Unreal Tournament 2004 bot passes Turing test

In a competition, more than 50% of players thought the bot was actually a human player. By comparison, humans were only correctly identified as human about 40% of the time.

In other words, the bot acted more like a human than humans did. This is kind of a big deal as the Turing test is one of the most commonly used measured of the "human-ness" of AI.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-09/uota-aig092612.php

Possible special guest for Oct. 1 meeting

I am currently working on confirming a special guest for our Oct. 1 meeting. Ray Tan is the founder of E-Sports Initiative, a charitable organization under the College of Engineering. This organization frequently runs competitive video game tournaments for games such as Super Smash Bros. and League of Legends as fundraisers to donate to various local charities, including Nationwide Children's Hospital.

Ray approached Jesse Fox to find out more about the kind of research we do and offer access to this population of skilled gamers for data collection. Jesse directed him to our group.

I know some of you have mentioned research ideas involving games such as these; this is a great opportunity to find out about what this population of gamers is doing and how they can help our research.

Sept. 24 Meeting: Moral choice in gaming

Be prepared to talk about moral choice in gaming for the Sept. 24 meeting. The topic came up this week and we all agree it's something that needs studied, but hasn't had much in the way of good study design yet.

I will unfortunately not be attending due to starting up a research project, but I'll be back for the Oct. 1 meeting.

Meeting day for Sept. 17, 2012

SHORT NOTICE: I will be presenting some preliminary results from my experiment in the Genre-Deplete study and some correlations from its survey data.

What I found in the study supports the relationship between the Strength Model of Self-Control (Roy Baumeister) and Self-Determination Theory (Richard Ryan) in the context of videogames' effects on intellectual performance.

If anyone with some advanced statistical skills (e.g., SEM) can look into my survey data and be second author. Bobby has the data as well, just so you know.

Gamification

One of the many topics of discussion from our first meeting was "gamification," the idea of applying the quests and reward systems commonly seen in video games to the real world. I recently encounted a blog post about gamification as a marketing strategy, for those interested in further reading.

DOTA and need for cognition: Quick lit search

I've done a quick lit search for the DOTA and Need for Cognition case. I've found some articles that provided some clues.

• Gerber, S., & Scott, L. (2011). Gamers and gaming context: Relationships to critical thinking: Gamers and critical thinking. British Journal of Educational Technology, 42 (5), 842-849. URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8535.2010.01106.x
• Schumann, C., & Schultheiss, D. (2009). Power and nerves of steel or thrill of adventure and patience? an empirical study on the use of different video game genres. Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, 1 (1), 39-56.
• Espejo, J., Day, E. A., & Scott, G. (2005). Performance evaluations, need for cognition, and the acquisition of a complex skill: an attribute–treatment interaction. Personality and Individual Differences, 38 (8), 1867-1877. URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2004.10.003
• Henning, B., & Vorderer, P. (2001). Psychological escapism: predicting the amount of television viewing by need for cognition. Journal of Communication, 51 (1), 100-120. URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2001.tb02874.x
• Fleischhauer, M., Enge, S., Brocke, B., Ullrich, J., Strobel, A., & Strobel, A. (2010). Same or different? clarifying the relationship of need for cognition to personality and intelligence. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36 (1), 82-96. URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0146167209351886
• Day, E. A., Espejo, J., Kowollik, V., Boatman, P. R., & McEntire, L. E. (2007). Modeling the links between need for cognition and the acquisition of a complex skill. Personality and Individual Differences, 42 (2), 201-212. URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2006.06.012
• Hall, A., & Zwarun, L. (2012). Challenging entertainment: Enjoyment, transportation, and need for cognition in relation to fictional films viewed online. Mass Communication and Society, 15 (3), 384-406. URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15205436.2011.583544

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

GlitchHiker and changing the stakes of gaming success

In today's meeting I mentioned GlitchHiker, a game designed to go extinct.

This design raises some potential research questions. How is a player affected by the knowledge that poor performance could actually deny someone else the chance to experience the game? How is a player affected by knowledge that great performance will lead to even more people getting to play?

Or, more generally, how does the experience of playing a single-player game change when your performance means something for other players?

Citation Library

The vast pool of academic information is being filled every day by hundreds of papers and video game studies is about 3-4 studies a week.

To keep track of these articles and one day draw inspiration from them, I have been collecting video game-related studies since 2008 and categorized them in my online citation library at Citeulike.

I have collected articles systematically through keyword alerts in google scholar alerts, academic databases, and select journal issue alerts. I update this library weekly and many of the recent articles might be in press or are recently accepted. The result is a 1000+ video game studies, each of them tagged with keywords based on theme, methodology, and theories among others.

There is an RSS feed if you want to subscribe.