1,721,044 research outputs found
Sociology and role-playing games
No full textSociology is concerned with most aspects of human social life. Sociologists study a range of phenomena, from small-scale structures and processes such as individuals and how they think, feel, and act, to mid-level structures and processes such as local communities or the cultures of organizations or groups, to large-scale patterns of
stratification that affect entire societies, such as class, gender, and race. Sociologists are interested in the structures surrounding social life, as well as in its processes. Both are readily found in role-playing games (RPGs): rules and game mechanics are important structures, while the performance of roles and the cooperative actions of players are important processes
A generalized semantic representation for procedural generation of rooms
No full textProcedural generation of rooms aims to create virtual environments that mimic common patterns found in real-world indoor locations, like offices or bedrooms. Graph-based models (e.g. factor graphs or Bayesian networks) have often been used to represent typical location's objects and their occurrence likelihood (nodes), as well as their inter-relationships (edges). Previous methods have struggled to represent object semantics in their graph nodes; specifically, they fail to fully and effectively support notions as abstractions (e.g. generic seat instead of chair) and replication (e.g. cups instead of cup). We propose a generalized representation and use for object semantics that overcomes the above limitations of graph-based models in the procedural generation of rooms. This node representation handles semantics as attributes, and clearly distinguishes the contribution of the attributes on the node from the potential effects of the node on the whole graph. We illustrate the additional expressive power of the resulting graph-based model for room generation, and show that it subsumes previous models as particular cases.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Computer Graphics and Visualisatio
Intrinsic Elicitation:A Model and Design Approach for Games Collecting Human Subject Data
Full text linkApplied games are increasingly used to collect human subject data such as people’s performance or attitudes. Games a ord a motive for data provision that poses a validity threat at the same time: as players enjoy winning the game, they are motivated to provide dishonest data if this holds a strategic in-game advantage. Current work on data collection game design doesn’t address this issue. We therefore propose a theoretical model of why people provide certain data in games, the Rational Game User Model. We derive a design approach for human subject data collection games that we call Intrinsic Elicitation: data collection should be integrated into the game’s mechanics such that honest responding is the necessary, strategically optimal, and least e ortful way to pursue the game’s goal. We illustrate the value of our approach with a sample analysis of the data collection game Urbanology
A semantic approach to patch-based procedural generation of urban road networks
Full text linkA road network is one of the core elements of urban environments, strongly defining their layout. Procedural modeling has been increasingly used to create such road networks. However, many procedural methods are complex and difficult to master by non-experts, often have a limited and hard-to-control expressive range, and require a variety of specialized input data to generate a complex road network. To mitigate this, some methods proposed to use stochastic data on road patches extracted from example maps to design a road network following a given urban style. We propose a novel patch-based method that uses the semantics of individual patches to help guiding the procedural generation. Our approach combines the advantages of patch-based generation with those of conventional parametric methods. Due to the intuitive character of semantic parameters and tags, our approach provides for an easy customization of fictive road network creation, allowing a user to easily define various types of road network styles, containing only the desired features and structures of real-world road networks.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Computer Graphics and Visualisatio
Mobilizing gamification
No full textMarshall McLuhan said in his 1964 book, The Medium is the Message, “we become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us”. In a relatively short time video games have become a major feature of our cultural landscape. This extends beyond the games themselves such that we can now see their aesthetic and iconography represented in the other main forms of media such as films, books and television - thus we are all becoming more ‘games literate’. Regardless of your views on how ‘Gamification’ is being defined or appropriated, in many respects its emergence is simply a reflection of our shared understanding of this growing aesthetic and literacy. In relation to this my perspective on gamification is not that of Gabe Zichermann, who describes it as ‘taking what’s fun about games and applying it to situations that maybe aren’t so fun’, which is oft repeated by many coming from a marketing perspective, but rather that it is we can use ‘games as a lens when designing interactive systems to produce more gameful designs’. In this way it avoids the presentation of games as some kind of ‘magic bullet’ for ensuring user engagement but rather it becomes like any other design frame to be considered alongside alternatives through which designers can concretise a solution to meet the needs of the user. In this position paper I will address this perspective of gameful design in relation to the consumer technology that has arguably had a greater impact on society since its appearance in the early 1990s, the mobile phone, which has become ubiquitous with over 6 billion phone subscriptions worldwide
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
The Impact of Roleplaying games on Culture
No full textThis chapter explores the influence of role-playing games (RPGs) on other games and media products as well as their representation in popular culture, including “moral panics” around tabletop RPGs and massively multiplayer online RPGs (MMORPGs). It examines the cultural impact of specific role-playing aspects that have caused a “drop down” effect whereby RPGs feed upon common themes and tropes to impact gaming as a whole. For computer RPGs (CRPGs) and MMORPGs, changes in the rules may require explanations by the designers, such as an expansion for World of Warcraft that changed the process used by groups to divide their loot. The chapter also examines the cultural impact of RPGs through their dissemination as a thematic genre and discusses their representation in three other popular media: literature, film, and television. RPGs lend themselves well to fiction writing simply because of the formulaic manner in which campaigns, events, and games are structured. Often tracking versions of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, RPG campaigns can form the basis of stories or encourage derivative texts
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