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.

Through more than five years of extensive, participatory research the writer became a fully integrated member of the World of Warcraft community he set out to study. By actually living the grounded practices that constitute the everyday life he concludes that the mundane, often repetitive practice has very little to do with the cyber-utopian claim that one can flee the body and become who they want on the Internet. Instead this doctoral thesis argues that the constant transitions of the borders between offline and online, virtual and real, body and avatar, play and work, player and producer are best described with the concept of leakage. Using leakage to describe the perforated borders that surrounds the game not only allows an understanding of World of Warcraft as a powerful site for production of meaning and culture but also places it far from the traditional understandings of separated fun, play and games. Play as an activity has traditionally been described with three intrinsic features: it is separable from everyday life, in particular from work; it is safe, meaning that it isn’t productive nor does it carry consequence and finally that play is pleasurable or fun. World of Warcraft doesn’t easily admit to these features and should not be understood as neither innocent utopia nor as a devoured mimesis, but rather as an expansion of the life space where players repeatedly and deliberately stretch beyond the producer’s intentions and create a world consisting of work, unwritten social norms, creativity and friendship. Players are social laborers that produce the core of what makes World of Warcraft what it is: a serious game.

The goal of General Game Playing (GGP) is to develop a system, that is able to automatically play previously unseen games well, solely by being given the rules of the game. In contrast to traditional game playing programs, a general game player cannot be given game specific knowledge. Instead, the program has to discover this knowledge and use it for effectively playing the game well without human intervention. In this thesis, we present a such a program and general methods that solve a variety of knowledge discovery problems in GGP. Our main contributions are methods for the automatic construction of heuristic evaluation functions, the automated discovery of game structures, a system for proving properties of games, and symmetry detection and exploitation for general games.

Physical tasks such as scrummaging, rucking and mauling are highly specific to rugby and also place unique physiological demands on the different playing positions within the forwards. Traditionally, the recruitment and development of talented rugby union players has focused on the assessment of motor skills and game intelligence aspects of performance, with less emphasis placed on the specific physiological requirements of playing positions in rugby. The purpose of this investigation was to measure the position-specific strength, speed and power characteristics of Premier rugby forwards in order (1) to determine whether any differences existed in the physiological characteristics of the different forward playing positions (prop, lock and loose forwards) and (2) to investigate the relationship between these physiological characteristics and coaches evaluations of football playing ability. Twenty-two male Premier level competition rugby forwards, consisting of eight prop forwards, five lock forwards and nine loose-forwards participated in the study. The Grunt 3000, a rugby specific force testing device was utilised to measure the static and dynamic horizontal strength during simulated scrummaging and rucking/mauling movements. Sprint times relating to acceleration ability (0 -10m, 0-20m) and maximum running speed (20 - 40m) were measured during a 40m sprint running test. In addition, force, power and displacement characteristics of a countermovement vertical jump were calculated from trials performed on a force plate. Also, player performance skill and physical capacity scores were determined independently by experienced coaches who assessed them based on their performances during the season. One-way analysis of variance and effect size statistics evaluated differences in the measured variables between forward playing positions and linear regression analysis evaluated the relationship between the coaches' scores of player performance skill and physical capacity and game specific measures of strength speed and power. Since there were no statistical significant differences between forward groups for horizontal force and countermovement jump variables and these analyses lacked statistical power, an effect size statistic was used to establish trends for differences in force and CMJ variables between the groups. There were moderate effect size differences between groups for horizontal impact force with prop and lock forwards producing 17.7% and 12.8% more force than the loose forwards respectively. No clear differences were apparent between forward positional groups for mean dynamic horizontal force and countermovement jump displacement of the centre of gravity. A significant difference (p =0.049) was shown between forward positional groups over the 0-40m sprint distance. Also, moderate effect size differences between pairs of groups were evident in 0-10m, 0-20m, 20-40m sprint times with both loose forwards and lock forwards on average, 6% faster than the prop forwards. A backward linear regression analysis revealed that the single best predictor of coaches' physical capacity and performance skill scores was the 20 - 40m sprint performance, accounting for 28% of the variance in player's physical capacity scores and 29% of the variance in player's performance skill scores. Whole-body horizontal static strength and impact strength in prop forwards and dynamic horizontal strength (relative to body mass) and sprint acceleration ability in loose forwards represent key factors for consideration when selecting forward players to these positions in the Premier rugby competition. The vertical jumping ability of all forward positional groups needs to be confirmed in a future study utilising a line-out specific countermovement jump test (free use of arm swing and line-out lifters in the jump) on a force plate. Monitoring of performance in rugby forwards should include an acceleration sprint test (0-10m) as this is specific to the sprinting patterns of forward players during a game, and maximum sprinting speed test (20-40m) as this test has the ability to discriminate between skilled and less-skilled rugby union forwards.

