In-game Characters Research Articles

Morality in Gaming: Observer Perceptions of Player versus Character Actions

The debate on the impact of violent video games and its influence on players continues despite mixed findings. Using the lens of third person perception research, we explored moral judgments of laypersons, those often at the crux of these public debates. Study 1 investigated whether the player or character is perceived by an outside observer as responsible for moral decisions made within the narrative of a violent video game. Study 2 investigated how those perceptions may impact the observers’ perceptions of the player’s future negative behaviors and personality traits. Study 1 and 2 used a 2 (condition: rescuing vs. harvesting) x 2 (role: player vs. character) mixed ANOVA with role as a repeated measure. We created a brief recording of gameplay leading to a moral decision in Bioshock, an interactive, first-person shooter game, shown to participants. Participants were asked to rate perceived morality of player and character actions. Study 1 showed that participants (N = 51) held the observed player more morally responsible for in-game behaviors than the character within the game. Replicating and advancing Study 1, Study 2 (N = 227) showed support for you are what you eat heuristic, in that observers were more likely to view the negative behaviors of the in-game characters as indicators of negative personality traits of the player. These insights are crucial in the broader societal discourse on the potential link between violent video games and real-world aggression

FACIAL ANIMATION AND EMPATHY IN THE<i> LAST OF US PARTS I AND II</i>

For more than a decade the videogame studio Naughty Dog has deployed increasingly sophisticated facial animations, greatly expanding its characters’ abilities to convey realistic and compelling emotion. In a parallel effort, the studio has remediated cinematic forms like the closeup, integrating them with the unique affordances of videoludic media. Naughty Dog’s 2020 The Last of Us Part II takes this a step further, making characters’ faces a vital aspect of the game’s interface: the dynamically changing emotional expression of 25 in-game characters offers fine-grained feedback regarding player choices and actions, and it also encourages players to engage with the characters less like tools or targets and more like autonomous human beings. Through a close study of a single game character, Ellie Williams, my article illuminates the narrative and gameplay impact of this merger of face and interface. Ellie began The Last of Us Part I (2013) as a non-player character (NPC) and, in some ways, an archetypal “damsel in distress,” but she evolved to become a fan favourite as well as the sequel’s protagonist and principal player-character (PC). Along the way, Ellie also became something of a feminist icon: she is a queer young woman who wears practical clothing, a character very different than the stereotypical heroes that dominated previous videogame generations. The success of the games and their central character, I argue, turns on their ability to encourage emotional connections, sometimes called empathy, inviting players to engage with videogame characters in ways that parallel their responses to characters in older media forms.

CUSTOMIZING EXPERIENCES: EXPANDING THE BOUNDARIES BEYOND GAME’S MECHANICS

Since the advent of the internet the gaming market has undergone a significant transformation, embracing global publishing and sales, as well as the exponential growth of online gaming. However, the appeal of this market extends beyond the games themselves, as it offers users immersive experiences not only as players but also as creators and customizers of their in-game characters. This research paper centres around the hypothesis that games have the potential to foster interaction and provide experiences that go beyond their mechanics and design, leveraging the customization options available to players. To explore this concept, an online survey was conducted, supported by a theoretical framework drawing from the fields of design, media, and psychology. The survey aimed to investigate the prevalence of customization practices, examining how players acquire customizations for games and how these personalization enhance their overall gaming experience. The findings underscored the significance of customization as a prominent aspect of gaming and revealed that players derive enjoyment from engaging in this activity, considering it an integral part of their gaming journey. These findings suggest that customization can serve as a valuable tool to enhance players' sense of attachment to the game universe.

FlexComb: A Facial Landmark-Based Model for Expression Combination Generation

Facial expressions are a crucial but challenging aspect of animating in-game characters. They provide vital nonverbal communication cues, but given the high complexity and variability of human faces, the task of capturing the natural diversity and affective complexity of human faces can be a labour-intensive process for animators. This motivates the need for more accurate, realistic and lightweight methods for generating emotional expressions for in-game characters. In this work, we introduce FlexComb, a Facial Landmark-based Expression Combination model, designed to generate a real-time space of realistic facial expression combinations. FlexComb leverages the highly varied CelebV-HQ dataset containing emotions in the wild, and a transformer-based architecture. The central component of the FlexComb system is an emotion recognition model that is trained on the facial dataset, and used to generate a larger dataset of tagged faces. The resulting system generates in-game facial expressions by sampling from this tagged dataset, including expressions that combine emotions in specified amounts. This allows in-game characters to take on variety of realistic facial expressions for a single emotion, which addresses this primary challenge of facial emotion modeling. FlexComb shows potential for expressive facial emotion simulation with applications that include animation, video game development, virtual reality, and human-computer interaction.

