Competitive Games: Playing Fair with Tanks

Real-time, competitive gaming has also resulted in higher demands of ultra-low latency in multiplayer gaming environments. Scalability and performance of the Traditional client-server models are a problem when the number of players involved and the speed of interactions is high, which introduces problems of latency, lag and synchronization errors. The current paper discusses the usage of serverless architectures as the means of addressing such issues. Serverless computing fully manages the infrastructure, providing developers with an opportunity to write event-driven code, automatically scaling the resources depending on the demand. AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, and Google Cloud Functions are services that offer low latency and scalable solutions to real-time multiplayer games. This paper presents an architectural overview, design, and implementation of serverless systems, analyses the performance monitor, and finally states the benefits of serverless computing when used in serving dynamical gaming workloads. It also discusses how serverless technologies may affect multiplayer gaming industry in future by improving scalability, cutting down operational costs and ensuring uninterrupted gaming experience to the players.

Discrete time stochastic multi-player competitive games with affine payoffs

Mate value is tied to appearance and age in women, and social status and wealth in men. Theory surrounding self-perceived mate value suggests that mate value shows relatively little situational plasticity. Here we challenge this concept by asking participants to compete in video games to test (a) whether self-perceived and actual performance affects subjective mate value, and (b) whether subjective mate value affects mate preferences. By randomly allocating participants to play either a violent or nonviolent game in three separate experiments, we show that both men and women who played a violent game had significantly lower self-perceived performance, and as a result, reported a lower self-perceived mate value. We also demonstrate that this effect led to different preferences for short-term mating partners, mainly among women. Our results strongly suggest that mate value in humans is situationally dynamic and responds to recent contest experiences, as it does in nonhumans. We discuss our results with reference to online multiplayer digital gaming experiences and how variation in self-perceived mate value affects mating market dynamics. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved) Public Significance Statement—People’s perceptions of their own quality as romantic partners (i.e., their mate value) often depends on physical attractiveness for women or social status for men. Here we show that self-perceived mate value is not a fixed trait but varies according to subjective performance in a competitive video game. Compared with people who played nonviolent video games, the men and women that played a violent video game believed they performed more poorly and rated themselves as having a relatively lower mate value. These experiments provide evidence that people’s perception of their quality as romantic partners varies according to the social experiences they have and their performance in online contests. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)

eSports (Electronics Sports or short for esports, e-sports) is the term used in multiplayer computer games competitions, most of them organized and dedicated to professional players. Nowadays, esports has become a real industry, generating profits for the hardware companies, for the event organizers, but especially for the players, who can reach record receipts from the awards given at different events around them. Esports has slowly evolved into a cultural phenomenon. Across Asia, North America and Europe, the best pro gamers are competing for a share in hundreds of thousands of dollars at each tournament, watched by thousands if not millions of people around the globe. The present paper aims to present some theoretical aspects regarding the connection between sport and society, and also the development of electronic sport in Romania. REZUMAT. Considerații cu privire la dezvoltarea fenomenului eSport. eSports (Electronics Sports sau prescurtare pentru eSports, e-sport) este termenul folosit în competițiile de jocuri pe computer multiplayer, majoritatea organizate și dedicate jucătorilor profesioniști. În zilele noastre, eSports a devenit o adevărată industrie, generând profituri pentru companiile de hardware, pentru organizatorii de evenimente, dar mai ales pentru jucători, care pot ajunge la încasări record din premiile acordate la diferite evenimente din jurul. eSportul a evoluat încet într-un fenomen cultural. În toată Asia, America de Nord și Europa, cei mai buni jucători profesioniști concurează pentru o cotă de sute de mii de dolari la fiecare turneu, urmăriți de mii, dacă nu chiar de milioane de oameni din întreaga lume. Prezenta lucrare își propune să prezinte câteva aspecte teoretice referitoare la conexiunea dintre sport și societate, precum şi dezvoltarea sportului electronic din România. Cuvinte cheie: eSport; Jocuri video profesionale; Jocuri video competitive.

