Electronic Arts Research Articles

Introduction

Introduction

Intergenerational knowledge as a form of peer review

Part of my PhD project Diffracting Indigenous Practices, Quantum Theory, Electronic Art and the Anthropocene involves bringing Indigenous Practices into dialogue with Western Science. It turns out that this remains problematic, as the knowledge types are heavily weighted in favour of Western knowledge sources. Smith has pointed out that “‘research is inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism” in the process of decolonising method (2021, p.1). However, in order to be published in international mainstream academic publications, the very process of peer review currently recolonises method. Indigenous researchers have presented strategies for “encouraging a new era of scholarship founded within the principle of “for Mā’ohi, by Mā’ohi” as opposed to research on Mā’ohi1 (Reynolds & Wheeler, 2022). Chang recognised the internalisation of colonial boundaries (2019, p.95) promoting a method based in Mo’oku’auhau (whakapapa or geneology). Escaping the immense gravitas of the words ‘epistemology’ and ‘ontology’ when discussing knowledge is problematic, as these concepts also contain embedded Western notions around how knowledge is accumulated and sorted into categories. Indigenous systems recognise interconnected energy flows rather than proposing bounded categories. Here I will argue that the movement that needs to occur in terms of knowledge recognition – also needs to occur inside Western academic structures. I propose four knowledge dimensions as keys to unlocking Indigenous forms of knowledge so that Western academic structures such as peer review can acknowledge these accordingly. Recently I incorporated into an art work the words ‘the history of knowledge has been colonised just like Moana islands and their peoples.’ From the context of knowledge dimensions I am able to provide an argument for intergenerational Moana knowledge to be seen as a form of peer review, opening the Western academic system to accepting such knowledge. This is crucial to combating the Anthropocene.

Commentary: Thinking of moving from academia into industry? Here are some things to consider

Commentary: Thinking of moving from academia into industry? Here are some things to consider

The state of the art in beyond 5G distributed massive multiple-input multiple-output communication system solutions

Beyond fifth generation (5G) communication systems aim towards data rates in the tera bits per second range, with improved and flexible coverage options, introducing many new technological challenges in the fields of network architecture, signal processing, and radio frequency front-ends. One option is to move towards cell-free, or distributed massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) network architectures and highly integrated front-end solutions. This paper presents an outlook on beyond 5G distributed massive MIMO communication systems, the signal processing, characterisation and simulation challenges, and an overview of the state of the art in millimetre wave antennas and electronics.

Reflection of Life within the Context of Electronic Waste Art

This project was engaged closely in how the reflection of autobiographical factors was utilised and expanded into artwork dealing with electronic waste art features. The artwork that was formed was developed through the process of understanding the inquiries of electronic fabrication from the previous work that related to the formation of new work. The artwork was created and associated with the changes and the transformation of installation and reflection of life home place artwork. This project shared the potential of the new form of the object within the context of electronic waste and represented contemporary strategies in creative artwork making.

‘White digital footballers can’t jump’: (re)constructions of race in FIFA 20

ABSTRACT Drawing on the quantitative datasets of Electronic Arts’ FIFA 20 top 100 players and their qualitative descriptors, the paper addresses the following: (1) How do ideas of race manifest and influence digital worlds? (2) How do digital football simulations (games) disrupt or reproduce racialised stereotypes and logics found within football in the social world? (3) How does playing football video games contribute to users’ understandings of race and sport. This paper, the first in-depth study of its kind, provides new empirical insights into the presence of the ‘natural athlete’ discourse within the operative datasets that underpin White and Black digital player performances in FIFA 20. We conclude that FIFA 20 is a site for a potent experiential socialisation in racialised myths, where gamers come to know race and the racialized other in sport through feeling the racialized differences of the procedurally generated natural athlete quite literally through their controllers.

Observed heterogeneity in players' football performance analysis using PLS-PM

Nowadays, data science is applied in several areas of daily life. There have been many applications to sports. In this context, the attention will be focused on football (i.e. ‘soccer’ for Americans): the making of strategic choices, whether by the scouting department of the football club, or the technical staff, up to the management, is crucial. It has been measured and monitored football players' performance in the season 2018/2019, for the top five European Leagues, using data provided by Electronic Arts (EA) experts and available on the Kaggle data science platform. For this purpose, with the help of football experts, a third-order partial least-squares path model (PLS-PM) approach was adopted to the sofifa key performance indices in order to compute a composite indicator differentiated by role and compare it with the well-known overall indicator from EA Sports. It has been taken into account players' observed heterogeneity (i.e. roles and leagues), since often experts refer to differences in these features, and so the objective is to verify their importance scientifically. The results are very consistent with this because they underline how some sub-areas of performance have different significance weights depending on the role.

