Selecting a World (Uru: Myst Online)

The study, which was conducted at the high school RN campus of Liceo de Cagayan University, delved into the influence of gender and personality on computer game preferences, as measured by the Personality Type Inventory and computer game preference, as measured by a researcher-made questionnaire, for the 150 high school students of the said university. The researcher used the descriptive design. The survey method was also used to gather the data needed. The T-test was applied to determine the game preference of the respondents. The analyses yielded the following results: The senior high school students of Liceo de Cagayan University appeared to possess Type A personality. Moreover, it was also revealed that male high school students preferred the violent computer games, while their female counterparts preferred non-violent computer games. Lastly, the statistical test revealed that there was a significant difference between the variables. In conclusion, it can be said that the personality type of the respondents has an important influence in their computer game preferences. This is also true to computer game preferences and gender. While personality type and gender are based on a biological predisposition, it is noteworthy that the socialization process of a male or female individual is greatly influenced by culture. Keywords - Psychology, personality type, computer game preferences, descriptive design, Philippines.

Ways of (Virtual) Seeing: Applying a Bergerian Lens in a Multi-User Virtual Environment (MUVE)

In this study, the opinions of the secondary school students on digital games were examined. The research is a screening model research and has a descriptive feature. It was carried out with 521 secondary school students in ElazA±AŸ (a province in eastern part of Turkey) [MSS1] in 2013. Almost all of the participants use computer. More than half of them have computers and internet connection in their houses. It was found that 83.3 % of the participants use computer 0-2 h a day. It has been found out that the secondary school students use the internet to do research, play games, watch videos or movies and communicate with their friends. Most of the students stated that they like playing computer games, feel happy when they complete the game stages successfully. However, there are also some negative aspects, such as addiction as a result of immense gaming motive, [MSS2] some games which involve violence affect individuals adversely, and is considered a waste of time. The findings showed that male students like playing computer games, become happier when they succeed; want to play games more than the female ones and they believe playing computer games contributes to their effort to tranquilise. On the other hand, the female students primarily believe that playing computer games is a waste of time, affects their social life in a negative way and the violent elements in these games are more dominant on the individuals. Key words: Computer games, digital games, secondary school students. [MSS1]A°s it a name for a place, town or what? Need to be specified for the readers. [MSS2]The stylistic of phrase is suggested to be rephased and improved.

Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) and Virtual Worlds are among the most popular applications on the internet. As player numbers increase, the limits of the currently dominant client/server architecture are becoming obvious. In this paper, we propose a new distributed event dissemination protocol for Virtual Worlds and MMOGs. This protocol is based on the idea of mutual notification: all players send their game event messages directly to all neighbouring players inside their Area of Interest (AOI). The connectedness of the system is ensured by binding neighbours. They are selected using quad-trees. We show by simulation that the proposed system achieves practical performance for Virtual Worlds and MMOGs.

Substantial evidence now supports pedagogical applications of virtual worlds; however, most research supporting virtual worlds for education has been conducted using researcher-developed Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVE). Second Life (SL) is a MUVE that has been adopted by a large number of academic institutions; however, little research has systematically investigated the potential of using SL for higher education. A 2–year pilot study was conducted that included seven SL activities and a mixed-methods evaluation of the SL's affordances, challenges, and limitations. Three SL integration factors emerged, each with sub-factors: pedagogical (relevance, complexity of required SL skills, use of SL affordances); contextual (student prior gaming experience, activity duration, frequency of events); and logistical (SL usability, training, technical support, computer issues). A framework for creating SL instructional activities is presented using the factors.

Distributed Virtual Environments are becoming more popular in today's computing and communications among people. Perhaps the most widely used form of such environments is Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG), which are in the form of client/server architecture that requires considerable server resources to manage a large number of distributed players. Peer-to-peer communication can achieve scalability at lower cost but may introduce other difficulties. Synchronous communication is a prime concern for multi-user collaborative applications like MMOGs where players need frequently interaction with each other to share their game states. In this article, we present a hybrid MMOG architecture called MM-VISA (Massively Multiuser VIrtual Simulation Architecture). In this architecture, servers and peers are coupled together to take the inherent advantages of the centralized architecture and the scalability of distributed systems. As the virtual world is decomposed into smaller manageable zones, the players' random movement causes reorganization at the P2P overlay structure. The frequent nature of movements along with unintelligent zone crossing approaches, currently implemented in MMOGs, breaks synchronous communication. To limit such problem, we consider players' gaming characteristics to intelligently define routing paths. A graph-theoretic framework is incorporated for overlay oriented real-time distributed virtual environments. We shall show that interest-driven zone crossing, dynamic shared region between adjacent zones, and clustering of entities based on their attributes significantly decrease unstable overlay situations. The effectiveness of the presented system is justified through simulation.