This paper aims to present and promote the eSports and its situation in Romania. Esports, also known as electronic sports, professional video game competitions, can be defined as a form of sports where the main aspects are facilitated by electronic systems. Most often eSports takes the form of multiplayer video game contests usually organized between professional players. Several games are popular in the competitive scene. The championships that appeared in the 1990s were those that contained fighting video games and the shooter type, genres that still have a large audience. Electronic athletes (or e-athlete, professional gamers) are those people who perform in a video game, thus reaching a higher level than amateur players. They train for hours to reach this performance. In the professional gaming industry, there are organizations that have players such as football or basketball clubs and they are paid monthly, receive specialized training, and participate in various competitions representing the organization they belong to. Following these ideas, the authors will first highlight the concepts that deal with eSports and video games globally, providing information on the emergence of eSports, then the situation of eSports in Romania is presented and its development. From this point of view, multiple video game contests and events are organized in Romania and the difference between international and domestic eSports is highlighted. As a novelty factor of this paper, some of the first Romanian representative attempts in organizing eSports events or competitions are presented.

Video Games and the Future of Learning

Most AR games focus primarily on static augmentation, leaving out the potential for rich and tangible interactions. Recently, with the creation of the Superhuman Sports genre, new AR games emerged with the goal to extend the sports experience by utilizing technology. With the understanding of various related projects towards physical object interaction in AR and with the rich selection of sensors in mobile devices, we want to present two innovative visions in the direction of AR Sports Games: 1.Floating Ball: A ball shaped object is augmented and while flying in a circular pattern, two players are competing against each other by interacting with it. 2.Augmented Drone: Resulting out of the experiences with the Floating Ball, a competitive game concept with a drone as a versatile augmented game ball will be presented. We want to utilize the results as a step towards a competitive multi-player AR Sports Game based on mobile devices. In both concepts, one device is functioning as a Tangible AR Interface with the task to let the player manipulate the flying path of the physical ball. For this purpose, the ball is incorporated into the augmented world to create a realistic, perceivable playing experience.

The evaluation system is devised in online competitive games and sports to assess players' skills. Popular methods Elo, designed for two-player competitive games such as chess and tennis, are based on the Bradley-Terry model and update players' ratings with competition outcomes. Extended methods Trueskill and mElo are proposed for multi-player(team) and two-player intransitive games, respectively. However, existing evaluation methods are constrained in specific situations; for example, mElo is limited to dealing with two-player games, and TrueSkill, Elo can not handle intransitive games. In addition, previous team evaluation methods bake in the assumption that individuals' contributions to team performance are uniformly determined by individual abilities, which does not hold in many situations, such as football with different roles and games with team score being defined as the maximum or minimum of players' gains. In this paper, we address the challenge of evaluating player skill in multi-player (team) competitions. We propose PIE, an online permutation-invariant evaluation model for multi-entity competitions that ensures the predicted winner of a multi-entity match remains invariant to the order of input entities. For multi-team evaluation, PIE enables team ratings to increase monotonically with improvements in individual player ratings. Empirical results of predicting the winner and winning probabilities in real-world games demonstrate that PIE achieves comparable performance in handling the prediction of multiplayer(team) matches with other baselines.

Fish Tank Virtual Reality (FTVR) creates a compelling 3D illusion for a single person by rendering to their perspective with head-tracking. However, typically, other participants cannot share in the experience since they see a weirdly distorted image when they look at the FTVR display making it difficult to work and play together. To overcome this problem, we have created CoGlobe: a large spherical FTVR display for multiple users. Using CoGlobe, Siggraph attendees will experience the latest advance of FTVR that supports multiple people co-located in a shared space working and playing together through two different multiplayer games and tasks. We have created a competitive two-person 3D Pong game (Figure 1b) for attendees to experience a highly interactive two-person game looking at the CoGlobe. Onlookers can also watch using a variation of mixed reality with a tracked mobile smartphone. Using a smartphone as a second screen registered to the same virtual world enables multiple people to interact together as well. We have also created a cooperative multi-person 3D drone game (Figure 1c) to illustrate cooperation in FTVR. Attendees will also see how effective co-located 3D FTVR is when cooperating on a complex 3D mental rotation (Figure 1d) and a path-tracing task (Figure 1a). CoGlobe overcomes the limited situation awareness of headset VR, while retaining the benefits of cooperative 3D interaction and thus is an exciting direction for the next wave of 3D displays for work and fun for Siggraph attendees to experience.

Multiplayer Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment (mDDA) is a method of reducing the difference in player performance and subsequent challenge in competitive multiplayer video games. As a balance of between player skill and challenge experienced is necessary for optimal player experience, this experimental study investigates the effects of mDDA and awareness of its presence on player performance and experience using subjective and biometric measures. Early analysis indicates that mDDA normalizes performance and challenge as expected, but awareness of its presence can reduce its effectiveness.

