Online Players Research Articles

Racial Disparities in Soccer Player Share Prices: Evidence From an Online Gambling Platform

ABSTRACTThis paper exploits data from a now‐defunct online gambling platform to investigate the extent to which the virtual demand for soccer players, as reflected in a player's share price quoted online, is related to race. The data are drawn from soccer players employed in the highest tier of the top five European leagues and contain a rich array of player‐level productivity and other attributes. The study finds that the skin tone of the player matters with the darker the shade, the lower the player's online purchase price. The statistically significant negative effects are generally found to be concentrated within the bottom part of the unconditional price distribution. In addition, decomposition methods using players classified unambiguously as either “White” or “Black” confirms the presence of an unequal treatment for the latter with the statistically significant effects again detected below the median of the unconditional price distribution. These effects are generally found to be robust to the use of both unweighted and weighted decomposition techniques.

What Drives Consumption in Online Games? Homo Socio Interneticus Approach

The current development of online gaming technology can facilitate social interaction, forming a virtual society. This social interaction is continued with economic interaction, namely the consumption of online games. This research uses a multidisciplinary approach to understand consumption behavior in online games. The research takes place in Jakarta, Indonesia, and interviews three key opinion leaders in online game communities. This is qualitative research using grounded theory. The results show that microtransactions in online games are driven by the influence of structural and cultural dimensions in a virtual society, in this case, online games. In the context of virtual society, structural dimensions of pressure are found in the form of exploitation by developers and communities. However, online players resist and reconfirm these structural and cultural pressures, such as stopping consumption. So, there is duality in the social structure of virtual society. This adds new perspectives to existing research more concerned with monetization strategy.

How gaming team participation fosters consumers’ social networks, communication and commitment

Online games are highly popular computer applications that generate enormous profits for companies that produce games. Online players actively participate and interact in gaming teams, but there is no study on how team participation leads to a commitment to gaming teams. Research that aims to fill this gap could elucidate practical solutions to strengthening the players' team commitment, contributing to the understanding of player behavior. Grounded in social capital theory and social exchange theory, in this paper a research model is developed, featuring an association between players' participation and players' team commitment. The data were gathered from 1352 online players, and structural equation modelling was employed as the data analysis technique. The results indicate that team participation is positively linked to network convergence and interdependence. They are, in turn, positively linked to social interaction and social presence, which significantly enhance the players' team commitment. We also find that, compared with social interaction, social presence has a stronger influence on such commitments. The research findings suggest that the game providers should encourage players to participate in gaming teams, thus strengthening the players’ team commitment.

An Affordable Wager: The Wider Implications of Regulatory Innovations to Address Vulnerability in Online Gambling

The British government is introducing new regulatory measures to address gambling harm, including affordability checks on online players that rely on cross-operators data sharing. This article seeks to understand these measures, and their limits. Section 1 recaps what we already know about differentiated restrictions on access to gambling, including as manifest in recent state-industry efforts to deploy online gambling technologies to identify and preempt gambling harm. Section 2 summarises agreed and proposed changes to British online gambling regulation since 2019, focusing in depth on affordability checks for players and the related imperative to develop a ‘single customer view’ of play. Section 3 outlines two grounds for concern about the measures, rooted in the industry’s enthusiasm for affordability checks, and ii. the implications for groups of customers who may already be disadvantaged and hyper-surveilled. I raise these concerns in an attempt to identify a way out of an impasse, such that urgent concerns about gambling harm do not translate so readily into regulatory efforts to differentially restrict access to ever-expanding groups of adults considered vulnerable.

A framework for designing Reinforcement Learning agents with Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment in single-player action video games

Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment (DDA) within video games aims to avoid frustration or boredom. This paper provides the first framework for designing a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent with DDA for single-player action video games. The framework includes the definitions of states, actions, and rewards. We propose a 2Q-table system that can provide a better winning/losing ratio and extend the duration of the rounds. We apply the framework to a use case study. We address the challenges that the design and implementation of RL agents with DDA for single-player action video games might present, such as (i) large and/or continuous action–state spaces, (ii) an appropriate definition of the rewards for achieving a correct DDA, (iii) learning from each player online from limited samples and (iv) in an arcade shooter video game. The two evaluations performed (with computer-driven and human players) show that the paper’s goals are met since players face personalized challenges according to their playing skills.

