Upcoming Game Research Articles

The Use of Momentum-Inspired Features in Pre-Game Prediction Models for the Sport of Ice Hockey

Abstract We make a unique contribution to momentum research by proposing a way to quantify momentum with performance indicators (i.e., features). We argue that due to measurable randomness in the NHL, sequential outcomes’ dependence or independence may not be the best way to approach momentum. Instead, we quantify momentum using a small sample of a team’s recent games and a linear line of best-fit to determine the trend of a team’s performances before an upcoming game. We show that with the use of SVM and logistic regression these momentum- based features have more predictive power than traditional frequency-based features in a pre-game prediction model which only uses each team’s three most recent games to assess team quality. While a random forest favors the use of both feature sets combined. The predictive power of these momentum-based features suggests that momentum is a real phenomenon in the NHL and may have more effect on the outcome of games than suggested by previous research. In addition, we believe that how our momentum-based features were designed and compared to frequency-based features could form a framework for comparing the short-term effects of momentum on any individual sport or team.

Human and machine collaboration for painting game assets with deep learning

Modern games are among the most intricate pieces of software ever devised. However, artists have little to no means of porting their creative work from title to title as the aesthetics change and older models grow to look obsolete. Zooming into the topic of assisted game art generation, the literature is notably scarce, although advances towards automated asset generation are of paramount interest to the field. In this work, we investigate the use of deep learning algorithms to create pixel art sprites from line art sketches to produce artwork of sufficient quality to be used within a game product with little to no manual editing by human artists. Such a problem contrasts with well-known tasks studied in the literature, which are based on natural pictures, boast massive datasets, and are much more tolerant to noise. In addition, we conducted a case study of applying current technology to the drawing pipeline of an upcoming game title, attaining useful and positive results that may fast-track the game development, supporting the argument that current image generation state-of-the-art is ready to be used in some real-world tasks.

Concussion killjoys: CTE, violence and the brain’s becoming

CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, is caused by repetitive head trauma and detected by a distinctive stain for a protein called ‘tau’ in autopsied brain tissue. While the number of diagnosed patients is only in the hundreds, the cultural footprint of the disease in North America is huge, both because those diagnosed are often celebrity-athletes and because millions of children, adolescents and young men and women play collision sports like football and hockey. We argue that the widespread attention to CTE provides a useful wedge to crack open another, heretofore neglected public health concern: repetitive acts of violence in and around hypermasculine sports create subjects whose brains—and characters—are materially shaped by that violence. Brains change materially when delivering blows as well as receiving them, when participating in degrading hazing rituals as victim or assailant, when belittled or assaulted by a coach, when approaching an upcoming game riddled with fear. We adopt a biosocial model of the brain’s becoming to intervene in a linear discourse around CTE that medicalizes and oversimplifies violence, a story that prematurely dissects one slice of the problem from a noxious whole.

Going home again?

Since its release in 2004, World of Warcraft (WoW) has regularly changed the game and the play experience in significant ways. Recently, Blizzard, the developer of WoW, announced the upcoming game WoW Classic: “an authentic, Blizzard-quality classic experience”. Drawing on interviews with adult WoW fans and gamers, the article examines the game as an ‘affective space’ (Hills, 2002) of fandom that cannot be separated from the fan narratives and experiences it mediates. A key component in this affective space is the notion of fan nostalgia. The nostalgic relationship between a fan and a favourite text is often imbued with an imagined history, conjoining aff ect and meaning, belief and knowledge, and making nostalgia “both a way of knowing worlds – and a discourse of knowledge” (Radstone, 2010, p. 188). The article traces diff erent and often contradictory modes of fan nostalgia connected to WoW, such as tactile feelings of technostalgia (Bolin, 2015), deeply personal and anchoring types of nostalgia in the form of totemic objects (Proctor, 2017), manifested through fan practices of collecting digital items and souvenirs (Geraghty, 2014), and interwoven with desirable and appropriate self-identity and self-narrative (Williams, 2014). In reading these modes of nostalgia, the article argues that they ultimately function as a sort of ‘homecoming’, as the gamers’ many different experiences of the game and media texts surrounding the game all come together as complex attempts of memory work, creating the possibility of establishing a home within their fandom.

Predicting World Cup results: Do goals seem more likely when they pay off?