Part of Computer Music History… (Trust Me, Latin America Has Always Been There!)

Abstract The political and economic instability in most Latin American countries has been profoundly affecting the lives of its inhabitants for decades. Support for artistic activities has usually been postponed to solve urgent social problems. Despite that, the development in these countries of the electronic arts, in general, and electroacoustic and computer music, in particular, is astounding. Mauricio Kagel, Reginaldo Carvalho, Hilda Dianda, Juan Amenabar, Horacio Vaggione, Jorge Antunes, Jocy de Oliveira, José Vicente Asuar, and Juan Blanco are only some of the many names in the ocean of electroacoustic music creativity that has always been Latin America. Archiving and disseminating electronic art—and working on a revised version of its history—is crucial to comprehend the present and build our future. The Latin American Electroacoustic Music Collection, hosted by the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology in Montreal, has over 1,700 digital recordings of compositions created between 1957 and 2007 by almost 400 composers. The Collection has recovered and made visible (and listenable) the creative work of many composers otherwise almost forgotten. It has defied the hegemony of the computer and electroacoustic music history narrative, helping to break barriers and widening the way their history is understood.

Dante and Video Games: The Unrealised Potential of the Virtual Commedia

ABSTRACT In 2010, the world’s fourth-largest gaming company, Electronic Arts, released an action-adventure video game called Dante’s Inferno. In the game, a weaponised, crusader Dante hacks and slashes his way through nine infernal circles to rescue his Beatrice, held captive by Satan in the pit of Hell. The game has sold a million copies, rates in the top quartile at review site Metacritic, and is critically acclaimed for its visual design. Dante scholarship, by contrast, has largely registered incredulity. This article takes the example of recent digital remediations of Inferno as a basis to explore what constitutes a ‘faithful’ remediation of Dante’s poem, and why; asking questions such as: How do we evaluate the effects of the original text; that is, what it ‘is’ or ‘does’? What conventions and mechanics of the original medium does the artefact depend upon? How can the effects invited or facilitated by one medium be translated into another? And: What constitutes ‘fidelity’ to the original work?

Art on the Divide Line: Experiments in Art and Technology in India and Latin America

In this paper, we discuss the causes of regional variations in electronic art. Mapping regional achievements in electronic art requires understanding of resources of education and advancement of engineering in locations of economically productive cultures. If we think of development of algorithm as the driving cause of innovations in electronic media art we shall find that more regional niches are not lagging far behind – at least not in alternative market locations like India, or even China, although results are not so encouraging in Africa and the Eurasian countries.

Contributors

Contributors

Necrologías posmodernas. Vanguardismo, cibercultura y mutaciones interactivas

The emergence of the avant-garde ended up affecting the categories that until then had served to satisfactorily interpret a multiplicity of phenomena that resulted in unstable and chaotic fluctuations, and determined qualitative changes in the so- cio-cultural structures of the planet, transformations that will have quantitative repercussions in the arts and historical culture. In this context, the idea that post- modernity succeeds modernity is somewhat complicated, due to the resistance of a certain intellectual sector in terms of validation and invalidation of the concept. Nevertheless, the factuality of elements that refer to a new symbolic-practical or- der, which in the arts associated with ICT gave rise to interactive “avant-gardes”, deojectualized and delocalized in a neo- or post-avant-garde spectrum, in which the electronic and biotec edial art, ended up assuming a partial protagonism.

Semi-Automated Gameplay Analysis by Machine Learning


 
 
 While presentation aspects like graphics and sound are important to a successful commercial game, it is likewise important that the gameplay, the non-presentational behaviour of the game, is engaging to the player. Considerable effort is invested in testing and refining gameplay throughout the development process. We present an overall view of the gameplay management problem and, more concretely, our recent research on the gameplay analysis part of this task. This consists of an active learning methodology, implemented in software tools, for largely automating the analysis of game behaviour in order to augment the abilities of game designers. The SAGA-ML (semi-automated gameplay analysis by machine learning) system is demonstrated in a real commercial context, Electronic Arts’ FIFA’99 Soccer title, where it has identified exploitable weaknesses in the game that allow easy scoring by players.
 
