► Definition of the essential guidelines to set up a social gamification framework. ► Learning techniques for social networks. ► Inclusion of this approach in a global social network for education ...purposes in Portugal.
As video games, particularly, social games are growing in popularity and number of users, there has been an increasing interest in its potential as innovative teaching tools. Gamification is a new concept intending to use elements from video games in non-game applications. Education is an area with high potential for application of this concept since it seeks to promote people’s motivation and engagement. The research in progress will try to find how to apply social gamification in education, testing and validating the results of that application. To fulfil these objectives, this paper presents the guidelines and main features of a social gamification framework to be applied in an existent K-6 social learning environment.
Playing digital games can nurture wellbeing by helping players recover from daily stressors, cope with life's challenges, practice emotion regulation, and engage in meaningful social interaction; ...however, this same leisure activity can also result in problematic gaming (i.e., harmful play at the expense of healthy behaviors), and social isolation that damages wellbeing. Research consistently demonstrates that the value or harm of gaming on wellbeing cannot be determined solely from whether and how much people play, but rather depends on contingent factors related to the player, the game, and the gaming context. In this paper, we aim to model contingent factors that differentiate between beneficial and harmful outcomes within players of the same massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG). We model how passion for gaming—defined as a strong desire to engage in a beloved activity that is enjoyed and valued, in which time and energy is invested, and that ultimately integrates into a person's identity—affects loneliness and wellbeing. We employ the dualistic model that divides passion into harmonious passion (HP)—characterized by a balanced and authentic relationship with the beloved activity, and obsessive passion (OP)—characterized by preoccupation and inflexible persistence toward the loved activity. We sampled 300 frequent World of Warcraft (WoW) players, recruited from online forums, and used structural equation modeling (SEM) to investigate the effects of their passion for playing WoW on in-game social capital, loneliness, and wellbeing. We demonstrate that HP for playing WoW facilitates in-game social capital (both bridging and bonding), combats loneliness, and increases wellbeing, whereas OP also builds social capital, but these social ties do not combat loneliness, and OP is directly associated with increased loneliness. Further, the positive effect of HP on wellbeing is mediated through an increase in bonding social capital and a resulting decrease in loneliness. Our findings highlight that passion orientation is important for characterizing the relationship between gaming and wellbeing. We contribute to the conversation on combating problematic gaming, while also promoting digital gaming as an appealing leisure activity that provides enjoyment, recovery, and meaningful social interaction for the millions of gamers who benefit from its captivation.
Online social games, played within social networks or games requiring social interaction with peers, are revolutionizing the nature of video-games due to their social aspect and the ability of users ...to compare their performance with their friends or people in their network. Social comparison features, such as leaderboards, individual scores, achievement badges and level maps, are commonly used in online games to enforce the social interaction of players. However, one of the biggest challenges that the social game industry is currently facing is the ability to increase user enjoyment, and keep its players engaged in the games. To probe more deeply into whether and how players’ continuance intention is influenced by social comparison processes, we combine two theoretical lenses: social comparison theory and self-efficacy theory. We conducted real-world data collection to measure the impact of social comparisons in player perceived enjoyment, online social gaming self-efficacy and game continuance. The results indicate that upward identification and downward contrast are the most influential comparison elements in game continuance. The results of these two comparisons have significant implications for both the theoretical application of social comparison in online settings and for the practical implications of future game design.
The public goods game is a model of a society investing some assets and regaining a profit, although can also model biological populations. In the classic public goods game only two strategies ...compete: either cooperate or defect; a third strategy is often implemented to asses punishment, which is a mechanism to promote cooperation. The conditions of the game can be of a dynamical nature, therefore we study time-dependent effects such an as oscillation in the enhancement factor, which accounts for productivity changes over time. Furthermore, we continue to study time dependencies on the game with a delay on the punishment time. We conclude that both the oscillations on the productivity and the punishment delay concur in the detriment of cooperation.
•Punishment is a mechanism to promote cooperation in social games.•We introduce time oscillations to the enhancement factor of the PGG to study the dynamics under changes of productivity.•We also introduce a time delay to study the dynamics under more realistic response times.
One fundamental economic challenge in social gaming is how to monetize players. We address this problem from the lens of social influence. Specifically, we examine how players' paying behaviors in a ...social game are associated with their pure friends and Simmelian-tie friends. Analyzing a comprehensive social game dataset provided by Tencent.com, we find that the cohesion effect emanating from players' direct connections in the social gaming network exhibits positive impacts on players' willingness to pay. Surprisingly, the cohesion effect of pure friends is found to be significantly stronger than that of Simmelian-tie friends, contrary to the common findings in the literature. These new findings have direct implications for companies tasked with designing social games or gamification systems and, more broadly, to help better understand the mechanism behind the microscopic economic behavior of individuals in a virtual economy.
This work proposes an innovative model for segmenting online players based on data related to their in-game behaviours to support player retention management. This kind of analysis is helpful to ...explore the potential reasons behind why players leave the game, analyse retention trends, design customised strategies for different player segments, and then boost the overall retention rate. In particular, a new similarity metric which is driven by players' stickiness to the game is developed to cluster players. Three feature dimensions, namely engagement features (e.g., log-in frequency and length of log-in time), performance features (e.g., level, the number of completed tasks, coins and achievements), and social interactions features (e.g., the number of in-game friends, whether or not to join a guild, and the guild role), are employed and aggregated to derive the stickiness metric. The applicability and utility of this new segmentation model are illustrated through experiments that are conducted on a realistic MMORPG dataset. The derived results are also discussed and compared against two benchmark models. The results reveal that the new segmentation model not only achieves better clustering performance, but also improves player's lifetime prediction by better distinguishing between loyal customers and churners. The empirical results confirm the effects of social interaction, which is usually underestimated in the current research, on player segmentation. From an operational perspective, the derived results would help game developers better understand the different retention-behaviour patterns of players, establish effective and customised tactics to retain more players, and boost product revenue.
