Thousands Of Players Research Articles

Exploitation in College Sports: No Longer Just a “Man's Game”

Previous studies of college athlete compensation have generally focused on the “revenue sports” of football and men's basketball. Hence, wage exploitation is often considered a “man's game.” In the 50 years since Title IX, many women's college sports have reported millions of dollars in revenue, suggesting wage exploitation is possible in college softball. Data on 19,760 athletes from 294 universities from 2012 to 2021, combined with two different sources of athletic revenue reach the same conclusion: wage exploitation exists in college softball. Furthermore, thousands of players generate more revenue in college than the wages they are likely to earn playing professional softball.

The psychological characteristics of football players under the age of 17 in Indonesia

Football is the most popular sport in Indonesia and involves thousands of players and millions of spectators. As the sport continues to grow, it demands an accelerated development of players and adjustments to their needs. However, the Indonesian Football Association (PSSI) has created a curriculum that only focuses on the physical, tactical, and technical aspects, ignoring the psychological aspect. This study aimed to investigate the role of psychology in the development of football players in Indonesia, focusing on the weaknesses of the current curriculum. The study was concentrated on the development and psychological characteristics that soccer players under 17 years of age require to maintain their performance into adulthood. The study used a grounded theory approach and semi-structured open questions in data collection. The sample included youth player-coaches with a minimum of 5 years of experience, as well as football players under the age of 17. These players typically begin practicing football at the age of 6 and continue until they reach 17 years old in Indonesia. The results of this study can be a reference for the PSSI and football coaches in Indonesia to create a comprehensive training program that includes physical, technical, tactical, and psychological aspects, enabling them to develop successful football players in the future.

Baseball’s Most Bizarre Plays: A Roster of the Odd, the Improbable and the Downright Confounding in Major League History by Alan Hirsch

Reviewed by: Baseball’s Most Bizarre Plays: A Roster of the Odd, the Improbable and the Downright Confounding in Major League History by Alan Hirsch Paul Hensler Alan Hirsch. Baseball’s Most Bizarre Plays: A Roster of the Odd, the Improbable and the Downright Confounding in Major League History. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2022. 199 pp. Paperback, $29.95. For well over a century, thousands of baseball games have featured even more thousands of players, and to no one’s surprise, all the action on the field taking place over so many innings provides ample opportunity for strange plays and quirks of circumstance to occur. Alan Hirsch takes a stab at finding the craziest of these as evinced by the title of this slim volume. In the introduction, the author states his methodology for determining his roster of 150 peculiar occurrences, not least of which includes proof in the form of a “newspaper or other eyewitness account of the game that reports this incident” (3). Although mass media has evolved greatly in recent years, thereby affording quick access to current website postings, “well over half of the plays pre-date 2000; roughly one- third predate 1980 and one- fourth predate 1960,” according to Hirsch’s estimation (3). The vignettes of each play are accompanied by commentary intended to be “very much in the spirit of Bill James- style baseball history” (2). Hirsch writes in a breezy, unpretentious style that is as easy as a conversation with your fellow fans at a ball game, and the kitschy subtitles for many of the selections emphasize his lighthearted approach: Play #56 is headed “Know When to Fold ’Em” and features pitcher Kenny Rogers (107); #102, “Insult Added to Injury,” describes the plight of another hurler, Jon Matlack, who takes a batted ball directly to his forehead (56). The book is a trivia buff ’s delight, as Hirsch ferrets out nuggets such as the real- life Ronn Reynolds serving as the catcher for the apocryphal Sidd Finch of Sports Illustrated fame, or Sean Casey of the Tigers being thrown out at first base on a presumed base hit to left field, only to reach base safely, ironically, on an infield hit later in the same game. [End Page 118] The author’s entries are replete with botched rundowns, strange inside-the-park home runs, misadventures caused by broken bats, and other assorted antics that go beyond what normally takes place between the foul lines (or sometimes beyond them) in a garden- variety game. This minutia makes for entertaining reading, but it comes at a steep price. As formatted, many plays and their related remarks comprise roughly one total page, but in his nod to the James style Hirsch far too often uses his commentary to segue and meander into topics and subtopics that have no bearing on the play under discussion. One example will suffice: in relating a sequence of multiple bad throws on one play in a Brewers— Indians contest from 1982— Hirsch rates this as the eighty- eighth most bizarre play in all of major- league history. The author also tells readers about the well- worn nickname of Mike Hargrove as well as Robin Yount’s journey to win the American League MVP award. But wait—there’s more! Readers are informed further about the plight of Yount’s older brother with the Houston Astros. All this bloating is derived from Yount and Hargrove being active participants in the crazy play from that 1982 game. In this instance, the author’s padded comments are nearly three times the length of the description of the play in question and add nothing to put it in a better historical context. Because this protocol follows 150 iterations, an ennui begins to set in when readers find that they are being bludgeoned with so much trivia and attendant diversions. Compounding this quandary in disturbing fashion are gaffes that should have been flagged during editing and simple fact- checking. While the author proudly notes that he presents no errors in the spelling of Jenrry Mejia’s name, there are other miscues aplenty, including, but not limited to, Hal “McCrae,” Bobby “Thompson” of the 1951 New York Giants, Wally...

