This paper reports on a preliminary attempt to develop and evaluate synthetic characters with multiple skill levels and with human-like behavior. Our goal was to determine which aspects of behavior have impact on skill level and humanness. We developed a bot that plays the computer game Quake against a human opponent. That bot can be parameterized along four dimensions: decision time, aggressiv...

With recent advances in harnessing the knowledge and skill of large groups of (unknown) network-connected humans, researchers and practitioners have been designing systems that make contributions of users entertaining and more engaging. Game mechanics are being applied to the traditional human computation tasks, such as transcription, classification and labeling. Seminal examples of such applic...

THE PREVALENCE OF INJURY PREVENTION PROGRAMS CONTINUES TO INCREASE, BUT THE INJURY RATES REMAIN CONSTANT. THESE PROGRAMS USE A BLOCK PRACTICE SCHEDULE AND CLOSED-SKILL EXERCISES, BUT GAMES ARE RANDOM AND INVOLVE OPEN SKILLS. TO IMPROVE THE EFFICACY OF THE NEUROMUSCULAR TRAINING PROGRAMS AND TREND THE INJURY RATE DOWNWARD, THESE PROGRAMS SHOULD INCORPORATE MOTOR LEARNING THEORY. BY INCORPORATING...

Deficits in emotion regulation have been identified as an important risk and maintaining factor for depression. The aim of this study was to examine the long-term effects of emotion regulation on symptoms of depression. Moreover, we investigated which specific emotion regulation skills were associated with subsequent symptoms of depression. Participants were 116 individuals (78% women, average ...

Observable structure of variability presents a window into the underlying processes of skill acquisition, especially when the task affords a manifold of solutions to the desired task result. This study examined skill acquisition by analyzing variability in both its distributional and temporal structure. Using a virtual throwing task, data distributions were analyzed by the Tolerance, Noise, Cov...

In the present study, we analyzed data from a very large sample (N = 854,064) of players of an online game involving rapid perception, decision making, and motor responding. Use of game data allowed us to connect, for the first time, rich details of training history with measures of performance from participants engaged for a sustained amount of time in effortful practice. We showed that lawful...

The idea that games may contain story elements is a hotly debated topic between ludologists and narratologists. For those in disciplines rooted in more traditional storytelling, the outcome of the game studies debate is largely irrelevant. Story exists where the author believes it exists, at least from a practitioner’s standpoint. In other words, a writer may tell a story within an interactive ...

This paper examines Allocators’ willingness to reward and punish their paired Recipients. Recipients only compete in a skill-testing contest, the outcome of which determines the size of the surplus. In the dictator game, Allocators reward skillful Recipients, but punish unskillful ones only modestly. The punishment effect is mitigated by the belief held by some Allocators that effort is the app...

We evaluate the rating system of“Heroes of Newerth”(HoN), a multiplayer online action role-playing game, by using statistical analysis and comparison of a player’s in-game performance metrics and the player rating assigned by the rating system. The datasets for the analysis have been extracted from the web sites that record the players’ ratings and a number of empirical metrics. Results suggest...