 

Contributors’ Notes

Contributors’ Notes

Examining the nexus between oil price, COVID-19, uncertainty index, and stock price of electronic sports: fresh insights from the nonlinear approach

Due to the arrival of a novel coronavirus, the year 2020 will forever be remembered. It is not hyperbole to state that COVID-19 has affected and infected almost everyone in society and the global community in different ways. However, many parts of the world seem to be improving. Individuals, organisations, and governments are trying to work through some effective strategies. The present study investigates the influence of fluctuation in the oil prices, COVID-19, and daily news-based index on Electronic Arts Inc's stock prices by applying a novel approach entitled Quantile Autoregressive Distributed Lag (QARDL) during 2019–2020. This approach is quite meaningful as it incorporates various quantiles with a comprehensive explanation of overall dependence among stated variables ignored by the traditional models like quantile regression, OLS, ARDL, etc. The study outcomes through QARDL reveal that the error correction coefficient is significant in various quantiles while confirming the long-run linkage among oil price, COVID-19, and EPU. More specifically, the study outcomes confirm a positive linkage (in all the quantiles) between COVID-19 and stock prices of Electronic Arts Inc, whereas a negative connection (for 0.20th to 0.95th quantiles) between oil prices and SPI. Furthermore, the Granger causality findings indicate the bidirectional causality between SPI and OIL and between SPI and EPU. Various policy implications are also provided under the present study.

To port or not to port? Availability of exclusivity in the digital service market

The digital service market is vast and constantly expanding. In the digital service market, platforms such as Netflix, Steam, etc. often seek to enter into exclusivity deals with service providers or developers in order to get exclusive access rights to their digital services in the hopes that offering exclusive access to a digital product will entice new consumers to use their platform and thus generate increased profits. In this study we focus on this phenomenon in the mobile gaming market. For example, the game developer Electronic Arts agreed to offer Apple iOS a 4-month exclusive deal for the well-known mobile game Plants vs. Zombies 2. The benefits of exclusivity deals for both platforms and digital service developers are unclear and have not been studied in the extant literature. We develop an analytical model of digital service profits to examine the optimal conditions of exclusivity for platforms and digital service developers. Our result shows that platforms prefer exclusivity while developers prefer offering their product on multiple platforms. We further explore the strategies that platforms and digital service developers can employ by analyzing three simultaneous and sequential game pricing and release scenarios. We find that higher profits can be generated by whichever party determines the price of a game first. However, we also found that in the presence of a leasing fee, platforms may prefer a simultaneous pricing and release scenario to even a platform-led pricing and release scenario. We conclude with implications for research and practice and suggestions for future research.

Preview the Products on Display at Display Week 2021

Preview the Products on Display at Display Week 2021

Missouri Experimental Sonic Arts Festival (MOXsonic)

Missouri Experimental Sonic Arts Festival (MOXsonic)

Video game play is positively correlated with well-being.

People have never played more video games, and many stakeholders are worried that this activity might be bad for players. So far, research has not had adequate data to test whether these worries are justified and if policymakers should act to regulate video game play time. We attempt to provide much-needed evidence with adequate data. Whereas previous research had to rely on self-reported play behaviour, we collaborated with two games companies, Electronic Arts and Nintendo of America, to obtain players' actual play behaviour. We surveyed players of Plants vs. Zombies: Battle for Neighborville and Animal Crossing: New Horizons for their well-being, motivations and need satisfaction during play, and merged their responses with telemetry data (i.e. logged game play). Contrary to many fears that excessive play time will lead to addiction and poor mental health, we found a small positive relation between game play and affective well-being. Need satisfaction and motivations during play did not interact with play time but were instead independently related to well-being. Our results advance the field in two important ways. First, we show that collaborations with industry partners can be done to high academic standards in an ethical and transparent fashion. Second, we deliver much-needed evidence to policymakers on the link between play and mental health.

\u2018Strangely Like a Person\u2019: Cole and the Queering of Asexuality in Dragon Age: Inquisition

In this article we consider the representation of the character Cole in Bioware’s Dragon Age: Inquisition (Electronic Arts, San Mateo, 2014), focusing upon how his asexuality is treated by other characters and its significance within his narrative arc. As well as contributing to the discussion of the representation of sexualities and gender within games, we seek to add to the ‘representational archive of asexuality’ (Cerankowski and Milks, Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives, Routledge, Abingdon, p 40, 2014), including games as media depicting and defining asexuality through fictional characterisation. We argue that it is particularly through humour that Cole is marked as being ambiguously set apart from the other characters in the game, and is infantilized as a ‘boy’ rather than a young man. Within a party of diverse genders, sexualities and indeed species, Cole’s absent interest in sex is treated as though it were something strange and in need of being overcome for Cole to become fully ‘human’. Beyond the scope of this game, this raises further questions for the representation of asexuality within media culture, and broader cultural discourses concerning whether asexuality is conceived of as being within the bounds of both masculinity and human normality.