The Baseball 100 by Joe Posnanski

Reviewed by: The Baseball 100 by Joe Posnanski Willie Steele Joe Posnanski. The Baseball 100. New York: Avid Reader Press, 2021. 869 pp. Cloth, $40.00. If there is anything baseball fans love more than the sound of a wood bat hitting a ball or the smell of hot dogs at the ballpark, it’s arguing. Fans will argue over whether a pitch was a ball or a strike. They’ll argue over which stadium is the best in the majors. They’ve been known to argue about which minor league team has the greatest mascot. And they have even argued over which suffered the most before finally winning a recent World Series, the Cubs or the Red Sox. In the introduction to The Baseball 100, commentator George F. Will begins by saying, “Baseball fans are an argumentative tribe” (1). And somewhere, probably in Cleveland, I can hear a fan respond, “No we aren’t!” If you are a reader who is looking for Joe Posnanski’s latest book, The Baseball 100, to solve any arguments, don’t get your hopes up. If you are looking for [End Page 142] a book to start a lot of arguments, more often than not between the reader and the author, you won’t be disappointed. And if you are looking for a book that reminds you why baseball has the greatest collection of characters in sports history, you’ve come to the right place. The book is, as its title indicates, Posnanski’s list of baseball’s top one hundred players. The chapters were originally written as individual articles over a hundred-day stretch when they were published on the Athletic website. Rather than simply relying on advanced statistics, and there are certainly plenty of those to go around, Posnanski incorporates the roles players played in the game’s rich (and often complicated) history, interesting sidebars about their lives, and elements of their lives and abilities that made them stand out from the thousands of players who did not make the list. In his introduction to the collection, the author recounts a story of when former Major League Baseball (MLB) commissioner Bud Selig called him to dispute the rankings that had appeared on the website. Rather than defending his choices, Posnanski readily admits to the reader, “You will have bones to pick, too” (6). He knows you’ll disagree with the list, and he’s okay with it. Unlike nearly every other book, The Baseball 100 is missing a table of contents, making it impossible for readers to jump ahead to the players they are most interested in or to see what players Posnanski has ranked and in what order. But instead of being put off by this tool, this reader enjoyed not knowing who was coming next in the book until he had finished the current chapter. (I will admit, however, that I skipped to the end to see who he’d ranked number one.) Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this book is the variety of players Posnanski chose for his list. The first chapter, or the hundredth best player, is (spoiler alert!) Ichiro Suzuki. And the last chapter, or the number one player to have ever played baseball, is (another alert!) Willie Mays. In between, there are players from MLB and players from the Negro Leagues, players from the Deadball Era and the modern era, players who are identifiable by a single name (“Babe”), and others whom you have most likely never heard of. Posnanski’s list is as much a tutorial of baseball’s history as it is a reminder of what makes its most iconic players so memorable. Throughout the book Posnanski gives readers glimpses into those players with whom he became acquainted in his career as a sportswriter, explains the memorable moments associated with many of the players, and debunks some long-standing myths associated with others in the game. The result is a compilation of players that is part biography, part statistical analysis, part mythology, and all baseball. Readers will find themselves appreciating the complexity in each chapter while arguing “Yes, but what about . . .” multiple times. [End Page 143] Some of the lengthier chapters are...