Read newspapers and professional educational journals, attend a national or state conference, or review the offerings of a university catalog, and you soon encounter statistics like 92 percent of children ages 2–17 play video and computer games (Beck & Wade, 2004); 60 percent of Americans play interactive games on a regular basis (Kirriemuir, 2002); 78 percent of American families have video game equipment in their homes (Simpson, 2005). You will also read that 78 percent of 18–29 year olds use the Internet in their daily lives (Ramaley & Zia, 2005), yet only 38 percent of college students report using the Internet in their classes (Ramaley & Zia, 2005). Outside the classroom, students are creating a new shared culture, showing us new ways to learn and communicate and make sense of physical and virtual identities and worlds. They are showing us that what happens in virtual worlds is often just as meaningful as what happens offline (Taylor, 2006). They work autonomously or with others—playing with others online who may protect and advise them or playing next to others who play the same game. They know where to obtain helpful resources. However, these mainly young gamers do not just play games and consult resources; they create game guides, answers to FAQs, maps, overviews, strategies, fanfic (fanfiction—stories about the gaming characters or settings written by game fans rather than by game creators), and character-planning guides. All of this adds up to a different kind of play and developmental environment, which influences a different developmental process and way of seeing the world and thinking than experienced by generations before.

The claim that video games are replacing literacy activities that is bandied about in the American mainstream press is based not only on unspecified definitions of both ‘games' and ‘literacy’ but also on a surprising lack of research on what children actually do when they play video games. In this article, the author examines some of the practices that comprise game play in the context of one genre of video games in particular — massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs). Based on data culled from a two-year online cognitive ethnography of the MMOG Lineage (both I and II), the author argues that forms of video game play such as those entailed in MMOGs are not replacing literacy activities but rather are literacy activities. In order to make this argument, the author surveys the literacy practices that MMOGamers routinely participate in, both within the game's virtual world (e.g. social interaction, in-game letters) and beyond (e.g. online game forums, the creation of fan sites and fan fiction). Then, with this argument in place, she attempts to historicize this popular contempt toward electronic ‘pop culture’ media such as video games and suggest a potentially more productive (and accurate) framing of the literacy practices of today's generation of adolescents and young adults.

Understanding the distributions and behaviors of players within Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) is essential for research in scalable architectures for these systems. We provide the first look into this problem through a measurement study on one of the most popular MMOGs, World of Warcraft [15]. Our goal is to answer four fundamental questions: how does the population of the virtual world change over time, how are players distributed in the virtual world, how much churn occurs with players, and how do they move in the virtual world. Through probing-based measurements, our preliminary results show that populations fluctuate according to a prime-time schedule, player distribution and churn appears to occur on a power-law distribution, and players move to only a small number of zones during each playing session. The ultimate goal of our research is to design an accurate player model for MMOGs so that future research can predict and simulate player behavior and population fluctuations over time.

Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) are becoming a very important part of computer entertainment business. With recent development of broadband technologies, the increase of the number of players is putting a strong pressure on this type of applications. Commonly used clients/server systems do not cope well with scalability, limiting the number of players who interact with each other, are not robust enough and might be subject to bottleneck due to their centralized infrastructure. These systems also force the developers to invest enormous amount of money on hardware and time to design complex software systems. To solve these problems we propose a fully distributed, peer-to-peer architecture for MMOGs. In this paper we discuss the issues surrounding MMOGs, the limitations in term of network infrastructure, and the lack of simulation environment to study and evaluate network architecture and protocol. We use a peer-to-peer (P2P) based architecture and protocol to provide a more scalable, flexible and robust technology solution than currently used infrastructures. We have conducted the design and implementation of a modular MMOG: 'time-prisoners', using a P2P protocol developed in Java and JXTA. The characteristics of P2P overlays enable to organize dynamically, and in transparent way for the users, the group of players according to their locations in the virtual world, and allow to design scalable mechanism to distribute the game state to the players and to maintain the world consistent in case of node failures.