Modeling Morality-Based Argumentation for Believable Game Characters: A Design Postmortem

An ability to morally reason is crucial to the believability of many fictional characters, from Jane Austen’s heroines to the denizens of The Good Place. These works often foreground the complexity of moral questions and the circumstances un- der which different forms of behavior might be justified. Morality is also foregrounded in many games, from Black and White to Mass Effect 3. Yet, most in-game characters judge other characters (or the player) based on a single reputation scale or binary values of right and wrong. There has been little exploration in games of the relationship between char- acter values and beliefs and moral reasoning. In keeping with this year’s conference theme, “Oh the Humanity,” this design postmortem paper describes the design and development of Argument Box, a model of moral argumentation and reason- ing based on Lakoff’s metaphor theory of moral politics. We describe our design approach, iterations, and authoring con- cerns — covering what went right and wrong in our attempts to model morality-based argumentation for believable game characters.

Exploring the Effects of Progression Mechanics in Competitive and Collaborative Gamified Learning

This study investigates how competitive, collaborative, and progressive game-based and gamification learning mechanics influence children's motivation, engagement, and learning outcomes. The research was conducted with primary school children in an e-learning context delivered by the University of Central Lancashire’s (UCLan) eLearning platform – Learnvoy - and specifically explored how the sense of progression, competition, and collaboration in a gamified environment influenced learners' academic performance. This study involved groups of primary school learners in a quasi-experiment. The control group engaged in a traditional eLearning setup where they were asked to watch a few plain monologue tutorial videos and answer related questions. Two experimental groups participated in a gamified eLearning environment that used the same tutorial videos, but in which their answers powered up in-game characters: in one case creating a competitive experience and in the other a collaborative experience. After viewing each tutorial video, each learner answered the same questions as the control group, but here their rate of correctness powered up, or hindered frogs, from reaching a princess in a game based on the story of The Princess and the Frog. In this way, competitive, collaborative, and progressive elements were introduced in the game, where learners with higher accuracy in the question and answering activities had a better chance of winning, thus fostering an environment of motivation and achievement. The results indicate that both experimental groups exhibited improved motivation, engagement, and accuracy compared to the control group; there was no significant difference between the two gamified conditions. These results are interesting to schoolteachers and eLearning creators seeking to integrate innovative and effective learning strategies into their educational curriculums. The findings underscore the potential of competitive and collaborative game mechanics, particularly progression elements, in enhancing learners' learning experiences and outcomes. In conclusion, this research highlights the educational value of competitive, collaborative, and progressive digital game-based learning mechanics, suggesting that the sense of progression, competition and collaboration conveyed by such games can play a role in fostering learners' academic success.

Using RPG-Based Learning Environment to Increase Engagement and Motivation for Learning Higher Mathematics

Although game-based learning has been introduced in various fields, there appears to be a lack of engaging computer games that incorporate higher maths learning (Anagnostopoulou, 2021). This paper presents an exploration of how fantasy-based narrative and storytelling, through role-playing and game mechanics, can be used to increase engagement and motivation for learning higher mathematics in a role-playing game (RPG) based learning environment. As part of this research, the project developed an RPG with incorporated mathematical techniques. Players/learners access the fictional world, controlling in-game characters. Learning evolves via a storyline and six mechanics, progressively building knowledge of derivatives using puzzles with shapes, which gradually fade to the abstract notion of mathematical functions. An experiment was conducted to test the research hypothesis that an RPG based around a quest structure with concreteness fading can enable students to get a better understanding of higher mathematics in the area of differentiation without impeding their entertainment. Participants were recruited from various backgrounds and levels of mathematical knowledge and gaming experience. Data was collected through observations, interviews and two questionnaires: one to be completed before playing the game and the other after. This paper is mainly focused on the qualitative outcomes of the research. The results suggest that the method is effective, with serious learning taking place. The participants reported that they had found the game to be fun and a useful way to learn maths. Moreover, it is revealed that a PRG-based learning environment can increase engagement and motivation for learning higher maths, without invalidating entertainment. The findings have implications for the design, implementation, and evaluation of game-based learning environments for higher mathematics. The paper concludes that this approach has the potential to provide a more immersive, engaging learning experience and increase motivation for learning. Finally, recommendations on how to improve the current game as well as more bold and optimistic ideas for enhanced immersive game builds are suggested.