Machine Learning Classifications of Player Behavior

Computer games often incorporate asymmetric game characters and classes, with the objective of providing a varied experience. Characters and classes are given different attributes, skills, and bonuses allowing players to employ different techniques and strategies. However, little research has been done on analyzing players’ behavior to determine if differences in characters and classes affect player behavior. In the field of game user research (GUR), the most common method of analysis is qualitative in nature. Previous quantitative work in the field focuses on drawing distinctions between the players themselves, but not distinctions about behavior caused by a game class independent of the player. The exploration of game class attributes and their effectiveness in directing player behavior is vitally important information for developers. Many games are regularly “rebalanced”, which is the practice of adjusting the capabilities and attributes of different classes to achieve a desired impact on gameplay, whether it be increased fairness or a more diverse gameplay experience. We strive to address the question of whether the varied attributes assigned to different gameplay classes do in fact elicit different in-game behavior depending on the class being used. Conclusions in this realm are often anecdotal or qualitative, with developers relying on methods like playtesting, heuristic evaluation, and think-aloud to guide their decisions concerning game updates and rebalancing. Even when analytics are used to inform rebalancing, it is typically limited to data visualization techniques to gain a better general understanding of gameplay. In this paper, we use quantitative methods over a sample of gameplay data to determine if the varied attributes that developers assign to different classes truly result in measurable and persistent behavioral differences. If we can accurately and reliably predict the gameplay class that a player is piloting based solely on their in-game behavior, then we know that the varied attributes assigned to the different classes do in fact have an impact on how players behave. The free-to-play World World II naval combat game World of Warships serves as the basis for this research. World of Warships is a massively multiplayer online game wherein each player controls a single ship, with each battle consisting of 12 ships on one team facing 12 ships of an opposing team. There are a variety of maps and gameplay objectives, but battles are largely focused on eliminating all enemy ships. World of Warship has four classes of ships: Destroyers, Cruisers, Battleships, and Aircraft Carriers. Each of these classes has significantly different capabilities in speed, armaments, armor, and more. Our hypothesis is that different classes of ships will encourage players to use different techniques and strategies and that we can identify the class of ship based solely on the player’s behavior. We use supervised machine learning techniques to automate analysis of player behavior and detect the ship class that the player is piloting. Our work will help with rebalancing the game during updates, providing information about how players change their behavior depending on the attributes assigned to each gameplay class. We employ a variety of machine learning and statistical analysis methods, using gameplay data from hundreds of online battles and thousands of players. This data serves as a quantification of in-game player behavior, reflecting the strategies and tactics that each player exhibited. A random forest model proved to be the most effective in classifying ship class based on player behavior, resulting in a training accuracy of 97% and a testing accuracy of 83%. The next section provides a review of current work in automated behavior analysis. We follow our review of previous work with a detailed discussion of our approach and results. Lastly, we provide a brief conclusion and proposal for future work that will build on the results.

Online multiplayer games as virtual laboratories for collecting data on social-ecological decision making.

Article impact statement: Online games can improve the collection of data on human decision-making in situations relevant to conservation and stakeholder trade-offs. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Investigating the Relation Between Playing Style and National Culture

In this study we examine playing styles in four popular Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), namely Battlefield 4, Counter-Strike, Dota 2, and Destiny. We investigate to what extent national culture influences these playing styles, and whether players from countries with similar cultures exhibit similar playing styles as well. We gathered playing style information from hundreds of thousands of players of these games, and applied correlation and clustering algorithms to relate playing styles to nationalities and to Hofstede cultural dimensions. We found that playing styles are influenced by nationality and cultural dimensions, and that there are clear similarities between the playing styles of similar cultures. In particular, the Hofstede dimension “Individualism” explained most of the variance in playing styles between national cultures for the games that we examined.

