that no monochromatic cycle is created. Alice¡¦s goal is to minimize the total number of colors used in the game, while Bob¡¦s goal is to maximize it. The game Grundy arboricity of G is the number of colors used in the game when both players use optimal strategies. This thesis discusses the game Grundy arboricity of graphs. It is proved that if a graph G has arboricity k, then the game Grundy arboricity of G is at most 3k − 1. If a graph G has an acyclic orientation D with maximum out-degree at most k, then the game Grundy arboricity of G is at most 3k − 2.

<p>This project is a study on the effect on motivation when adding positive reinforcements, in the form of audiovisual rewards, to an e-learning application. Two e-learning applications (designed to teach Japanese Kanji) were created; one <em>experimental</em> version with audiovisual rewards (to act as positive reinforcements) and one <em>control</em> version without. Two groups of test subjects were gathered, one using the control version, the other using the experimental version. Using questionnaires their experiences and progress were measured, compared and analyzed. The study indicated that the experimental group learned slightly more than the control group, but that there were no difference in overall motivation between the groups.</p>

In trying to provide access to videogame materials for scholars, collecting organizations must build standards for building and structuring collections, and in turn information professionals must assess the information needs of users. In order to begin the assessment, this paper presents a content analysis of scholarly videogame articles. The results of the analysis will provide the basis for structuring videogame archives, libraries, or databases. Metadata schemas are important to access, and to collecting. That metadata will aid patrons is widely accepted, but too often schemas and vocabularies are based on only experts’ opinions without taking into account patrons’ ideas of what is important. To address this dearth, the content analysis presented in this paper combines historical ideas of metadata standards from expert archivists with an analysis of what themes are important, common, and sought for in the literature of videogame scholars, who are the likely users of videogame collections. / text

No description available.

Competitive Diffusion is a recently introduced game-theoretic model for the spread of information through social networks. The model is a game on a graph with external players trying to reach the most vertices. In this thesis, we consider the safe game of Competitive Diffusion. This is the game where one player tries to optimize his gain as before, while his opponents' objectives are to minimize the first player's gain. This leads to a safety value for the player, i.e. an optimal minimal expected gain no matter the strategies of the opponents. We discuss safe strategies and present some bounds on the safety value in the two-player version of the game on various graphs. The results are almost entirely on the safe game on trees, including the special cases of paths, spiders and complete trees but also consist of some preliminary studies of the safe game on three other simple graphs. Our main result consists of a Centroidal Safe Strategy (CSS) Algorithm which suggests a safe strategy for a player on any centroidal tree, a tree which has one vertex as centroid, and gives its associated guaranteed gain.

Darbas skirtas sukurti invariantišką kosminių žingsninių strateginių žaidimų duomenų bazę. Darbo metu buvo atlikta žaidimo modelio analizė, pagal kurią buvo suprojektuota duomenų bazė tinkanti bet kokiam žaidimo modeliui. Taip pat žaidimo varikliuke buvo sukurtas modulis dirbti su duomenų baze bei atlikus duomenų bazės efektyvumo tyrimą realizuotas duomenų bazės optimizavimo metodas konkrečiam žaidimui. / The purpose of this work is to create an invariant space turn-based strategy game database. Working with game model and its analysis was designed database suitable for any game model. Also, a module for work with the database was implemented in the game engine. Furthermore, after testing the database a method was implemented, used for optimizing the database for a specific game.

No description available.