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with the increase of mobile device usage around the globe, face-to-face communication has degraded and complete prohibition is not realistic. The degradation is not to be prevented as it happens as a side effect of technology. However, balancing usage of mobile device and quality of face-to-face communication is possible. Thus, by approaching users through developing a party genre mobile game, which is not famous as a mobile game at the time, with local multiplayer focus and introducing the given game to users, it is expected that face-to-face communication can be encouraged, thus resulting in mobile party game to become a media for the encouragement. Sample mini game that is a part of party game is developed with the help of Unity game engine as a testing object in which user response is collected. As application testing take place, and target user response is collected, face-toface encouragement is proven and user response is positive towards the game. Sample game testing has effectively reintroduced the existence of nowadays rare party game in mobile platform along with encouraging face-to-face communication, shown by the enthusiasm and enjoyment that audience testers have experienced. In the end, with mobile party game can help by being a media to encourage face-to-face communication and prevent degradation of such communication, future developments of a complete party game in mobile platform is highly encouraged as overall face-to-face communication quality enhancement may be required in the future in order to mitigate degradation.

Multiplayer computer games can be divided into two architectural groups: client-server and Peer-to-Peer (P2P). While the peer-to-peer approach is very promising due to its independence of expensive game servers, a number of issues, such as state synchronization in an un-trusted environment, arise. Blockchain networks are a special case of a P2P network, and they have the potential to efficiently tackle some issues with P2P-based multiplayer games. However, blockchain development is a vast and complicated area, foreign to most game developers. In this paper, we present a framework to connect an existing game client to a blockchain network, friendly towards game developers. More precisely, we develop a middleware solution and a data model therein, to store the game state on a chain and communicate it to the game client.

There are currently important limitations in allowing for a more efficient man-machine collaboration in environments hostile to human presence. An immersive and intuitive user interface has the potential to bridge the gap between the human and the robot he/she is tasked to operate in the remote environment. In this work, we propose a novel architecture that allows for collecting large amount of sensory data to build models of the world and its inhabitants and present this information to the teleoperator of the robot. This environment maintain interfaces that are intuitive to the operator and accurately represents the robot’s real-world state and environment. The proposed game client is capable of handling multiple users, much like a traditional multiplayer game, while visualizing multiple robotic agents operating within the real world. A set of user studies are conducted to validate the performance of the proposed architecture compared to traditional tele-robotic applications. The experimental results show significant improvements in both task completion time and task completion rate over traditional tools.

With the rapid growth of MMORPG market, game bot detection has become an essential task for maintaining stable in-game ecosystem. To classify bots from normal users, detection methods are proposed in both game client and server-side. Among various classification methods, data mining method in server-side captured unique characteristics of bots efficiently. For features used in data mining, behavioral and social actions of character are analyzed with numerous algorithms. However, bot developers can evade the previous detection methods by changing bot’s activities continuously. Eventually, overall maintenance cost increases because the selected features need to be updated along with the change of bot’s behavior.

This paper aims to explore the possibility of implementing location-based game using the smartphones GPS to enhance the players experience. With the GPS technology, the player can play in a real world as well as in the virtual game world. We postulate this thus will enhance the players experience. To test the hypothesis, a horror game genre with location-based features was developed. The game was evaluated to thirty participants. The results demonstrate the game allowed the participants to explore a new place with fun. In addition, the participants claimed that the game allow them to enjoy a new experience in playing horror game. The participants described that playing the game was giving them more tension compare to playing a conventional horror game. Moreover, the participants claimed that they feel more familiar with the place theyve explored during the game. Finally, some improvements could be done to improve the experience enhancement to the game. First, more variation in the storyline, quests and the enemy. As the game evaluated in this paper is served only as a prototype, the variation of the storyline, quests and the enemy (i.e. the ghost) is limited.

In recent, conservative groups propose the online game shutdown system. Also some politicians propose a bill to enact online game shutdown system as a revision to the youth protection act. The online game shutdown system is blocking children's access to online game in certain time or after using online game for certain hours at midnight. Here certain time means from p.m. 10 to a.m. 6, and certain hours means 2 hours. The bill to enact online game shutdown system imposes the obligation to block access to online game in certain time on the online game publishers, and inflicts a penalty on a online game publisher for an offense. But in my views, the online game shutdown system is unconstitutional in the following perspectives. Firstly, the online game shutdown system infringes upon youth's right to pursue happiness, especially right to play game. Because the object of the online game shutdown system is the online games which is already rated suitable for children by Korea Media Rating Board. Secondly, the online game shutdown system violates the constitutional principle of family autonomy, or infringes upon parents' right to educate and foster children. Thirdly, the online game shutdown system infringes upon online game publishers' right to equal protection by discriminating online game publishers from arcade game, video game, pc game, mobile game publishers without reasonable rationales.

