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 ...

Introduction: Video games are common cultural issues with great influence in all societies. One of the important cognitive effects of video games is on creating stress on video players. The present research objective was to study different types of stress in players based on video game styles.  Methods: A total of 80 players, aged 18 to 30 years, played four types of video games;  Ru...

Explanations given to each other by 20 pairs of 5th grade children while playing a tangible tabletop sustainability game were analyzed inductively for key themes relating to their use of language, gesture and system tools. Half the pairs had been assigned roles (human development or natural resources manager) with associated system controls. Findings showed that explanations by pairs in both co...

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...

This study surveyed Dutch adolescents and adults about their video gaming behavior to assess the prevalence of problematic gaming. A representative national panel of 902 respondents aged 14 to 81 took part in the study. The results show that gaming in general is a wide-spread and popular activity among the Dutch population. Browser games (small games played via the internet) and offline casual ...

Along with the success of the massively multiplayer role-playing gaming industry in Asia, online gaming-related crimes have grown at an amazing rate. Most of the criminal cases are related to virtual properties since markets have developed for the virtual properties giving them real world values. There has been little research and resulting technologies for MMRPG virtual property protection. In...

Relationship is one of the most basic needs of human being. When our relationship suffers, we tend to turn to online game as an alternative to fulfill our unmet need. Massive Multi-user Online Role-playing Games (MMORPGs) environment is an ideal platform for multiple players to interact, to make friends, and to complete a task together. Social Learning Theory deposits that behaviors are learned...

Although trust is widely acknowledged as critical in virtual settings, little is known regarding the antecedents and consequences of trust in leaders of virtual groups. Adopting a multi-level perspective, we propose the leadership’s communication behavior and the broader cultural context in which the group operates determine trust in leaders of virtual groups, which in turn affects the performa...

Within the MMORPG World of Warcraft, attitudes towards warfare are expressed in conflicting ways. This is partly a result of the difficult relationship modern Western society has with warfare, and the various political agendas that surround this. Within World of Warcraft, this is expressed specifically in the minigames known as ‘Battlegrounds’, which allow players to fight against each other in...