Cows, Clicks, Ciphers, and Satire
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What Do Players Do in Idle Games?
This is a repository copy of Busy doing nothing? What do players do in idle games?. White Rose Research Online URL for this paper: https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/135461/ Version: Accepted Version Article: Cutting, Joe Timothy, Gundry, David Edward and Cairns, Paul Antony orcid.org/0000-0002- 6508-372X (2019) Busy doing nothing? What do players do in idle games? International journal of human-Computer studies. pp. 133-144. ISSN 1071-5819 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2018.09.006 Reuse This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND) licence. This licence only allows you to download this work and share it with others as long as you credit the authors, but you can’t change the article in any way or use it commercially. More information and the full terms of the licence here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ Takedown If you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing [email protected] including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. [email protected] https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ Busy doing nothing? What do players do in idle games? Joe Cuttinga,∗, David Gundrya, Paul Cairnsa aUniversity of York, Heslington,York, United Kingdom Abstract Idle games – games where waiting for extended periods is an important dynamic – are increasing in popularity. The game Neko Atsume, a mobile game about collecting cats, is an extreme example of this genre where progress can only be achieved when the game is switched off (so-called "progress while gone"). -
Playing to Wait: a Taxonomy of Idle Games
CHI 2018 Paper CHI 2018, April 21–26, 2018, Montréal, QC, Canada Playing to Wait: A Taxonomy of Idle Games Sultan A. Alharthi,1 Olaa Alsaedi,1 Zachary O. Toups,1 Joshua Tanenbaum,2 Jessica Hammer3 1Play & Interactive Experiences for Learning Lab, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM, USA 2 Transformative Play Lab, Department of Informatics, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA 3HCI Institute / Entertainment Technology Center, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA {salharth, olaa}@nmsu.edu, [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] Figure 1. Sample of idle games featuring different styles of gameplay, interaction, and graphical or text interfaces. From left to right: Cookie Clicker [G50], AdVenture Capitalist [G38], Kittens Game [G16], Clicker Heroes [G66], and Cow Clicker [G39]. Screenshots taken cb author Alharthi. ABSTRACT are typically played in web browsers, on mobile devices, or Idle games are a recent minimalist gaming phenomenon in on a PC. Players progress with minimal-to-no interaction. Idle which the game is left running with little player interaction. games usually involve repeating a simple action (e.g., clicking, We deepen understanding of idle games and their characteris- rubbing, tapping) to accumulate resources as a core mechanic, tics by developing a taxonomy and identifying game features. an action that is regularly performed in play [55]. Most idle This paper examines 66 idle games using a grounded theory games also include mechanics that automate gameplay so the approach to analyze play, game mechanics, rewards, interac- game progresses by itself [50]. Although the interactions are tivity, progress rate, and user interface. -
Intercultural Perspective on Impact of Video Games on Players: Insights from a Systematic Review of Recent Literature
EDUCATIONAL SCIENCES: THEORY & PRACTICE eISSN: 2148-7561, ISSN: 2630-5984 Received: 28 November 2019 Revision received: 16 December 2019 Copyright © 2020 JESTP Accepted: 20 January 2020 www.jestp.com DOI 10.12738/jestp.2020.1.004 ⬧ January 2020 ⬧ 20(1) ⬧ 40-58 Review article Intercultural Perspective on Impact of Video Games on Players: Insights from a Systematic Review of Recent Literature Elena Shliakhovchuk Adolfo Muñoz García Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain Abstract The video-game industry has become a significant force in the business and entertainment world. Video games have become so widespread and pervasive that they are now considered a part of the mass media, a common method of storytelling and representation. Despite the massive popularity of video games, their increasing variety, and the diversification of the player base, until very recently little attention was devoted to understanding how playing video games affects the way people think and collaborate across cultures. This paper examines the recent literature regarding the impact of video games on players