Innovación en los ecosistemas de distribución turística: el papel de los intermediaries y nuevos agentes

Tourism distribution is facing new challenges characterised by accelerating innovation cycles, a shift from traditional to digital business models, and ever-deepening technical know-how, which provide organisations with new opportunities to expand their capabilities and become more competitive. We aim to achieve a comprehensive and updated synthesis of current research approaches to innovation in tourism distribution ecosystems and provide proposals for future studies. This is one of the first thematic reviews to concentrate on how the tourism distribution ecosystem can be understood comprehensively through the application of the 6C framework. The study aims to conduct an in-depth review of 53 selected papers obtained from a specific search criterion employed across widespread repositories of Scopus and Web of Science databases, capturing the period from Jan 2001 to August 2023. In business ecosystems, advancements in information and communications technologies have triggered radical innovations in tourism distribution with the emergence of players with new business models. This affects traditional players who must innovate to remain competitive. An organisational analysis shows that new online players lead product innovation, whereas traditional distributors rely more on process innovation. Organisational innovation has emerged as necessary for both.

MODEL KOMUNIKASI REMAJA PEMAIN GAME ONLINE FREE FIRE (STUDI KASUS PADA REMAJA DI RT02 KELURAHAN MANULAI 2 KOTA KUPANG)

The process of adolescent communication in the free fire online game is a two-way communication process carried out by adolescents with their friends and also random in the game, the purpose of this research is to understand the communication process carried out by adolescent free fire online game players to form communication models which describes the relationship between the communication components of the communication process carried out by adolescents when playing the free fire online game. The theory used in this study is the theory of Computer Mediated Communication (CMC). This research is a qualitative research with a qualitative descriptive method. The object of this research is teenagers playing free fire online games at RT 02 Manulai 2 Village, Kupang City. There are three data collection techniques used in this study, namely through direct interview observation and documentation of young online free fire game players. The result of this study is to find a communication model formed from the communication process of free fire online game players, namely the linear communication model and the Schramm interactional communication model. In the Liear Communication Model the communication process only takes place in one direction where there is no feedback in the Linear Communication Model while the Schramm interactional model is a two-way communication process where there is both direct feedback and delayed feedback in the communication process carried out by teenage game players online free fire.

In search of the relationship between predisposition to addictions and impulsivity in online players from the resentment perspective

Over the past few years, there has been a great development of audiovisual electronic media. It brings great opportunities in many scientific fields but is also subject to many judgments of criticism from opponents. Therefore, in view of the enormity of the changes and expansion of the culture, many circles wonder and analyze what changes occur among adults under the influence of these means and especially online games. The author, based on his own research, presents a new psychological approach between the predisposition to addictions and impulsivity in the light of ressentiment. Seventy-two people participated in the study, and the IVE Impulsivity Questionnaire, UPPS-P Impulsive Behavior Scale and Internet Gaming Disorder Test (IGD-20 Test) and Ressentiment Questionnaire were used. The results of the study showed that there is a link between impulsivity and addiction propensity, but it is determined by the degree of impulsivity in a person. On the other hand, ressentiment in the emotion regulatory system appeared as a negative feeling resulting from a sense of unfulfillment in an online game causing a mental state that extends over time and is underpinned by various types of emotionally tinged reactions. What can cause these feelings to turn into revenge without concrete actions-inducing hatred, but not leading to infliction of harm-and causing jealousy, which will not be confirmed by acts of jealousy. In light of this research, the negative emotion that is generated during online game interaction relates to personal experiences and can affect the emotional state and components of environmental attitudes.