Villains and Vixens: The Representation of Female Vampires in Videogames

Vampires populate our culture and have become a recurrent presence in fiction and the media. In all cases the inclusion of the vampire has given voice to “socio-culture issues faced in particular times and places; issues that may otherwise remain repressed” (Dillon and Lundberg 2017, 47). This socio-cultural subtext is complicated when the vampire is female, for she is now doubly othered by her gender. Her monstrosity is seen as twofold: as a vampire and as a transgressive woman. While many studies address female vampires in popular culture, their portrayal in videogames has been recurrently overlooked. Games potentially help shape gender attitudes in thousands of players; therefore, it is particularly relevant to examine the varied representations of these monstrous or othered female figures and to understand how they adhere to or challenge misogynistic readings of women and their bodies. In light of this, and interpreting videogames as a narrative medium, this article provides an analysis of significant vampiric videogames and discusses the female vampire in relation to violence against women and postfeminist agendas, following a narrative rather than ludology approach.

Online virtual worlds as anthropological field sites: Ethnographic methods training via collaborative research of Internet gaming cultures

Since 2008, at Colorado State University, I have been collaboratively researching virtual worlds with my students in experimental methods seminars. My “ethnographic research and teaching laboratory” (ERTL), ambitious in scope, conducts original and even cutting edge research, while teaching students field methods in the process. The research and teaching unfold primarily in Internet‐based games—such as World of Warcraft and Guild Wars 2—persistent online networked social spaces of hundreds and even thousands of players. As a teaching tool, online virtual worlds provide a convenient way to get students quickly into the “field,” with online games being for some students (based on their play experience or lack of it) akin to foreign cultures. In this article, I discuss strengths and also challenges of ERTL, illustrating in the process how my lab's linked research and teaching model illuminates one way forward for empirically minded anthropologists hoping to move beyond the lone ethnographer. [online gaming cultures, ethnographic laboratory, mixed methods]

Wykorzystanie drzew trójmianowych i teorii cyklu życia produktu do wyceny piłkarzy

Nowadays, football is not just only an amateur sport, but also a big and a very interesting branch of industry for investors and gamblers. Football clubs start to act like an ordinary company on the market. One of the most important assets in a club’s balance are footballers’ performance rights. Every year thousands of players are the subject of football club transfers (in 2013 there were over 12.000 of such transfers with a total value of over USD 37 billion). It means that the monitoring of a footballer’s value could protect a club before the risk of a sudden disadvantageous change. This article indicates the possibilities of using quantitative methods in players’ performance rights value monitoring. Authors have raised the hypothesis that joins methods of the trinomial tree and the product life cycle that could give the managers of clubs more powerful tools in managing a football club company. The trinomial tree is usually used to value the option price giving three paths of price movement. In this approach, the method was used to determine the future hypothetical value of footballers’ performance rights. Using the product life cycle we could observe and analyse the moment in the life cycle of a football player. In this part of the research, non-linear models were used to approximate the best-fitting function of the market value of a player. Such information indicates the direction of movement on the trinomial tree. In this article, we use the historical data of the market values of chosen football players from the web site http://transfermarkt.de. To make a proper analysis, we chose three kinds of players: in the phase of growth, in the phase of stabilization and the phase of dropping down in value. Such an assumption causes the necessity of choosing players with adequate features, for example: age, skills and the team played for. Therefore, the length of the time series depends on the years and the performances of the footballer. The opportunities and threats of such an attempt are shown in this article.

Assessing the economic effects of server launches in free-to-play MMO games

In MMO (massively multi-player online) games, the interaction among thousands of players can produce both positive and negative network effects. It is therefore crucial for a company managing MMO games to establish how the entire user base should be distributed across different game instances (‘servers’) in order to optimize the players’ game experience and, ultimately, the company’s revenues. While splitting the user base onto different game servers is a common measure in the industry, there is a conspicuous lack of clear guidelines as to when launching new game servers would be advisable. Our work notably fills this gap: for a popular MMO real-time strategy game, our counterfactual simulation shows that a division of the user base across different game servers can lead to additional revenues if implemented at the right time. For the game in focus, our results indicate that launching multiple new game servers would be beneficial in terms of revenue when the game was new, and additional servers every 90–120 days when it was in decline.