from an intercultural perspective. Sixty-two studies are identified whose aim is to analyze behavioral-change, content understanding, knowledge acquisition, and perceptional impacts. Their findings suggest that video games have the potential to help to acquire cultural knowledge and develop intercultural literacy, socio-cultural literacy, cultural awareness, self-awareness, and the cultural understanding of different geopolitical spaces, to reinforce or weaken stereotypes, and to some extent also facilitate the development of intercultural skills. The paper provides valuable insights to the scholars, teachers, and practitioners of cultural studies, education, social studies, as well as to the researchers, pointing out areas for future research. -
Informa 2018 Full Year Results Statement
Informa LEI: 5493006VM2LKUPSEDU20 Press Release 7 March 2019 Informa PLC Results for 12 Months to 31 December 2018 2018: Combination & Creation 2019: Performance & Growth KEY FINANCIAL AND OPERATING HIGHLIGHTS1 • Strong Revenue Growth: +3.7% underlying and +34.9% reported to £2,369.5m, including six months of UBM (2017: £1,756.8m) • Higher Adjusted Operating Profit: +2.3% underlying and +34.4% reported to £732.1m (2017: £544.9m) • Improved Statutory Operating Profit: £363.2m (2017: £344.7m) • Increased Adjusted Diluted Earnings per Share: +7.0% to 49.2p (2017: 46.0p); Statutory EPS of 19.7p (2017: 37.6p), with prior year including non-cash credit from US tax reforms • Attractive Free Cash Flow: £503.2m and £600m+ including a full year of UBM (2017: £400.9m) • Robust Balance Sheet, in line with plan: Net debt/EBITDA1 at 2.9x (2017: 2.5x) • Enhanced Dividend: up 7.1% to 21.90p (2017: 20.45p) London: Informa (LSE: INF.L), the International Exhibitions, Events, Information Services and Scholarly Research Group, today published its financial results for the 12 months to 31 December 2018, reporting a further period of operational progress and improving financial performance. Stephen A. Carter, Group Chief Executive, said: “In 2018, the Informa Group delivered a fifth consecutive year of improving growth, increasing adjusted profits, adjusted earnings per share, cashflow and dividends.” He added: “In 2019, our focus is on continuing Performance and Growth as we consolidate our market positions and further reduce complexity. This will enable -
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Issue 01 – 2012 Journal –Peer Reviewed MELINDA JACOBS Flight 1337 [email protected] Click, click, click, click Zynga and the gamification of clicking Although the era of the social network game ofcially began with the launch of the Facebook Platform in 2007, it wasn’t until 2009 that social network games began to attract the spotlight of mainstream media with the runaway successes of several games. Not surprisingly, since that moment the online gaming industry has been fully occupied with discerning and attempting to replicate the elements that have made those Facebook games fruitful. Both academics and industry members have engaged in a hearty amount of discussion and speculation as to the reasons for the success seen by social network gaming, watching the evolution of the genre as companies have both emerged and retreated from the industry. Despite the large number of games appearing on Facebook by a variety of publishers and developers almost none have come close to meeting or bypass- ing the initial pace set by game developer Zynga. Over the course of just a few years, Zynga has built a company valued at over 15 billion USD with over 200 million monthly active users (MAU) of their games (Woo & Raice, 2011). The next closest game developer is EA at 55 million MAU. EA is one of the frst developers in the past three years to develop a game, The Sims Social with 28 million MAU, that has come close to average MAU counts—30 to 40 mil- lion—of the games released by Zynga (Appdata, 2011). What then is it about Zynga’s games in particular that make them so successful? In the discussion and literature addressing social network gaming and the reception and success of Zynga’s games in particular, three core features of their structural design stand out that are frequently referenced as reasons for the suc- cess of Zynga. -
Griefing, Massacres, Discrimination, and Art: the Limits of Overlapping Rule Sets in Online Games Sal Humphreys University of Adelaide (Australia)
