Today millions of players interact with one another in online games, especially massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). These games promote interaction among players by offering interdependency features, but to date few studies have asked what interdependency design factors of MMORPGs make them fun for players, produce experiences of flow, or enhance player performance. In th...

Typology and Sociodemographic Characteristics of Massively Multiplayer Online Game Players Katalin Nagygyörgy a , Róbert Urbán a , Judit Farkas a , Mark D. Griffiths b , Dalma Zilahy a , Gyöngyi Kökönyei a , Barbara Mervó a , Antónia Reindl a , Csilla Ágoston a , Andrea Kertész a , Eszter Harmath a , Attila Oláh a & Zsolt Demetrovics a a Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary b Nottingham ...

Online game addiction has a negative image and is becoming a public concern in Taiwan. We look at this phenomenon from another perspective, through interviews with gamers who were addicted to a MMORPG but have quit playing, we believe that the multiple reasons causing gamers to leave their game can reflect some more aspects of online game addiction. We then map out how a gamer’s attachment to a...

Online games construct a virtual world where gamers can explore and experience various exciting environments. However, studies on gamer behavior rarely investigated the relationships between motivations and spending for online games. Understanding these relationships helps online game service providers manage gamers’ motivations and develop better revenue models. This study investigated the rel...

The developers of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) rely on attractive content such as logical challenges (puzzles) to entertain and generate revenue from millions of concurrent players. While a large part of the content is currently generated by hand, the exponentially increasing number of players and their new demand for player-customized content have made manual content generation u...

Global development of online gaming, especially of Massively Multiplayer Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) has been phenomenal, but has evolved in different ways in different countries. The experiences of this industry (and its developers, players, regulators, and other stakeholders) in the US and China have been particularly interesting. Whereas China has seen the growth of gameplaying in Internet ...

We describe witness-narrator agents, a framework for collaborative narrative generation in persistent virtual environments such as massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs). Witness-narrator agents allow reports of events in the environment to be published to external audiences so that they can keep up with events within the game world (e.g., via a weblog or SMS messages), or fe...

We present the argument that the majority of low-molecular-weight organic compounds made and secreted by microbes play roles as cell-signalling molecules in the environment. Of the large number of compounds isolated to date, only a small fraction have been shown to possess useful therapeutic antibiotic activity. However, most microbial metabolites modulate gene transcription at low concentratio...

Molecular recognition is central to all biological processes. For the past 50 years, Koshland's 'induced fit' hypothesis has been the textbook explanation for molecular recognition events. However, recent experimental evidence supports an alternative mechanism. 'Conformational selection' postulates that all protein conformations pre-exist, and the ligand selects the most favored conformation. F...