Real-Time Prediction of Simulator Sickness in Virtual Reality Games

Virtual Reality (VR) technology has progressed rapidly and is used in various domains, particularly games. Simulator Sickness (SS) still represents a significant problem for its wider adoption. The most common way to detect SS is using the Simulator Sickness Questionnaire (SSQ). SSQ is a subjective measurement and is inadequate for real-time applications such as VR games. This research aims to develop a model to predict SS in real time using in-game characters’ movement and users’ eye motion data during gameplay in VR games. To achieve this, we designed an experiment to collect such data with three types of games. We trained a Long Short-Term Memory neural network with the eye-tracking and character movement data to predict SS. Our model can predict SS in real time with an accuracy of 83.4% for players who suffer from severe sensitivity to SS. Our results indicate that, in VR games, our model is an accurate and efficient method to predict SS in real time.

What is the post-game depression? A narrative inquiry

Despite the fact that video games and gaming are one of the main focuses of scholars in the field of cyberpsychology, there are a lot of phenomena that hardly get any scientific cover. One of them is post-game depression, a term coined in the gamers community to express a specific state that some of them experience after playing certain video games. However, as to the authors’ knowledge, there has been no research focusing on understanding that state. Based on the findings of narrative psychology, a narrative inquiry approach was chosen for the presented qualitative, exploratory study. Using guidelines from the interpretative phenomenological analysis, the final sample of 35 given narratives of players were analysed, of which 22 described post-game depression and 13 of narrators described reasons why they did not experience it. After comparing the results between the two groups, the general conclusion is that post-game depression is a state of media anhedonia and reminiscing about the game that gave a visceral, insightful, thought-provoking and emotionally driven experience where players had parasocial relationships with in-game characters and/or their avatars/protagonists. Possible buffer factors can be personal growth from the experience and a fulfilling ending for the player. It is important to further understand what other factors, for example, personal traits of the players and specific game mechanics, contribute to that state since it can be a possible cause of serious psychological distress on the one hand, on the other a possible phase of being personally enriched by the experience of playing certain video games.

How video games saved me during the pandemic: A gamer's guide to psychological safety

How video games saved me during the pandemic: A gamer's guide to psychological safety

Empathy in game design - Exploring a human-centric approach in designing engaging video game experiences

The link between engagement and player emotions has been extensively explored by researchers in recent years. Empathy, which is the innate ability to accurately perceive another person’s current feelings and meanings can be broadly categorized into two main human-centric design approaches - cognitive empathy and affective empathy. Certain forms of media especially time-based media have been proven to better exploit viewers’ empathy and provide a more engaging experience when a human-centric design approach is applied. The aim of this research paper is to explore if a human-centric design approach can provide the same level if not more immersive engagement when designing video game experiences. The initial research into a human-centric design approach in video games will be obtained through an exploratory research design involving six tertiary-level students in the field of game design between the ages of 20 to 24 over a period of two weeks. The exploratory research encompassing of a semi-structured interview process with eight key questions relating to the respondent’s experience with empathy in games determined the advantages of planning and designing a game using a human-centric game design approach. The research determined that human-centric game design focusing on affective empathy provides a high possibility of a more engaging game experience that is strengthened by in-game narrative elements resulting in increased time spent in-game. This can be attributed to two main factors – firstly, a stronger player connection through direct empathy to their virtual avatars or in-game characters, regardless of the player’s moral standings and principles. Secondly, an immersive narrative structure produces a deeper player attachment toward game characters and game worlds.