Human performance has permanently been an objective for society and, specifically, for researchers. Traditional sports, board games, video games... A wide diversity of domains have recall the attention on the reasons why top players perform better than the rest. eSports can be defined as competitive multiplayer video games. Nowadays, eSports have a huge impact on society with billions of people playing or consuming related content. Being a relatively new universe, there is a wide gap when talking about applying scientific principles to performance analysis and improvement on eSports. This paper tries to establish a new research topic, introducing Virtual Reality and neuroscience as main frameworks to pursue a double objective: evaluate psycho-cognitive characteristics of eSports players aiming to profile them and, additionally, using that profile to create custom psycho-cognitive training plans. Neuroscience and EEG data from players have the ability of explaining the complex decisio n making procedures that involve an individual action while playing. Neurofeedback training (NFT) is a neuro-behavioral technique that will allow using real-time EEG data to drive a gamified environment aiming to adapt their brain activity to the optimum performance mode. This project aims, for the first time, to use neurofeedback within a gamified training environment in order to improve individual performance on eSports.

While the topic of investigating user experience with immersive services, such as Social Virtual Reality (VR), is starting to gain traction in the research community, the unique case of multiplayer VR games requires a more specific approach. Attempts to investigate user experiences with this complex, multidimensional service are hindered by the absence of specific standards and guidelines going beyond what we know about non-immersive gaming. In this article, we present the results of a user study (N = 32) exploring participants’ experience of playing two competitive VR games of different genres (shooter, sports game), as we focus on three distinct facets of multiplayer VR gaming—network, interpersonal competitiveness, and social interaction. Furthermore, approaching the issue from the perspective of Quality of Experience researchers looking to conduct future user studies on the topic, we also present our findings as a way to shed light on factors that need further consideration, especially in the context of participant recruitment and methodology design, such as the choice of access network to be used for testing, and the issue of matchmaking study participants based on skill and prior relationship.

Like most applications deployed on the Internet, modern multiplayer games are subject to the impact of transmission delays and the variability thereof. These delays can be introduced either by the physical limitations of signal transmission speed or overload and queuing problems in intermediate nodes. The influence of this delay is far-reaching and impacts most interactive applications. More specifically, quantitative and qualitative studies have been conducted on competitive game genres, such as first person shooter and racing games. In contrast, this work investigates how network delay affects player experience in cooperative games, where players have to interact with shared objects and obstacles. In this game genre, one might expect an increased sensitivity to detrimental network factors due to the reliance on the (near-)perfect synchronization of actions between participants. In this paper, a series of consecutive user tests were carried out with one of the most recent games, Little Big Planet 2; which focuses primarily on the cooperative aspect. Analysis has shown that delays over 100 ms significantly decrease player performance and the way in which network quality is perceived. At the same time jitter negatively affects user performance, though players do not perceive this impairment as disturbing.

Electronic-sports (e-sports) is a form of organized, online, multiplayer video game competition, which requires both action skills and the ability and process of forming and adapting a strategy (referred to as strategization hereafter) to achieve goals. Over the past few decades, research has shown that video gaming experience has an important impact on the plasticity of the sensorimotor, attentional, and executive brain areas. However, little research has examined the relationship between e-sports experience and the plasticity of brain networks that are related to strategization. Using resting-state fMRI data and the local functional connectivity density (lFCD) analysis, this study investigated the relationship between e-sports experience (League of Legends [LOL] in this study) and brain plasticity by comparing between top-ranking LOL players and lower-ranking (yet experienced) LOL players. Results showed that the top-ranking LOL players had superior local functional integration in the executive areas compared to lower-ranking players. Furthermore, the top-ranking players had higher lFCD in the default mode areas, which have been found related to various subprocesses (e.g., memory and planning) essential for strategization. Finally, the top-ranking players' lFCD was related to their LOL expertise rank level, as indicated by a comprehensive score assigned by the gaming software based on players' gaming experience and expertise. Thus, the result showed that the local functional connectivity in central executive and default mode brain areas was enhanced in the top-ranking e-sports players, suggesting that e-sports experience is related to the plasticity of the central executive and default mode areas.

This paper presents The Newborn World, a colocated multiplayer game for mobile devices with a focus on storytelling. The game has been designed following patterns of analog games that prompt players to tell stories, and uses digital representations of cards and tokens for interaction. The collaborative nature of storytelling is interspersed with competitive elements such as hidden goals and secret voting for best story. The paper exposes several design decisions for balancing goal-oriented and freeform play, competition and collaboration, as well as elements that constrain or foster players’ creativity.