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.

The goal of General Game Playing (GGP) is to develop a system, that is able to automatically play previously unseen games well, solely by being given the rules of the game. In contrast to traditional game playing programs, a general game player cannot be given game specific knowledge. Instead, the program has to discover this knowledge and use it for effectively playing the game well without human intervention. In this thesis, we present a such a program and general methods that solve a variety of knowledge discovery problems in GGP. Our main contributions are methods for the automatic construction of heuristic evaluation functions, the automated discovery of game structures, a system for proving properties of games, and symmetry detection and exploitation for general games.:1. Introduction 2. Preliminaries 3. Components of Fluxplayer 4. Game Tree Search 5. Generating State Evaluation Functions 6. Distance Estimates for Fluents and States 7. Proving Properties of Games 8. Symmetry Detection 9. Related Work 10. Discussion

The trumpet ensemble has increasingly become a popular chamber ensemble inside music programs at the secondary and collegiate level. Chamber music ensembles are frequently guided by both democratic processes and ensemble coaches with limited chamber music experience. As trumpet ensembles grow in popularity, pedagogical resources are needed to guide rehearsals. This project serves as a guide for educators and performers to focus on fundamental issues related to trumpet ensembles as well as strategies for ensemble rehearsal.

<p>Syftet med studien är att beskriva hur några förskollärare och grundskollärare värderar leken inom förskoleklassen och årskurs 1. De frågeställningar som studien utgår ifrån är följande: Vad uppfattar dessa pedagoger som det viktiga i leken?  Hur uppfattar dessa pedagoger att leken kan användas som en resurs i lärandesituationer inom förskoleklassen och årskurs 1? samt Hur uppfattar dessa pedagoger att möjligheten till lek förändras i årskurs 1 i förhållande till förskoleklass?</p><p>Studien har genomförts med en kvalitativ ansats enligt fenomenografiskt analyssätt. I studien har sex pedagoger intervjuats, dessa pedagoger har vi valt ut från tre olika skolor, det vill säga en förskollärare och en grundskollärare från respektive skola. Intervjupersonerna är även utvalda utifrån att de har minst tio års yrkeserfarenhet. Av insamlat datamaterial har åtta kategorier utformats.</p><p>Resultatet visar att de två verksamheterna, förskoleklass och årskurs 1, värderar leken ganska lika. Det viktiga i leken är framför allt att utveckla den sociala kompetensen Förskollärarna anser att allt lärande kan rymmas i leken, medan grundskollärarna anser att inlärning sker genom den pedagogiska leken och den fria leken är en paus för barnen för att återhämta sig. Fastän de båda yrkeskategorierna är medvetna om att leken ska vara en del även av verksamheten i årskurs 1, så får inte förstaklassarna alltid möjlighet till det.</p> / <p> </p><p>The purpose of this study is to describe how playing is estimated by some pre-school teachers and primary school teachers within a pre-school class and a primary school form 1. The issues which this study is based on are as follows: What is important in playing? How can games and playing be used as a resource in situations of teaching and learning in a pre-school class and a primary school form 1? and What is the possibility of changes in playing between pre-school compared to primary school form 1?</p><p>The study has been effected with a qualitatively high effort according to a phenomenographic way of analysis. In this study six pedagogues (teachers) have been interviewed, chosen from three different schools, one pre-school teacher and one primary school teacher from each school. They were also chosen by the duration of their  professional experience which is at least 10 years. From collected facts eight categories have been worked out.</p><p>The result shows that the two activities, pre-school class and primary school form 1 estimate playing almost in the same way. The important thing in playing is above all to develop social ability. Pre-school teachers think that all learning can be contained in playing, while primary school teachers think that learning takes place only through educational games, and that free playing serves only as a break for children to relax and recover. Although both professional categories are aware of the fact that free playing is supposed to be part of the activity in primary school form 1, it won't  normally be possible for these children to practice it.</p>

SourceURL:file://localhost/Users/ClaesAct/Dropbox/LNU%20psykologi/Uppsats/Examensarbete_ClaesLilja_HT16_2PS600.doc Physical exercise has been associated with various health benefits, including improved cognitive functioning, well-being and life satisfaction. Other variables that have been found to explain these areas include gender, age, dispositional optimism, meditation practice, and videogame habits. The aim of the present study was to explore whether physical exercise on its own has benefits for visuospatial rotation abilities and life satisfaction. It was also the intention to examine how other known factors of age, gender, dispositional optimism, meditation, and videogames may help predict visuospatial rotation abilities and satisfaction with life. The results showed no significant explanation for visuospatial performance while finding some exercise measurements and physical activity level to have significant correlations with life satisfaction. Dispositional optimism was found to be the strongest indicator of life satisfaction, while gender was determined to not hold explanatory power for either of the criterion variables.

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.&#0;