Massively Multi-Player On-Line Role-Playing Games (MMORPG) represent a computer game genre where the human player is able to assume the role of a game character and control its actions in a well defined virtual world ; the prefix “massively” denoting the vast number of players playing the game simultaneously. Cheating in such games is a fairly common occurrence and presents a major concern in network games as it is able to degrade the experience of “honest” players, with cheat prevention being considered as a subset of security issues for online games. In this paper we have presented a form of a network-level game cheating based on the MMORPG client reverse engineering method within the game Mana World, an MMORPG with client/server architecture. We have used the network protocol vulnerability of a nonencrypted data traffic in order to reverse- engineer the original data packets sent by the original game client, and replicated these packets in our own AI-based game client which enabled us complete control of the game character via Python code.

In MMO (massively multi-player online) games, the interaction among thousands of players can produce both positive and negative network effects. It is therefore crucial for a company managing MMO games to establish how the entire user base should be distributed across different game instances (‘servers’) in order to optimize the players’ game experience and, ultimately, the company’s revenues. While splitting the user base onto different game servers is a common measure in the industry, there is a conspicuous lack of clear guidelines as to when launching new game servers would be advisable. Our work notably fills this gap: for a popular MMO real-time strategy game, our counterfactual simulation shows that a division of the user base across different game servers can lead to additional revenues if implemented at the right time. For the game in focus, our results indicate that launching multiple new game servers would be beneficial in terms of revenue when the game was new, and additional servers every 90–120 days when it was in decline.

The educational computer game service, due to its entertainment role, is a very attractive tool for students to raise their interests in learning. Especially mathematics, the most difficult subject for many students, is one of the typical subjects in which the educational computer game service can be efficiently applied. Most of the previous game services is for single or two learners. And learner only have to simply submit a solution for the proposed math expression in the game. In this paper a multi-player game service based on TCP/IP socket programming technique is designed and implemented to join in the game for multiple learners. In addition, we design a game rule to improve learners` number sense by letting them arrange various ways to solve the problem. Finally, using the requirements of educational game service, we evaluate the proposed game service and its usability.

In the area of mobile game, the job of data analysis is very important. As the mobile game market is being expanded, the characteristics of the market have been so much changed, that the contents updating and marketing strategy should be built on thorough understanding and analysis result of the gamers` needs and their play pattern. Thus the importance of the mobile game management system can not be overemphasized. However, in practice, most of the mobile game companies are small scale, and they have intrinsic problem to provide successful game service to user with a dedicated operating team. To overcome these problems, this paper suggests an efficient mobile game management system based on our already developed mobile game. And the effectiveness of our system is illustrated by our case examples such as prompt response to user question or refund request. Our proposed system also played an important role to plan additional contents update, providing scientific data analysis result on user`s play pattern and purchase trend.

Recently, StarCraft AI has been very actively researched, largely via analysis of human replay data. However, such data are difficult to evaluate visually because they represent information from a limited environment, that of the game client. To solve this problem, we created an environment in which game screens are displayed on the web, allowing game progression to be evaluated at a glance. This allows the performance of more diverse and efficient experiments than conventional human testing. We show that human players label macro decisions (e.g., main force operations) during supervised StarCraft learning using a web-based interface.

This work investigates an over-arching question: how can an immersive virtual environment be connected with its intelligent physical counterpart to allow for a more efficient man-machine collaboration. To this end, an immersive user interface for the purpose of robot tele-operation is designed. A large amount of sensory data is utilized to build models of the world and its inhabitants in a way that is intuitive to the operator and accurately represents the robot&rsquo, s real-world state and environment. The game client is capable of handling multiple users, much like a traditional multiplayer game, while visualizing multiple robotic agents operating within the real world. The proposed Virtual Environment for Tele-Operation (VETO) architecture is a tele-operation system that provides a feature-rich framework to implement robotic agents into an immersive end-user game interface. Game levels are generated dynamically on a Graphic Processing Unit or GPU-accelerated server based on real-world sensor data from the robotic agents. A set of user studies are conducted to validate the performance of the proposed architecture compared to traditional tele-robotic applications. The experimental results show significant improvements in both task completion time and task completion rate over traditional tools.