Introduction: The purpose of the present study is to graphically and comprehensively illustrate the data on the impact of violent video games on the behavior of children and adolescents. Materials and Methods: This visualization system was designed based on the Schneider principle using the results of a clinical study carried out by psychologists at the Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, United States that included 242 children aged 8 to 12 years in three groups. All groups played different versions of the Minecraft game, then using data recorded in an Excel file on the Figshare site, four variables were depicted. The variables including finding the gun, length of time the gun was held, the number of trigger pulls, as well as demographic or control characteristics of age and gender of the children were evaluated. Results: Visualization was designed in the Processing software environment and it was easy to compare the three groups using the color, shape, and coordinate channels. Accordingly, it appeared that violent behaviors in children who experienced gun play were greater than those played the sword; both of them showed more violent behaviors compared to the group who played the non-violent version. Violent behaviors were also more prevalent in male children in all three groups. In other words, girls in the 8-12 age group in all three groups were less likely to exhibit post-game aggression. Conclusion: In this study, data on the impact of violent video games on the behavior of children and adolescents were graphically and comprehensibly visualized based on the Schneider Principle and revealed that violent behaviors in children who experienced violent video games were higher than those in the control group. Violent behaviors were also more prevalent in male children in all three groups.

There is widespread interest in the development and use of decentralized systems and virtual world environments as possible new places for engaging in collaborative work activities. Similarly, there is widespread interest in stimulating new technological innovations that enable people to come together through social networking, file/media sharing, and networked multi-player computer game play. A decentralized virtual activity system (DVAS) is a networked computer supported work/play system whose elements and social activities can be both virtual and decentralized (Scacchi et al. 2008b). Massively multi-player online games (MMOGs) such as World of Warcraft and online virtual worlds such as Second Life are each popular examples of a DVAS. Furthermore, these systems are beginning to be used for research, deve-lopment, and education activities in different science, technology, and engineering domains (Bainbridge 2007, Bohannon et al. 2009; Rieber 2005; Scacchi and Adams 2007; Shaffer 2006), which are also of interest here. This chapter explores two case studies of DVASs developed at the University of California at Irvine that employ game-based virtual worlds to support collaborative work/play activities in different settings. The settings include those that model and simulate practical or imaginative physical worlds in different domains of science, technology, or engineering through alternative virtual worlds where players/workers engage in different kinds of quests or quest-like workflows (Jakobsson 2006).

Virtual-worlds research is a dynamic and growing interdisciplinary area in the social sciences and humanities. Sociological theory can play an important role in how virtual worlds are conceptualized and studied. Drawing on data from ethnographic projects on two distinct types of virtual worlds, an asynchronous text-based internet forum and a massively-multiplayer online game, I consider what social and cultural similarities these two types of virtual worlds have with one another, despite their radically different forms and functions. My comparative analysis is framed in terms of three questions. First, are virtual worlds temporary and/or intentional communities? Second, what are the frames of reference through which virtual-world communities are built? Third, how do boundaries function in virtual worlds? My discussion suggests some of the common social and cultural features of virtual worlds.

This paper addresses a set of persistent methodological and theoretical challenges to research on Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), and to studies of 'virtual worlds' more generally. Critically examining some of the ontological, epistemological and ethical missteps that characterize well-respected, well-publicized and oft-cited research, our goal is to contribute to building firmer theoretical foundations to support more innovative, more rigorous and more accountable studies of digitally re-mediated, MMOG-based work, play and sociality.

Construction industry is a very complicated and complex environment that causes high accident rate. The development of advanced virtual world has become an important issue for safety education in order to reduce dangerous occurrence in the construction site. However, most researchers on virtual world still have limitations such as the offline virtual world simulation, the low level of interaction between users in virtual world, and so on. With the regard to this issue, this paper proposes the adoption online 3D world Second Life (SL) platform which allows students to perform role-playing, dialogic learning, and social interaction for efficient and effective construction safety and health education. In this approach, construction safety education model based on Second Life (CSESL) is developed, which consists of the following three modules: 1) Safety information and knowledge preparation to understand the critical causes of accident in construction site; 2) Collaborative simulation for safety case study to transfer unsafe case or dangerous occurrence information to 3D modeling; 3) Reflection on safety lesson for education and training to enhance practical safety knowledge by participating in 3D inspection game. The CSESL advantages and disadvantages are identified by testing the model using a real case scenario. This study presents the potentials and benefits of SL which could enhance construction safety and health education.