기본 사본을 갖는 P2P 멀티플레이어 게임 구조의 수준별 일관성 제어 기법

A Multiplayer Online Game(MOG) is a game capable of supporting hundreds or thousands of players and is mostly played using the Internet. P2P(peer-to-peer) architectures for MOGs can potentially achieve high scalability, low cost, and good performance. The basic idea of many P2P-based games is to distribute the game state among peers and along with it processing, network, and storage tasks. In a primary-copy based replication scheme where any update to the object has to be first performed on the primary copy, this means distributing primary copies of objects among peers. Most multiplayer games use a primary-copy model in order to provide strong consistency control over an object. Games consist of various types of actions that have different levels of sensitivity and can be categorized according to their consistency requirements. With the appropriate consistency level of each action type within a game, this paper allows developers to choose the right trade-off between performance and consistency. The performance for P2P game architecture with the primary-copy model is evaluated through simulation experiments and analysis.

Emitexts and Paratexts

In EVE Online, powerful alliances of thousands of players wage long war campaigns over in-game sovereignty, wealth, power, and status. The larger of these wars involve—two to three battles a day across multiple time zones demanding thousands of players and considerable in-game wealth. As with real wars, the morale of combatants plays a crucial role in the success of a campaign. In this article, I discuss the propaganda produced as a component of these wars and the crucial role that it plays in EVE’s virtual warfare. Leveraging broader Internet memes; “nerd” tropes; in-jokes; game history; and racial, cultural, and sexist stereotypes, these evocative images serve to bolster support and demoralize opponents. I argue that propaganda can be conceptualized as a form of paratext that emerges from within the game as part of play, rather than a peripheral industry that surrounds it. Consequently, I propose the term “emitext” to define this persuasive media.

Transforming Cornish and Devon Wrestling (Britain) and Gouren (Brittany – France) Through Sportification

This article looks at an entity of two regions with significant cultural similarities: they are neighbouring peninsulas, had a common Celtic language and have had many exchanges over the centuries. Cornish and Devon wrestling was one of the traditional sporting games descended from medieval martial activities. Gouren, or Breton wrestling, was its equivalent in Brittany. However, from the beginning of the nineteenth century until the 1880s, Cornish wrestling has known a fantastic development, accompanying the economic development and the standardisation of the games into sports and spectacles in Great Britain. The game was very popular in Cornwall and Devon, the old West Country. At the same time, Gouren vegetated in the mediocrity of the dark Breton nineteenth century. Nowadays, since the mid-twentieth century, Cornish wrestling has almost disappeared, while Gouren has a healthy federation with dozens of clubs and thousands of players in the last decade, with a practice supported by political institutions in Brittany. This paper analyses why this situation reversed, using various tools: an historical survey of the two situations and then analyse from a praxeological point of view in order to define the elements that probably led to this situation.

Dynamic resource provisioning for cloud-based gaming infrastructures

Modern massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) allow hundreds of thousands of players to interact with a large, dynamic virtual world. Implementing a scalable MMOG service is challenging because the system is subject to high workload variability, but nevertheless must always operate under very strict quality of service (QoS) requirements. Traditionally, MMOG services are implemented as large dedicated IT infrastructures with aggressive over-provisioning of resources in order to cope with the worst-case workload scenario. In this article we address the problem of building a large-scale, multitier MMOG service using resources provided by a Cloud computing infrastructure. The Cloud paradigm allows customers to request as many resources as they need using a pay-as-you-go model. We harness this paradigm by proposing a dynamic provisioning algorithm, which can resize the resource pool of a MMOG service to adapt to workload variability and maintain a response time below a given threshold. We use a queuing network performance model to quickly estimate the system response time for different configurations. The performance model is used within a greedy algorithm to compute the minimum number of servers to be allocated on each tier in order to satisfy the system response time constraint. Numerical experiments are used to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Guest editorial for special issue on network and systems support for games