Online games with a variety of genres and game style have become popular. While the market for online games is growing, unauthorized program software is used and operated by some users. They damaged fair players and furthermore, bot program users have inflicted a huge loss to game service companies. Bot programs show various game play action styles and there are many users not only in Korea but also other countries, so it is not easy to trace. Also, as users of online game and smart device game which is focused recently are increasing, log data quantity are explosively increased and demands of analysis on not only bot information, but also statistical information which is necessary for game operation plan from log information. This paper examines bot program of online game, detection method and tendency of log data management technology for it. This paper introduces our method to detect game bots and manage game log data.

This paper introduces a program structure that minimizes the client’s business logic by reducing the client’s specifications as a way of minimizing the limitations of online game platforms. The objective of this thesis is to design an online game that is based on a 3-tier client/server structure, and thus using this 3-tier structure to ultimately create an online Sutda game that anyone can enjoy. The progression of newly released games is highly based on the mobile market and the number of online games being launched is decreasing. As the mobile game market grows, more and more multi-platform games are being developed and target platforms within online games are greatly diversifying. Through these situations, this thesis minimizes the client’s business logic through a 3-tier structure of application-middleware-database, and also proposes an online game client/server that allows three or more users to participate simultaneously through the server.

Methodology of server development is so important for the development of online game because the client where the users play the online game depends on the server. In this research, we have studied data linkage methods of the online game server which permits the server to save and retrieve the user data on the database. The data linkage method of the server is critical to make the users continue their games anywhere online. In this paper, several data linkage methods have been proposed and classified with their definitions. The proposed methods have been evaluated with the experimental data. It will contribute for the developer of online game server to choose a good data linkage method for the features of the game.

Let’s understand the definition of games. Let’s find out the characteristics of games. Let’s figure out what kinds of games exist and how to classify them.

Using automation to ensure reliability of a tricky card based game application is not a child's play, especially when the underlying engine is cocos-2dx, which is the world's no. 1 open-source and a cross-platform game development platform. This paper explores the challenges that can be faced while automating a game developed using cocos-2dx, such as dynamic rendering of game elements, overcoming the limitations in using automation tools like selenium in the absence of any locators to identify the visible or active elements to perform any operation. This paper further discusses the approach to bring efficient, generic and re-usable solution for these challenges while automating a multiplayer card game developed using cocos-2dx. This multi-layered approach spans across the following areas: 1) The mechanism for working and communicating with cocos-2dx web and native game client. 2) Approach for automating multiplayer game using FSM. 3) Automating the game play based on game rules which follows a heuristic approach. The benefit of this automation approach is that it makes the code 'device agnostic, which helps to run the same code against multiple devices of varying screen size and resolutions. This approach also makes the code robust, reducing any false failures since the interaction with the client is done via Javascript, which lot of UI automation tool still does not guarantee.

The market of online games is highly increasing in the last years and thanks to the availability of always more effective gaming infrastructures and the increased quality of the developed games. The diffusion of on line games also increases the use of game bots to automatically perform malicious tasks obtaining some rewards (with a consequent economical advantage or popularity) in the game community with low effort. These causes the disappointment of the game players community becoming a critical issue for the game developers. For this reason, distinguishing between game bots and human behaviour being became essential in order to detect the malicious tasks and consequently increase the players satisfaction. In this paper authors propose an approach to the game bot detection in the online role player games based on the adoption of machine learning techniques in order to discriminate between users and game bots basing on some user behavioral features. The approach is applied to a real-world dataset of a popular role player game and the obtained results are encouraging.

The whole point of community-based healthcare (CBHC) is to assist people with healthcare problems to have the choice of living in their own home. In today’s society in Australia, it is now possible for that to happen for people with a wide range of bodily impairments or healthcare concerns, including for example, living with a ventilator, cognitive impairment or impaired mobility.

Over the last few years, the use of mobile devices and their mobile browsers has steadily increased, to the point where several popular sites have started reporting that the number of mobile device users visiting them exceeds the number of visits from desktop users. While we may not have necessarily reached a tipping point where mobile device usage has surpassed desktop usage everywhere, we have definitely reached a point where mobile device users comprise a significant market share and can no longer be ignored.

