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...

Considering both play and design as world building activities, this paper offers to think the question of the distribution of authority on online game worlds through a sociotechnical perspective, and investigate the paradoxical relationship between designers and players of an online roleplaying game universe. The analysis is grounded on longterm investigations led on the project of an online mu...

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 authors conducted two studies to explore online game players’ flow experiences and positive affect. Our findings indicated that online game are capable of evoking flow experiences and positive affect, and games of violent or nonviolent type may not arouse players’ aggression. The players could be placed into four flow conditions: flow, boredom, anxiety, and apathy, as determined by level of...

The focus of this article is to determine how the engineering practices common in online game development may be approached differently to promote more diverse online gaming scenarios. The technical difficulties in providing online gaming are not trivial, requiring substantially larger budgets compared with their non-online counterparts: Commercial failure of an online game could be costly. The...

Driven by the dominant Internet usage and the prospective profits from the game industry, especially from the thriving and robust free-to-play model of online games, there is a need to realize players’ behaviors. Playing online games is experienceoriented but rare studies further explore what reactions of initial (trial) experiences in game playing are and how they will further influence player...

In this paper, we compare the offline versions of three Ramsey-type oneplayer games that have been studied in an online setting in previous work: the online Ramsey game, the balanced online Ramsey game, and the Achlioptas game. The goal in all games is to color the edges of the random graph Gn,m according to certain rules without creating a monochromatic copy of some fixed forbidden graph H. Wh...

The aim of this study was to investigate how group membership in an online game affects online and offline social interaction. Our main questions were: 1. Do people in online groups socialize more online and offline than people not in groups? 2. Do people in online groups have a different attitude towards bad behavior online? We surveyed Asheron’s Call users and logged online game observations ...