Computer games, now a significant economic sector andsubject to both academic and industry research anddevelopment, continue to grow in popularity at a sub-stantial rate. Multiplayer networked games, which enablehundreds of thousands of players to simultaneously interactwith each other, are now widely used not only just forentertainment, but also for socializing, business, com-merce, scientific experimentation, and many other practicalpurposes. Literally millions of people spend their time andmoney in game worlds such as World of Warcraft, whichnow hosts more than 10 million subscribers [2] with a peakof 500,000 players online at a given time, or EntropiaUniverse, which holds the number 1 and number 2 recordfor the most expensive ‘‘virtual’’ real estate player-to-player sale, each over US$300,000 per virtual property.Recently, Entropia Universe’s Planet Calypso, a largevirtual real estate with more than 950,000 registeredaccounts from 200 countries and with US$428 millionplayer-to-player transactions in 2010, has been bought forUS$6 million by SEE Virtual World [3]. A detailed anal-ysis by In-Stat indicates that the revenue generated fromsales of virtual goods has increased 245 %: from US$2.1billion in 2007 to US$7.3 billion in 2010, and that suchrevenues will rise to US$14 billion by 2014 [4]. These arein addition to the player’s gaming purchases and sub-scription fees, which the NPD Group reports to be US$3.3billion just in the fourth quarter of 2011 and only takinginto account the US, UK, France, and Germany’s non-physical retail sales [5]. In China, another large and rapidlygrowing market, online games generated revenue of 11.27billion Yuan (US$1.77 billion) in the first quarter of 2012alone [1]. As these online games become more popular andsignificant contributors to Internet traffic, research needs tobe devoted to manage and support the emerging massive-ness, its traffic on the network, and the users’ quality ofexperience.In this special issue, we focus on online games andcover scientific, engineering, and research topics in termsof systems and networking support to enable such games.We start off the special issue by two review articles. First is‘‘ From 101 to nnn: A Review and a Classification ofComputer Game Architectures’’, which presents the GameWorld Graph (GWG) framework to analyze and classifycomputer game architectures. GWG can cover all gamesranging from single player to massively multiplayer gamesand allows researchers to reflect on current and futurearchitectural strategies as well as techniques that transcendspecific designs, such as anti-cheat strategies. This isfollowed by ‘‘Player Behavior and Traffic Characterizationfor MMORPGs: A Survey’’, which presents current researchefforts in measuring, characterizing, and modeling Mas-sively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG)from two aspects of application level behavior and networktraffic, focusing on the relationship between those twoaspects and providing measurements of network traffic andplayer behavior with key information regarding variousdatasets.

Computer games take their place in the science classroom

A 2011 National Research Council report found emerging but inconclusive evidence that educational science-based games improve learning.

Les universités francophones

The French-speaking universities agency is a global network serving the higher education and research. This text summarizes its history since its inception in 1961, stopping at different stages of its evolution. From a purely cooperative network for 30 years, the Agency has become an operator of the institutional “Francophonie” located on five continents and with a reputation for innovation. This is illustrated in particular by setting up francophone dig- ital campuses leading a community of thousands of players involved in research on ICT and as developers of new forms of knowledge transmission.

Improving online gaming experience using location awareness and interaction details

Latency is a key element for online game quality and user experience. The client–server approach is a widely used system supporting hundreds of thousands of players on a regular basis. However, if latency among players via an intermediate server is large, timely interaction for them could be difficult. In this article, we present a procedure to share game states for a group of players within their area of interaction so that players can comply with stringent time-constraint and improve their game experience. As players move around in a game space, so do their virtual positions. In addition, the relative orientation of players within an area of interaction is unpredictable which indeed changes quite frequently. Because of these facts, we cannot make a predefined rule set for message exchange among players. So a message exchange plan currently working well might have low efficiency after a while due to dynamic changes. In our procedure, considering the importance of interaction, relative orientation, and virtual and geographical locations, we devise a message exchange plan that works alone in each client machine with the local information available. Significant performance improvements are noticed through simulations, validating our approach.

Evaluating motion: spatial user behaviour in virtual environments

User-behaviour analysis has only recently been adapted to the context of the virtual world domain and remains limited in its application. Behaviour analysis is based on instrumentation data, automated, detailed, quantitative information about user behaviour within the virtual environment (VE) of digital games. A key advantage of the method in comparison with existing user-research methods, such as usability- and playability-testing is that it permits very large sample sizes. Furthermore, games are in the vast majority of cases based on spatial, VEs within which the players operate and through which they experience the games. Therefore, spatial behaviour analyses are useful to game research and design. In this paper, spatial analysis methods are introduced and arguments posed for their use in user-behaviour analysis. Case studies involving data from thousands of players are used to exemplify the application of instrumentation data to the analysis of spatial patterns of user behaviour.