Online games are virtual space where it connects individual users through network connection to offer enjoyment of play games and game developer who service online games have to develop new contents and provide them to users to extend life of their service. Typically, in order to update new contents, all service companies have maintenance schedule to stop the game service for a while to update both server and client applications. Usually this process takes quite amount of time and users do not have any other choice but disconnected from server and wait until it is over. The purpose of this thesis is to describe the advantages of new design system which will allows users to continue to play the game even during the update. The main focus of this design is to make users feel more convenience in online gaming experience by move client from previous server to new server while users are still playing. If they can to connect current client with new server without any certificate validation process while users information from the client can automatically pass through to the new server, users may not need to experience maintenance for new contents update.

In a server cluster providing massively multiplayer online games, it is critical that the game workload is balanced among servers. This study develops a new mechanism, named Game Connection Handoff in operating system, which is able to transparently hand off a client's live game connection between servers. The responding server for a player can be dynamically changed and the game workload thus can be dynamically adjusted to balance the server loads. An effective request distribution mechanism is also proposed, named game server locality-aware request distribution. This takes into account the information of game maps and server loading to dynamically distribute game maps and players among game servers. The proposed mechanisms have been implemented in the Linux kernel of LVS-CAD cluster. Practical experiments using a real multiplayer online game--Stendhal--show that the proposed mechanisms not only effectively increase the service capacity, but also transform the game server architecture from the original with a single server into one with multiple servers.

Computer games stand to benefit from "cloud" technology by doing heavy-weight, graphics-intensive computations at the server, sending only the visual game frames down to a thin client, with the client sending only the player actions upstream to the server. However, computer games tend to be graphically intense with fast-paced user actions necessitating bitrates and update frequencies that may stress end-host networks. Understanding the traffic characteristics of thin client games is important for building traffic models and traffic classifiers, as well as adequately planning network infrastructures to meet future demand. While there have been numerous studies detailing online game traffic and streaming video traffic, this paper provides the first detailed study of the network characteristic of OnLive, a commercially available thin client game system. Carefully designed experiments measure OnLive game traffic for several game genres, analyzing the bitrates, packet sizes and inter-packet times for both upstream and downstream game traffic, and analyzing frame rates for the games. Results indicate OnLive rapidly sends large packets downstream, similar but still significantly different than live video. Upstream, OnLive less frequently sends much smaller packets, significantly different than upstream traditional game client traffic. OnLive supports only the top frame rates with high-capacity end-host connections, but provides good frame rates with moderate end-host connections. The results should be a useful beginning to building effective traffic models and traffic classifiers and for preparing end-host networks to support this upcoming generation of computer games.

To implement a cloud game service platform supporting multiple users and devices based on real-time streaming, there are many technical needs, including game screen and sound capturing, audio/video encoding in real time created by a high-performance server-generated game screen, and real-time streaming to client devices, such as low-cost PCs, smart devices, and set-top boxes. We therefore present a game service platform for the running and management of the game screen, as well as running the sound on the server, in which the captured and encoded game screen and sound separately provide client devices through real-time streaming. The proposed platform offers Web-based services that allow game play on smaller end devices without requiring the games to be installed locally.

User interfaces are a crucial factor in successful computer games design. Well-designed user interactions in a computer game can enhance user experience in terms of playfulness, immersion and flow, resulting in better user engagement during game playing. The aim of this paper is to better understand the elements of user interface designs in games by measuring the user experience while engaged in playing the game. An experiment was conducted using The Sims 3, an extremely popular social and life simulation game featuring real 3D graphics, to measure various facets of user experiences while interacting with the game. A Game Engagement Questionnaire (GEQ) was customised and administered to 35 participants aged between 20 and 28, and their responses were analysed. The findings show that most participants enjoyed the game. Overall, participants provided positive feedback on the user interface.