Bar-Hillel and Budescu (1995) failed to find a desirability bias in probability estimation. The World Cup soccer tournament provided an opportunity to revisit the phenomenon in a context in which desirability biases are notoriously rampant. Participants estimated the probabilities of various teams' winning their upcoming games. They were promised money if one team-randomly designated by the experimenter-won its upcoming game. Participants assigned a higher probability to a victory by their target team than did other participants, whose promised monetary reward was contingent on the victory of its opponent. Prima facie, this seems to be a desirability bias. However, in a follow-up study that made one team salient, without promising monetary rewards, participants also judged their target team to be more likely to win. On grounds of parsimony, we conclude that what appears to be a desirability bias may just be a salience/marking effect, and-although optimism is a robust and ubiquitous human phenomenon-that wishful thinking still remains elusive.

Social Prediction and the “Allegiance Bias”

Abstract Two studies examined the allegiance bias - the rendering of biased predictions by individuals who are psychologically invested in a desired outcome. In Study 1, fans of either Notre Dame or University of Miami college football read information about an upcoming game between the two teams and then explained a hypothetical victory either by Notre Dame or Miami. Although explaining a hypothetical victory biased the judgments of controls (i.e., fans of neither team) in the direction of the team explained, the judgments of Notre Dame and Miami fans favored their team in every explanation condition. In addition, fans exhibited biased recall for facts favoring their own teams and this biased recall predicted fans' judgments regarding the upcoming game. Study 2 attempted to specify a debiasing technique that might attenuate the allegiance bias. Indiana University basketball fans described what they thought might happen in an upcoming game between Indiana and the University of Michigan while anticipating ...

Predicting Affective Responses to Unexpected Outcomes

In decisions under uncertainty, decision makers confront two uncertainties: the uncertain linkage between actions and outcomes and the uncertain linkage between these outcomes and his or her affective responses to them. The two studies reported here examine affective responses to expected and unexpected outcomes in various settings. In Study 1, a scenario-based laboratory experiment (N = 149), we examined subjects' predicted responses to a range of outcomes, as a function of how surprising the outcome was. Study 2, a field study (N = 127), involved the expectations of bowlers about their scores in an upcoming game and about their responses to various outcomes at, above, and below expectations. We also measured actual affective reactions after the bowlers had completed their games. Findings suggest that subjects both expect and experience a loss-averse, expectation-based value function broadly of the Prospect Theory type. They also anticipate, and experience, an amplifying effect of outcome surprise, though they underestimate its size. We argue that such underestimation, together with overtight prediction ranges, may expose subjects to much larger affective variation with outcome variability than they anticipate.

Motivated person perception: Constructing justifications for desired beliefs

We propose that people motivated to hold particular beliefs about another person attempt to construct justifications for these desired beliefs. In so doing, they construct general beliefs from which the desired ones may be inferred. In Study 1 subjects motivated to see a target as high or low in ability (because he was to be their partner or opponent in an upcoming game) differed as expected in their beliefs about the target and also differed in their general beliefs about the ability of the target's peers and about the causal determinants of performance at a task in which the target had been observed. In Study 2 subjects motivated to see a member of a stigmatized group, schizophrenics, positively (because they expected to interact with him) expressed more positive stereotypes of that group than less motivated subjects (who expected only to observe such an interaction). In both studies the differing general beliefs may have been constructed so as to justify different desired beliefs about the targets.

The role of prior knowledge in explaining hypothetical events

Having subjects explain a hypothetical future event biases their subjective likelihood estimates for that event. However, Sherman, Zehner, Johnson, and Hirt (1983, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44, 1127–1143) found that the biasing effects of an explanation task were reduced when subjects formed an initial impression based on the information (prior to the explanation task). Nonetheless, there are no doubt many factors that may influence subjects' ability to form strong initial impressions. The present studies address two of these factors. Experiment 1 used both subjects who were knowledgeable and unknowledgeable (naive) about a stimulus domain (football). Experiment 2 used only knowledgeable subjects, but gave these subjects information about unfamiliar teams and players. Subjects first read information about teams in an upcoming game and were then asked to explain a hypothetical victory by one team. They then made judgments about the actual future game and recalled the information. Only knowledgeable subjects given an initial impression set and given information that was easily integrated with past knowledge were able to resist the explanation bias. All other subjects demonstrated judgments that were strongly biased in the direction of the outcome explained. An examination of the relation between judgment and recall implied that knowledgeable and naive individuals differed in the ways they made judgments.