Problematic Gaming at a Crossroad: Exploring the Interplay Between Internet Gaming Disorder, Toxic Attitudes, and Empathy in Digital Entertainment

It is becoming more common to use Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD) to measure problematic gaming in online environments. However, there is limited data examining the role of empathy and toxicity in IGD. In addition, little attention has been given to the role of the social element of online gaming communities and its influence on these factors. This article aims to address this gap by presenting the results of a cross-sectional study involving 567 online players who completed an online survey about their gaming habits. More specifically, participants were recruited from four different game communities and asked to complete the Internet Gaming Disorder Scale—Short Form, a toxicity-related questionnaire, and the Interpersonal Reactivity Index. Comparisons between the four game communities were also explored. Findings pointed at significant associations between toxicity, empathy, game community, and IGD, suggesting additional research opportunities and counter strategies for preventing negative experiences with online gaming.

Revealing Social Group Long-Term Survival for Smart Cities Based on Behavior Graph Structures Using Virtual Game

With the transformation of human life into virtual worlds based on the reality, current researches of smart cities and sustainability should integrate the factors of virtual social behaviors. Virtual games are an ideal domain and tools for exploring social science. Therefore, our work innovatively using Nova Empire as a case study to reveal the social group long-term survival via complexity analysis of behavior graph structural properties for building smart cities. Specifically, behavioral data of 101,424 players and 5,324 alliances from September 2021 to February 2022 are used. Our observations show that the phenomenon of “gap of wealth” in real society also exists in the virtual game. Meanwhile, the player online time is significantly positive related to alliance survival time, which is the foundation of our work. Then, correlation and regression analysis are performed to understand the significance of different structural properties on alliance survival time. Our original findings demonstrate that larger alliance, more sub-groups, balanced player distribution and frequent behavioral interactions will promote long-term survival of the alliance. Small sub-group and a relaxed social environment can improve player online time. Furthermore, we transfer the conclusions from virtual game to real society based on the mapping principle. Finally, new virtual tools and solutions for policymakers to improve smart cities and sustainable society ecosystem, and operation strategies for game designers to improve players retention rate are proposed.

US-based SVoD services and the restructuring of the audio-visual production market: The French case

This article studies the impact of the rise of new content consumption methods on French audio-visual production. To this end, we conducted 26 semi-structured interviews with producers, investigating their relationship with new online players, as well as their work habits. This study makes it possible to distinguish between two market segments: the first is organized around US-based subscription video on demand platforms (Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney+) and the second around players from the competitive fringe, who are smaller but whose demand still fuels the French audio-visual sector.

REGULATION OF ONLINE PLATFORMS, INTERMEDIARIES, AND MARKETS IN THE EUROPEAN UNION AND CHINA

The EU and the PRC have recently introduced new regulatory standards governing specific online platforms, intermediaries, and markets. As an agenda to enhance digital governance, regulatory initiatives have been made on various frontiers governing digital services and digital markets to enhance both domestic and cross-border online transactions. These developments arguably enhance the relevance of the evolving European and Chinese regulatory frameworks as a stimulating subject for comparative law studies. The present paper examines the evolving key regulatory standards governing digital services and markets in Europe and the PRC and assesses their effectiveness in enhancing digital governance. The paper examines the specific regulations governing online platforms, intermediaries, and digital markets to determine the interests, obligations, and liabilities of key stakeholders. The paper assesses the effectiveness of newly introduced market regulatory standards to protect businesses and end users from the dominance of key online players. The paper argues the need for other key jurisdictions, including China, to rejuvenate their domestic digital regulatory framework with reference to the evolving European regulatory standards. The paper concludes with an analysis based on the key findings of the paper and points out the referential utility of the European experience for prospective legal harmonization needs.

Friend-connecting affordances: playing online games to contact friends

PurposeOnline games are popular applications of Internet technology, with over 2.8 billion users worldwide. Many players engage in team gameplay, indicating that online games are suitable media through which players connect with their friends. However, past studies have not examined the ability of games to assist players in connecting with their friends, indicating a gap. To fill this gap, the authors propose a new concept, the friend-connecting affordance, which is the ability of an online game to enable players to contact friends within the game.Design/methodology/approachThe authors built a model to explain how games' friend-connecting affordances influence game loyalty. The authors gathered responses from 1,347 online players and used structural equation modeling to test the model.FindingsThe authors found that friend-connecting affordances and team participation influence game loyalty. Gaming intensity and gaming history can moderate the impact of friend-connecting affordances.Originality/valueThis new affordance can be realized through various game elements, offering unique and actionable insights to game makers. The authors also compared the friend-connecting affordances among a number of popular online games, providing insights specific to each game and increasing the practical value of the findings.