This paper presents the evaluation methods and techniques applied to the serious game developed within the VirtualSign project as well as the results achieved through those methods. VirtualSign is a Portuguese sign language bi-directional translator with three main components. The components are a gesture to text translator, a text to gesture translator and a serious game. The serious game aims to make the process of learning sign language easier and enjoyable using the VirtualSign bi-directional translator. The method used to evaluate the VirtualSign was the Quantitative Evaluation Framework (QEF). The translator undertakes a rigid validation process by both sign language experts and the deaf community. The evaluation process was also supported by questionnaires. The precision of the translator has a direct impact on the game performance. To evaluate the precision of the automatic translator we have used QEF and 10-fold cross validation to estimate the accuracy of the translator. The experimental results show a precision above 90%. In the identification of the Portuguese Sign Language terms As for the game the quality rate is 88% based on the QEF evaluation.

This technical demonstration presents the SuperStreamer project, which enables progressive game assets streaming to players while games are played, reducing the startup time required to download and start playing a cloud-based game. SuperStreamer modifies a popular game engine, Unreal Engine 4, to support developing and playing games with progressive game asset streaming. With SuperStreamer, developers can mark the minimal set of files, containing only the game content essential to start playing the game. When a player plays the game, these minimal set of files will be downloaded to the player's device. SuperStreamer also generates low resolution textures automatically when a developer publishes a game, and these low resolution textures are transmitted first into the game client. As players move through a game level, high quality textures required for the game will be downloaded. In our demo game, we are able to decrease the time taken to startup and load the first game level by around 30%.

We identify a class of content-based pub/sub applications with highly dynamic subscriptions. This includes location-based notification systems, predictive stock trading, and multiplayer games. The traditional method of handling subscription changes by engaging in expensive re-subscription protocols is inadequate when the workload is sufficiently large.We propose evolving subscriptions as a technique to alleviate the overhead of subscription churn when handling regular patterns of subscription changes. Subscribers express as a function of time the evolution of its subscriptions. The pub/sub brokers can then independently modify the evolving subscriptions without requiring further communication with the subscribers.In this demo, we present our design and implementation for supporting evolving subscriptions in the context of a multiplayer online game. We first show how evolving subscriptions are expressed to the pub/sub system. We then demonstrate its usage with a game client, which displays real-time performance measurements between the regular system and our enhanced version. We show the relative impact of using evolving subscriptions by running different experiments with our game engine.

In this chapter, you will learn how to generate MathSearch numeric puzzles like the one shown in Figure 14-1.

We developed a virtual game playing agent with the goal of showing believable non-verbal behavior related to what is going on in the game. Combining the fields of virtual agents and general game playing allows our agent to play arbitrary board games with minimal adaptations for the representation of the game state in the virtual environment. Participants in preliminary user testing report the game to be more engaging and life-like with the virtual agent present.

The aim of the study was the comparison of existing approaches of user interfaces for visually impaired people playing a mobile game. The mobile gamebook was taken into account as an example of the game. Seven different interfaces accessible for visually impaired people were studied analyzing the following aspects: interface reaction time, commands correctness, screen size influence, complexity of implementation, and number of available options. It was concluded, that perfectly accessible interface of a mobile game should consist of the lowest number of options as possible. When simple interfaces with limited number of options are designed, then swipes, multi-touch and sensors, due to the short reaction time and a high level of correctness of operations, are worth taking into account. The paper highlights, that the use of MVP design pattern allows developers to create mobile games with different methods of interaction, which can be changed in a runtime.

Recently, online-game industry has been rapidly expanding in these days. But, the various game service victimized cases are generated by the bots program. Particularly, the abnormal collection of the game money and item loses the inherent fun of a game. It reaches ultimately the definite bad effect to the game life cycle. In this paper, we propose a Bots detection method by observing the playing patterns of game characters with game log data. It analyzed behaviors of human players as well as bots and identified features to build the model to differentiate bots from human players. In an experiment, by using the served online-game, the model of a user and bots were generated was distinguished. And the reasonable result was confirmed.

With the development of online game industry, the focal structure of game industry is under the expansion from content production to service management. In line with the trend, game service management and user satisfaction to the service as well have gained their weight in the game industry. However, since previous studies have focused on content production, little was discussed on the game service management. The current study investigated the effects of game service on user satisfaction. In addition, we tested the effects of a user's game service satisfaction on the user's loyalty toward the games with consideration of the user's content satisfaction and the gaming period. Results showed that there is a significant association between service satisfaction and user loyalty in the user's continual use of the games. Specifically, light users showed high loyalty with the increase of service satisfaction as they continue playing the games.Keywords : Game Operation Service(게임운영 서비스), User Satisfaction(이용자 만족도)Game Content Satisfaction(게임 콘텐츠 만족도)