Thesis (Ph. D.)--Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 194-198). Also available in electronic version. Access restricted to campus users.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 139-143).

Cette thèse a pour objectif de donner une définition générale et mesurable de la difficulté du gameplay dans un jeu vidéo. Elle propose une méthode et un outil pour mesurer cette difficulté. La méthode de mesure couramment employée est en effet principalement heuristique et propre au contexte de chaque jeu. Nous proposons une approche générique d’analyse du gameplay qui prend en compte l’apprentissage du joueur et permet une évaluation statistique de la difficulté d’un gameplay. Dans un premier temps, la thèse explore les liens entre difficulté, game design, et plaisir de jouer. Nous étudions diverses formes de difficultés : sensorielles, logiques et motrices. Après diverses expérimentations d’analyse automatique de gameplay, nous détaillons notre modèle de mesure de la difficulté, et l’analyse en challenges et capacités d’un gameplay, ainsi que le logiciel associé. Finalement, nous présentons une expérience, dont l’objectif est de tester la faisabilité et la précision de notre modèle. / The goal of this thesis is to propose a general and measurable definition of the difficulty in video games. The current approach, widely adopted, is mainly heuristic, and depends on each game’s context. We propose a generic way to analyse a gameplay, taking into account the player’s apprenticeship, which allows to statistically evaluate the gameplay’s difficulty. The thesis first explores the links between difficulty, game design and the player’s enjoyment. Then, we study different types of difficulties, sensory, logical and motor. After a few experiments on automatic gameplay analysis, we detail our measurement model, base on the splitting of gameplay into challenges and capacities. We present the developed software, and report an experiment that we ran to test the feasibility and accuracy of our measuring technique.

The first chapter examines adolescent beauty as a potential originator of the observed wage premium for adult beauty and finds that adolescent beauty has its own separate effect on adult wages. Adolescent beauty also affects early human capital development, as evidenced by its significant impact on educational outcomes. Changes in beauty over time are shown to be positively correlated with changes in wages for full-time workers, and changes in beauty are generally not correlated with appearance-related choice variables. I explore the possibility that self-confidence and social capital are potential mechanisms through which adolescent attractiveness affects future wages but find that these do not change the magnitude of the effects of adolescent beauty, although they are of themselves significant determinants of wages. The second chapter examines the effects of personal grooming behaviors on earnings and shows evidence that these effects are due to persistent differences in preferences or productivity between workers displaying different grooming choices and not statistical discrimination on the part of employers. In a longitudinal sample of lawyers graduating from the same law school, men who wear glasses and men with facial hair face an earnings penalty in first-year income and to some extent in subsequent years. Some grooming behaviors are positively correlated with income in the 1970's cohort and negatively correlated with income in the 1980's cohort (and vice versa), suggesting that fashion signals change relatively quickly. I also find that grooming behaviors are correlated with beauty ratings and that the beauty premium is unaffected by earnings, but the estimated effects of some grooming behaviors partially result from their correlation with beauty. I do not find evidence that grooming behaviors act as a signaling mechanism in the labor market. The third chapter evaluates the claim that design piracy is beneficial to certain status-goods firms. It builds on Pesendorfer's model of fashion cycles by introducing the possibility of design imitation for a market in which designs are used as a signaling mechanism. There exist equilibria in which both the designer and imitator are active in the market, but there are no conditions under which imitation is profitable to the designer. Under some conditions the presence of a potential imitator will ensure that the designer does not produce at all. / text

Cooperative services--a term which includes any system that relies on the resources and participation of its clients to function--have proven to be a popular, naturally scalable means to disseminate content, distribute computational workloads, or provide network connectivity. However, because these services critically depend on participants that are not controlled by a single administrative domain, these services must be designed to function in environments where no participant--because of failure or selfishness--will necessarily follow the specified protocol. This thesis addresses the challenge of establishing and maintaining cooperation in cooperative services by (1) advancing our understanding of the limits to what our services can guarantee in the presence of failure, (2) demonstrating the critical role that correct participants can play in the incentives provided by the service, and (3) proposing a new notion of equilibrium that, unlike traditional notions, provides both rigorous yet practical guarantees in the presence of collusion. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our ideas can be applied to practice by designing and implementing Seer, a system that provides a scalable, reliable, and robust method for disseminating content even if participants may fail arbitrarily or deviate selfishly as a coalition. / text

Gemsbok, ibex, sitatunga, nyala. Their names may be unfamiliar, but these rare species, originally from Africa and Asia, now roam Texas ranches in numbers close to 1 million. In an irony as big and as rich as Texas, however, their proliferation has depended on their popularity with hunters. Enthusiasts will pay anywhere from $2,000 to $20,000 to hunt these so-called “texotics.” While this flourishing micro-economy and sub-culture has gone unrecognized by most of the world, “A Kind of Wild” is a 22 minute documentary that puts forth a portrait of the industry as illustrated through a cross-section of individuals with different roles in the system: an amateur breeder, a researcher, a ranch hand and a hunter. The film explores the paradoxical relationship between these people and the animals they care for, between economics and conservation. It is intended to spread awareness about this obscured phenomenon and to encourage audiences to reflect upon their own values concerning humans increasingly complicated impact on the natural world around us. This report chronicles the process of making the film and expounds on its challenges and lessons. / text

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The game is a social expression, which had come during a societal progress by a working process. It indicates a world, which surrounds a man. That man’s recreative activities, forms of a communication are factors, which are controlled by special rules and done for an aim of an entertainment, a pleasant time spending. During a historical period games were one of the most available ways for a man to improve in physically, to express a joy, to commune with others. When games had come from a generation to a generation, they had changed and improved. In different societal periods games had differed forms and purports. When a societal culture had developed, games had improved and had reflected national peculiarities, a nation’s ideology, an education, a level of culture, a science. Analyzing children’s games we realize what they during games repairing for theirs lives and at the same time they develop themselves mentally, physically. By playing games children usually solve theirs problems, find ways from crises, make acquaintances with a surrounding world and get versatile capabilities. When we look at children’s games, we see they get many new skills, like a diligence, reaching for an aim, the volition. The game organizes a collective, teaches how to help for each other and develops a responsibility, a principality, a geniality, the modesty, a culture of a communication. One of the most important conditions of the game is a discipline. So the game is the perfect way to calm... [to full text]

This thesis considers three restricted universes of partizan combinatorial games and finds new results for misere play using the recently-introduced theory of indistinguishability quotients. The universes are defined by imposing three different conditions on game play: alternating, dicot (all-small), and dead-ending. General results are proved for each main universe, which in turn facilitate detailed analysis of specific subuniverses. In this way, misere monoids are constructed for alternating ends, for pairs of day-2 dicots, and for normal-play numbers, as well as for sets of positions that occur in variations of nim, hackenbush, and kayles, which fall into the alternating, dicot, and dead-ending universes, respectively. Special attention is given to equivalency to zero in misere play. With a new sufficiency condition for the invertibility of games in a restricted universe, the thesis succeeds in demonstrating the invertibility (modulo specific universes) of all alternating ends, all but previous-win alternating non-ends, all but one day-2 dicot, over one thousand day-3 dicots, hackenbush ‘sprigs’, dead ends, normal-play numbers, and partizan kayles positions. Connections are drawn between the three universes, including the recurrence of monoids isomorphic to the group of integers under addition, and the similarities of universe-specific outcome determinants. Among the suggestions for future research is the further investigation of a natural and promising subset of dead-ending games called placement games.

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