UC Irvine Law Review Volume 2 Issue 2 Governing the Magic Circle: Regulation of Article 3 Virtual Worlds 6-2012 Griefing, Massacres, Discrimination, and Art: The Limits of Overlapping Rule Sets in Online Games Sal Humphreys University of Adelaide (Australia) Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.uci.edu/ucilr Part of the Contracts Commons, Internet Law Commons, and the Rule of Law Commons Recommended Citation Sal Humphreys, Griefing, Massacres, Discrimination, and Art: The Limits of Overlapping Rule Sets in Online Games, 2 U.C. Irvine L. Rev. 507 (2012). Available at: https://scholarship.law.uci.edu/ucilr/vol2/iss2/3 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by UCI Law Scholarly Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in UC Irvine Law Review by an authorized editor of UCI Law Scholarly Commons. UCILR V2I2 Assembled v4 (Do Not Delete) 7/14/2012 2:14 PM Griefing, Massacres, Discrimination, and Art: The Limits of Overlapping Rule Sets in Online Games Sal Humphreys* and Melissa de Zwart** Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 507 I. Game Rules, the Magic Circle, and Heterotopias .................................................. 510 II. End User License Agreements ................................................................................ 515 III. Breaking the Rules ................................................................................................... 516 IV. Griefing ..................................................................................................................... -
Wait Wait& Donˇt Play Me: the Clicker Game Genre and Configuring
InVisible Culture Journal • Issue 30: Poetics of Play Wait Wait… Don’t Play Me: The Clicker Game Genre and Conguring Everyday Temporalities Oscar Moralde1 1UCLA Published on: Apr 18, 2019 DOI: 10.47761/494a02f6.0cf44974 License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0) InVisible Culture Journal • Issue 30: Poetics of Play Wait Wait… Don’t Play Me: The Clicker Game Genre and Conguring Everyday Temporalities Clicker Heroes, 2014. "We do not say that we have learnt, and that anything is made new or beautiful by mere lapses of time; for we regard time itself as destroying rather than producing, for what is counted in time is movement, and movement dislodges whatever it affects from its present state."1 “The Time Machine brings cookies from the past, before they were even eaten.”2 Game Genre, Duration, and the Flow of the Everyday Video game aesthetics extend beyond the sights and sounds encoded into datasets for electronic processing into the audiovisual worlds of player experience. They even extend beyond the feel and feelings produced by the cybernetic intersubjective assemblage of player and game at the threshold of the interface, which has become an important site of inquiry for game studies scholars.3 Game aesthetics are strongly situated aesthetics: spatial and temporal contexts not only shape the meanings that players take away from gameplay experience, but they also determine the form and types of experience that unfold in play. For example, in Hamlet on the Holodeck, Janet Murray describes the iconic 1984 -
What We Talk About When We Talk About Game Aesthetics Simon Niedenthal Malmö University School of Arts and Communication Malmö, Sweden [email protected]
What We Talk About When We Talk About Game Aesthetics Simon Niedenthal Malmö University School of Arts and Communication Malmö, Sweden [email protected] ABSTRACT well under 4% in both 2005 and 2007. Game industry Digital games are commonly described as phenomena that discomfort with aesthetic questions is expressed in a combine aesthetic, social and technological elements, yet different manner. “Here we go again” was the resigned our understanding of the aesthetic element of games and response of one interviewee in a recent Gamasutra.com play is perhaps the least developed of all. All too often, an article on the question “Are games art?” [34]. Are we to aesthetics perspective within game studies and design conclude that an aesthetics perspective on digital games has discourses is relegated to a marginal role, by conflating fallen upon tough times? Hardly. Although the term game aesthetics with graphics and “eye candy,” or by “aesthetics” (and the implicit and explicit attitudes limiting aesthetic discussion to graphic style analysis or associated with it) needs to be critically reexamined within debates on the question “are games art?” Changing game a game studies context, changes in game technologies, as technologies, as well as arguments from within philosophy, well as arguments drawing upon philosophy, psychology, psychology, interaction design theory and cultural theory, interaction design theory and cultural studies suggest that call for us to examine the implicit and explicit assumptions an aesthetics perspective can contribute greatly to research we make when we write about aesthetics within game discourses on gaming as an embodied and pleasurable studies research, as a prelude to reclaiming a perspective experience, and can give rise to new ways of thinking about that will allow us to better understand the way in which game design. -