•An innovative player segmentation model is proposed to support retention management for online social games.•A new similarity metric, which is driven by players' stickiness to the game, is developed to cluster gamers.•The applicability and utility of the proposed model is illustrated and discussed through a realistic MMORPG dataset.•The performance of the new clustering model is compared against two benchmark models and better results are obtained.
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•We propose a system to automatically evaluate player complaints in a social game.•Our database contains 100,000 players, 1000 complaints and 240 abusive players.•We experiment with ...several pieces of player information and their combinations.•Our system can correctly identify abusive players with up to 85% precision.•We can isolate and identify severe abuse cases with a higher confidence.
Online multiplayer games create new social platforms, with their own etiquette, social rules of conduct and ways of expression. What counts as aggressive and abusing behavior may change depending on the platform, but most online gaming companies need to deal with aggressive and abusive players explicitly. This usually is tied to a reporting mechanism where the offended player reports an offense. In this paper, we develop tools for validating whether a verbal aggression offense report refers to a real offense or not, in the context of a very popular online social game, called Okey. Our approach relies on the analysis of player behavior and characteristics of offending players. In the proposed system, chat records and other social activities in the game are taken into account, as well as player history. This methodology is sufficiently generic, and it can be applied to similar gaming platforms, thus describing a useful tool for game companies. We report our results on data collected over a six months period, involving 100,000 users and 800,000 game records, and illustrate the viability of such analysis, while providing insights on the factors associated with verbal aggression and abusive behavior for social games.
The workload of cloud providers is often uncertain due to the dynamic and varied client demands, thus presenting a significant challenge. If cloud providers fail to meet changing demands during peak ...hours, they may experience service requests’ delays and rejections, damaging both their reputation and their profit margin. The idea of cloud federations is contemplated as a solution to this challenge by allowing a group of cloud providers to combine their resources, as and when required, to satisfy client requests dynamically. Despite the merits of the existing cloud federation approaches, they suffer from several limitations, such as performance issues, the inability to converge to a solution in complex scenarios, the lack of consideration of SLA requirements during the federation formation phase, and the lack of flexibility offered to clients to prioritize specific objectives during the formation of the cloud federation. This work addresses these deficiencies by presenting a green, practical, and customizable SLA-based approach to cloud federation formation. Inspired by social gaming, the proposed approach can rapidly form a stable coalition of cloud providers able to fulfill client requests, while ensuring the satisfaction of SLA requirements in terms of performance, energy consumption, CO2 emissions, and providers’ trustfulness. At the heart of this approach lies a new coalition formation algorithm, dubbed the “multi-criterion coalition formation algorithm (MCCF).” Unlike existing collation formation algorithms, the MCCF algorithm offers clients the flexibility to prioritize the objectives used for cloud federation formation. Based on those preferences, the MCCF algorithm generates stable SLA-aware groups of cloud providers that dynamically adapt to network changes using a self-healing process. The MCCF algorithm has been implemented and extensively tested using a wide range of scenarios, and its performance was compared with that of two state of the art approaches: The optimal approach and the split-and-merge approach. The results show that the MCCF algorithm outperforms the optimal and the split-and-merge approaches in terms of coalition size, individual providers’ payoff, and mistrust cost. Moreover, the proposed approach yields a zero % request rejection rate and an execution time that is 8 to 16 times faster than the split-and-merge and optimal approaches, while enabling a reduction of the Carbon footprint of the cloud coalition operations. Owing to these advantages and its ability to offer a flexible and customizable solution to clients, the MCCF algorithm represents a promising and environmentally conscious cloud collation formation approach that is ideal for real-time applications and practical cloud deployments.
•A customized SLA-based approach for the creation of cloud coalitions.•Prioritizes SLA fulfillment at the cloud federation formation stage.•Self-healing ability ensuring that SLA continues to be met during cloud operation.•Detailed mathematical model along with extensive test results were presented.•Outperforms existing approaches in terms of execution time and customization ability.
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to identify the factors that influence people to play socially interactive games on mobile devices. Based on network externalities and theory of uses and ...gratifications (U&G), it seeks to provide direction for further academic research on this timely topic.
Design/methodology/approach
– Based on 237 valid responses collected from online questionnaires, structural equation modeling technology was employed to examine the research model.
Findings
– The results reveal that both network externalities and individual gratifications significantly influence the intention to play social games on mobile devices. Time flexibility, however, which is one of the mobile device features, appears to contribute relatively little to the intention to play mobile social games.
Originality/value
– This research successfully applies a combination of network externalities theory and U&G theory to investigate the antecedents of players’ intentions to play mobile social games. This study is able to provide a better understanding of how two dimensions – perceived number of users/peers and individual gratification – influence mobile game playing, an insight that has not been examined previously in the mobile apps literature.
In recent years, social games such as 'Farmville' and 'Pokémon Go' have become a major game type in the gaming industry. This study examines the importance of different factors in social games using ...the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and DEMATEL. The result shows 'social norm' as the most important factor overall. It is also found that 'pleasure' and 'sociability' are the most important aspects in 'perceived enjoyment'. Regarding key aspects in each factor, 'flow experience' is crucial in 'perceived attractiveness', 'game fairness' largely influential in 'social norm', and 'reputation of platform and service provider' a decisive aspect in 'platform service and corporate image'. These findings and analyses are apt references for social game providers to improve their services.
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