Summoning Ghosts of Post-Soviet Spaces: A Comparative Study of the Horror Games Someday You’ll Return and the Medium

This paper aims to analyse the tension between the universal themes of the horror genre that are appealing for the global public and the local character of the digital games developed by smaller companies/studios from the semi-peripheral countries of Central and Eastern Europe. To examine in-game representation of game spaces as well as the authorial intention and production processes behind their inclusion, we combine close readings of the two titles with interviews with their designers of two digital games: Someday You’ll Return and The Medium. Both games target an international audience but heavily feature real-life domestic locations and landmarks. The digitally represented physical space is also a vehicle for the narration, which is centred around memories of personal trauma of the in-game characters. While using the concepts of hauntology, postmemory, and folk horror, we try to understand the process of creating stories that appeal to an international audience but is heavily rooted in very specific local folklore (Someday You’ll Return) or painful national history (The Medium). This phenomenon can lead to both popularisation of new aesthetics in global market, as well as to perpetuating stereotypical narratives about national cultures and histories.

The Quest for Motivation

Studies have shown Tabletop Role Playing Games (TRPGs) to be effective motivational learning tools that can be utilized in various subject matters. However, limited research has analyzed the elements within TRPGs that enable them to provide motivation to the users. As such, this study conducted an in-depth examination of the elements of TRPGs through the perception of players. Self-determination theory helped frame the study, while the Generic Qualitative Inquiry approach was used for the methodology. Semi structured interviews were conducted with six participants. Data revealed several themes that aligned with the motivational frame related to competency, relatedness, and autonomy. The findings indicate the importance of the roleplaying element and the connection between the player and their in-game character, as well as the effect choices within the game have on the players and other elements of TRPGs. Implications regarding design of TRPGs as learning tools are discussed.

SquadSmart — Hierarchical Planning and Coordinated Plan Execution for Squads of Characters

This paper presents an application of Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planning to a squad-based military simulation. The hierarchical planner produces collaborative plans for the whole squad in real time, generating the type of highly coordinated behaviours typical for armed combat situations involving trained professionals. Here, we detail the extensions to HTN planning necessary to provide real-time planning and subsequent collaborative plan execution. To make full hierarchical planning feasible in a game context we employ a planner compilation technique that saves memory allocations and speeds up symbol access. Additionally, our planner can be paused and resumed, making it possible to impose a hard limit on its computation time during any single frame. For collaborative plan execution we describe several synchronization extensions to the HTN framework, allowing agents to participate in several plans at once and to act in parallel or in sequence during single plans. Overall, we demonstrate that HTN planning can be used as an expressive and powerful real-time planning framework for tightly coupled groups of in-game characters.

Study of Gender-based Playing Style Stereotype in Overwatch using Machine Learning Analysis

Since its release in 2016, Overwatch has become a game with a high amount of daily users (over 50 million users Worldwide) and made a great amount of profit for the company that produced it — Blizzard. However, it is common that the stereotypes and biases hide under the popularity of the games. In past researches, it is shown that gender could affect the designs, abilities, and player’s view of in-game characters. In this research, a survey regarding gender stereotypes in Overwatch is conducted, and statistical and machine learning methods are applied to analyze the results. The result suggests that many of the players in the game had given biased or stereotypical actions or thoughts toward female players. Simultaneously, we propose an Ensemble Late Fusion (ELF) method that unifies the weighted predicted probabilities generated from various state-of-art classifiers to classify the player behaviors with or without gender-based stereotypes in Overwatch. The experimental results show that when using ELF, the optimal classification result reaches AUC to 0.9044, which beats several well-known traditional machine learning and deep learning classifiers. Moreover, the connection between certain biased ideas and rather a user in sexist is graphed and discussed in the paper.

Evolution of the YouTube Personas Related to Survival Horror Games

The indie survival horror game genre has given rise to some of the most famous game streamers on YouTube, especially titles like Amnesia: The Dark Descent (Frictional Games 2010), Slender: The Eight Pages (Parsec Productions 2012), and Five Nights at Freddy’s (Scott Cawthon 2014). The games are strongly focused on horror tropes including jump scares and defenceless protagonists, which lend them to displays of overemphasised emotional reactions by YouTubers, who use them to build their online personas in a certain way. This paper retraces the evolution of the relationship between horror games and YouTube personas, with attention to in-game characters and gameplay mechanics on the one hand and the practices of prominent YouTube personas on the other. It will show how the horror game genre and related media, including “Let’s play” videos, animated fanvids, and “creepypasta” stories have influenced prominent YouTuber personas and resulted in some changes in the common processes of persona formation on the platform.