Challenges and Solutions of the Application of Data-Driven Technology in Network 3D Game Design

The development of online games is in full swing in recent years, and it is developing in the direction of 3D, exquisite, and has attained significant popularity. However, there are many challenges faced while designing 3D games that are targeted to specific user groups and can run stably. Data-driven technology can collect game preferences and identify common technical defects and other issues in game design for effective completion of frameworks. To solve the problem and difficulty of obtaining the data for 3D games and the possibility of flaws in the framework design, this paper adopts data-driven technology to descriptively analyze the obtained data through website log files, web beacons, and JS page tags and constructs a network after experimenting with the mathematical model of 3D modeling for gaming. For this purpose, a 3D game framework was successfully designed. After testing the data of the server for three cases while there are 4000, 8000, and 12000 players online at a given time, where each of which ran for 3 consecutive days, and it was concluded that the average CPU occupancy rate of these three cases was below 50%, especially in the range of about 30% for the majority of these players. Moreover, it can stably support about 10000 simultaneous online players for a relatively long period of time. For game servers and character servers, the results are excellent and have the potential to be adopted in future for 3D gaming industry.

Back to the Control Room: Managing Artistic Work

Control rooms have long been a key domain of investigation in HCI and CSCW as sites for understanding distributed work and fragmented settings, as well as the role and design of digital technologies in that work. Although research has tended to focus mainly on ‘command and control’ configurations, such as rail transport, ambulance dispatch, air traffic and CCTV rooms, centres of coordination shaped by artistic and performative concerns have much to contribute. Our study examines how a professional team of artists and volunteers stage manage and direct the performance of a mixed reality game from a central control room, with remote runners performing live video streaming from the streets nearby to online players. We focus on the work undertaken by team members to bring this about, exploring three key elements that enable it. First, we detail how team members oriented to the work as an artistic performance produced for an audience, how they produced compelling, varied content for online players, and how the quality of the work was ongoingly assessed. Second, we unpack the organisational hierarchy in the control room’s division of labour, and how this was designed to manage the challenges of restricted informational visibility there. Third, we explore the interactional accomplishment of the performance by looking at the role of radio announcements from the event’s director to orchestrate how the performance developed over time. Announcements were used to resolve trouble and provide instructions for avoiding future performative problems; but more centrally, to give artistic direction to runners in order to shape the performance itself. To close we discuss how this study of a performance impacts CSCW’s understandings of control room work, how the problem of ‘diffuse’ tasks like artistic work is co-ordinated, and how orientations towards quality as an artistic concern is manifest in / as control room practices. We also reflect on hierarchical and horizontal control room arrangements, and the role of video as both collaborative resource and product.Graphical abstract

‘Imagine talking about politics in a kids’ game’: Making sense of #BLM in Nintendo’s Splatoon 2

On Twitter and other established digital social networks, references to the Black Lives Matter movement almost doubled after George Floyd’s murder (see Giorgi et al., 2020, ‘Twitter corpus of the #blacklivesmatter movement and counter protests: 2013 to 2020’), alongside a similar rise in references to the counter-protest terms ‘All Lives Matter’ and ‘Blue Lives Matter’. Around the same time, the authors found online players of Splatoon 2 (Nintendo) expressing Black Lives Matter sentiments when using in-game design tools. These messages quickly disappeared in the game space to be replaced by longer-lived political content relating to LGBTQ+ activist sentiments and other non-political messaging. This visual essay provides documentation of memes captured by one of the authors between 6 and 14 March 2020 and discussion of their significance as data. The authors conclude that, despite being digital artefacts, Splatoon posts may be better understood using Cramer’s ‘What Is “Post-digital”’ (2014) reading with different characteristics from normal digital activism artefacts. The visual form attempts to underline the visual character of these post-digital artefacts, which contain no machine-readable textual content or metadata. Nevertheless, they represent a form of community discourse that is little examined and that the authors suggest should be documented and researched despite its awkward data structure.