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Vol. 10, No. 1 (2019) http://www.eludamos.org The Ontology of Incremental Games: Thinking like the Computer in Frank Lantz’s Universal Paperclips Matthew Schmalzer Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture. 2019; 10 (1), pp. 91–108 The Ontology of Incremental Games: Thinking like the Computer in Frank Lantz’s Universal Paperclips MATTHEW SCHMALZER “Mass media,” Alexander Galloway (2006) claims, has undergone an “upheaval” (p.3). He argues that “what used to be primarily the domain of eyes and looking is now more likely that of muscles and doing” (p.3). Videogames are the catalyst of this supposed shift. Where we once inertly watched media, we now actively play them. However, during gameplay, the player is not the only one that acts; the computer does as well. The computer’s software runs, acting both in response to players’ actions and of its own accord. In Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo, 1985), for example, players’ input makes Mario jump and run, but set the controller down and the enemies continue moving along their determined routes, the music continues playing, and the clock insists on ticking down. All of these actions are algorithmically determined by the computer’s code and require no input from the player. The computer plays even when the player ceases interacting with it, demonstrating an agency of its own that has a very real effect on the player. If the computer’s code determines that an enemy’s path should intersect with Mario’s, the player will likely respond by attempting to evade or attack the algorithmically generated obstacle. -
A Scripting Game That Leverages Fuzzy Logic As an Engaging Game Mechanic
Fuzzy Tactics: A scripting game that leverages fuzzy logic as an engaging game mechanic ⇑ Michele Pirovano a,b, Pier Luca Lanzi a, a Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy b Department of Computer Science, University of Milano, Milano, Italy 1. Introduction intelligent. The award-winning game Black & White (Lionhead Studios, 2001) leverages reinforcement learning to support the Artificial intelligence in video games aims at enhancing players’ interaction with the player’s giant pet-avatar as the main core of experience in various ways (Millington, 2006; Buckland, 2004); for the gameplay. Most of the gameplay in Black & White (Lionhead instance, by providing intelligent behaviors for non-player charac- Studios, 2001) concerns teaching what is good and what is bad ters, by implementing adaptive gameplay, by generating high- to the pet, a novel mechanic enabled by the AI. In Galactic Arms quality content (e.g. missions, meshes, textures), by controlling Race (Hastings, Guha, & Stanley, 2009), the players’ weapon prefer- complex animations, by implementing tactical and strategic plan- ences form the selection mechanism of a distributed genetic algo- ning, and by supporting on-line learning. Noticeably, artificial rithm that evolves the dynamics of the particle weapons of intelligence is typically invisible to the players who become aware spaceships. The players can experience the weapons’ evolution of its presence only when it behaves badly (as demonstrated by the based on their choices. In all these games, the underlying artificial huge amount of YouTube videos showing examples of bad artificial intelligence is the main element that permeates the whole game intelligence1). -
Routledge International Handbook of Schools and Schooling in Asia
ROUTLEDGE INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOK OF SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLING IN ASIA Edited by Kerry J. Kennedy and John Chi- Kin Lee First published 2018 ISBN: 978- 1- 138- 90849- 9 (hbk) ISBN: 978- 1- 315- 69438- 2 (ebk) 37 A SYSTEMATIC LITERATURE REVIEW OF GAME- BASED LEARNING AND GAMIFICATION RESEARCH IN ASIA The synthesized fi ndings and research gap Hyo- Jeong So and Minhwi Seo (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Kerry J. Kennedy and John Chi- Kin Lee; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Kerry J. Kennedy and John Chi- Kin Lee to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. With the exception of Chapters 35, 36, 37, and 38, no part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Chapter 35, 36, 37, and 38 of this book are available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution- Non Commercial- No Derivatives 4.0 license. -
Mass Media Visibility Distribution Plan
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