Priority pixels: the social and cultural implications of romance in video games

ABSTRACT Video games are not immediately synonymous with romance, but role-playing games can present players with opportunities to flirt, establish digital relationships, and even experience intimacy with pre-programmed in-game characters. This project explores understudied elements of video game players’ emotional investment in games through romantic narratives using interviews and content analysis of online forum discussions. Although romance is not the primary motivation for many players, it can become an important element that builds on and interacts with broader narrative considerations. Romance adds emotional grounding for video game stories and its inclusion can become thoroughly engaging for players. It makes the narrative feel realistic, makes players feel closer to and invested in the game world, and gives players new opportunities to bond with one another outside of the game. Romantic narratives play an important role in emotional consumption of video games, but also present opportunities to explore gaming culture more deeply.

Analysis on Marketing Strategies of Tencent Games—Take Honor of Kings as an Example

This paper mainly focuses on the marketing strategies of Tencent Games. Tencent Games has the largest revenue all over the world. It is considered that the effective marketing strategies play important roles in global competition. Many researches have been focusing on this topic. In this article, strategies are summarized into four main points: product marketing, entertainment marketing, cross-border cooperation and intellectual property creation. Then the author conducts out a deep case study of Honor of Kings, introducing the most striking and latest strategies of the game. The game has cross-border cooperation with a cosmetics brand, idolizes the in-game characters and gets hold of festivals to launch virtual products. The experience of Tencent Games indicates that different strategies fit different periods and the developer should listen to the users and follow the trend.

Live Action Role-playing: Transcending the Magic Circle through Play in Dagorhir

Individuals interact with one another and develop themselves in accordance with these interactions. One group within this complex system is live action role-players (larpers). Larps are a variant of play that combine the “role-playing” of games, such as Dungeons & Dragons, with the “live action” aspects of sports. Using symbolic interactionism as its paradigmatic orientation, this study examines how the magic circle is reinforced and challenged through the development of in-game characters and their effect on the out-of-game self. The respondents of this ethnography participate in a larp called Dagorhir (1977-), which puts an emphasis on live action combat rather than role-play. Participants are part of the Las Vegas realm of Dagorhir, Barad’Dun. Players view Dagorhir as a full contact sport mixed with martial arts; role-playing and character development is encouraged, but not necessary. I observed, interviewed, and participated with this group over the period of six months. Even in a combat-oriented larp like Dagorhir, players get to choose names, weapons, clothing, fighting techniques, and other ways to develop their in-game characters; this ability establishes a connection between leisure larps and edu-larps.The themes that emerged from coding show different aspects of self and social interactions that are affected through in-game character development: Larp Segregation, Reflection of Self, Critique of Self, and Evolution of Self. Players develop terms to label each other and other larpers, as well as create different social networks to further bonding within play. Many of the players recognized how they developed their in-game characters, but some failed to see how their characters facilitated personal change outside of the larp. Though some participants choose characters that reinforce who they are out-of-game, others choose characters to emulate attributes they believe they lack out-of-game. While participants often perceived their in-game characters and their out-of-game self as separate entities, this study was able to observe ways in which they are connected.

Neural Rendering for Game Character Auto-Creation.

Many role-playing games feature character creation systems where players are allowed to edit the facial appearance of their in-game characters. This paper proposes a novel method to automatically create game characters based on a single face photo. We frame this "artistic creation" process under a self-supervised learning paradigm by leveraging the differentiable neural rendering. Considering the rendering process of a typical game engine is not differentiable, an "imitator" network is introduced to imitate the behavior of the engine so that the in-game characters can be smoothly optimized by gradient descent in an end-to-end fashion. Different from previous monocular 3D face reconstruction which focuses on generating 3D mesh-grid and ignores user interaction, our method produces fine-grained facial parameters with a clear physical significance where users can optionally fine-tune their auto-created characters by manually adjusting those parameters. Experiments on multiple large-scale face datasets show that our method can generate highly robust and vivid game characters. Our method has been applied to two games and has now provided over 10 million times of online services.