Investigating how internet gaming disorder and bodily dissociation experiences vary by game genres.

This study aims to investigate whether Internet gaming disorder (IGD) and bodily dissociation vary depending on the most frequently used game genre. Seven hundred and fifteen highly engaged online players (71.5% men; mean age 29.75 ± 7.48years) recruited in player communities completed a survey that assessed game genre, bodily dissociative experiences and IGD. The results showed significantlly higher levels of IGD among multiplayer online battle arenas (MOBA) and massively multiplayer online role-playing games players relative to first-person shooters (FPS) game players, whilst MOBA players report significantly higher bodily dissociative experiences compared to MORPG and FPS. However, we found that differences on body dissociation disappear at high levels of IGD, with problematic players showing high body disconnection, regardless of the type of game most frequently used. This suggests that high engagement in online games has the potential to disconnect a player from his body, regardless of the type of game used.

MULTIPLE CRITERIA APPROACH APPLIED TO DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION IN FASHION STORES: THE CASE OF PHYSICAL RETAILERS IN SPAIN

In a very open competitive context where pure online players are consistently gaining market share, the use of digital devices is a steady trend which is penetrating physical retail stores as a tool for retailers to improve customer experience and increase engagement. This need has increased with the COVID-19 pandemic as electronic devices in physical stores reduce the contact between people providing a greater sense of health safety, hence improving the customer experience. This work develops a multiple-criteria decision-making model for retailers who want to digitize their physical stores, providing a systematic approach to manage investment priorities in the organization. Important decisions should involve all different areas of the organization: Finance, Clients, Internal Processes and Learning & Growth departments. This strategic decision can be made hierarchically to obtain consistent decisions, also the use of the Order Weighted Average operator allows for alternative scenarios to be presented and agreed among the different areas of the business. The authors develop a use case for a Spanish fashion retailer. In the most widely agreed scenario the preferred devices were more technologically complex and expensive, while in the scenarios where the head of Finance is more predominant, cheaper and simpler devices were selected.

Ghosts of the Titanomachy: Structure, Commitment, Economics, and Risk as Causal Mechanisms in an Online Battle

Background In January 2014 over seven thousand EVE Online players engaged in a 21-h battle that came to be known as the Battle of B-R5RB, in which an estimated $330,000 of virtual property was destroyed, calculated in real U.S. dollars as measured by time. Aim To discern why players were willing to commit time and resources to fight in a large-scale virtual battle, which in turn informs how players perceive risk and develop large-scale emergent political structures. Method Drawing from multiple case history and journalism reports on the Battle of B-R5RB, the author combines the inductive ideographic case study approach and process tracing method to uncover key causal mechanisms. Results The author inductively theorizes that the Battle of B-R5RB resulted from the Null-Sec’s anarchic structure, player commitment to their respective Corporations, measurable economic value, and risk associated with permanent loss. These mechanisms closely align with the offensive realism and anarchy. Discussion and conclusion The Battle of B-R5B is a relevant example of real-world emergent political behavior developing in a virtual world setting. Analysis of this single battle suggests that players are willing to project actual value onto virtual assets. Perception of value is magnified in virtual worlds lacking overt governance or security structures. Players must form groups to mitigate risk, and the greater the risk, the greater the commitment to the group.

A network analysis of internet gaming disorder symptoms

We examined the symptoms network of Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD). We recruited 793 heavy game players online and 184 of them were diagnosed with IGD. We measured IGD via the 27-item IGD Scale and analyzed symptoms to examine how they interacted with each other to drive the addictive behaviors. Furthermore, we added motives and psychological well-being variables into the network. We found that the most central symptoms were conflict, withdrawal, and tolerance. Overall, two distinct groups of symptoms were discovered: one group for addictive symptoms and the other for psychological consequences.