CiteULike: jirlong's game

From Tree House to Barracks: The Social Life of Guilds in World of Warcraft

Dmitri Williams — 2007-09-24T16:05:22-00:00

Games and Culture, Vol. 1, No. 4. (October 2006), pp. 338-361.

Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs

Richard Bartle — 2007-09-25T21:37:22-00:00

Journal of MUD Research, Vol. 1, No. 1. (1996)

The Labor of Fun: How Video Games Blur the Boundaries of Work and Play

Nick Yee — 2007-09-30T12:25:50-00:00

Games and Culture, Vol. 1, No. 1. (January 2006), pp. 68-71.

Play Between Worlds : Exploring Online Game Culture

TL Taylor — 2006-03-22T10:01:04-00:00

(10 March 2006)

In Play Between Worlds, T. L. Taylor examines multiplayer gaming life as it is lived on the borders, in the gaps--as players slip in and out of complex social networks that cross online and offline space. Taylor questions the common assumption that playing computer games is an isolating and alienating activity indulged in by solitary teenage boys. Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), in which thousands of players participate in a virtual game world in real time, are in fact actively designed for sociability. Games like the popular Everquest, she argues, are fundamentally social spaces. Taylor's detailed look at Everquest offers a snapshot of multiplayer culture. Drawing on her own experience as an Everquest player (as a female Gnome Necromancer)--including her attendance at an Everquest Fan Faire, with its blurring of online-and offline life--and extensive research, Taylor not only shows us something about games but raises broader cultural issues. She considers "power gamers," who play in ways that seem closer to work, and examines our underlying notions of what constitutes play--and why play sometimes feels like work and may even be painful, repetitive, and boring. She looks at the women who play Everquest and finds they don't fit the narrow stereotype of women gamers, which may cast into doubt our standardized and preconceived ideas of femininity. And she explores the questions of who owns game space--what happens when emergent player culture confronts the major corporation behind the game.

From Tree House to Barracks: The Social Life of Guilds in World of Warcraft

Dmitri Williams — 2007-08-03T00:45:42-00:00

Games and Culture, Vol. 1, No. 4. (1 October 2006), pp. 338-361.

A representative sample of players of a popular massively multiplayer online game (World of Warcraft) was interviewed to map out the social dynamics of guilds. An initial survey and network mapping of players and guilds helped form a baseline. Next, the resulting interview transcripts were reviewed to explore player behaviors, attitudes, and opinions; the meanings they make; the social capital they derive; and the networks they form and to develop a typology of players and guilds. In keeping with current Internet research findings, players were found to use the game to extend real-life relationships, meet new people, form relationships of varying strength, and also use others merely as a backdrop. The key moderator of these outcomes appears to be the game's mechanic, which encourages some kinds of interactions while discouraging others. The findings are discussed with respect to the growing role of code in shaping social interactions. 10.1177/1555412006292616

Everyday-World Plan Use

Mark Fasciano — 2008-01-23T12:18:24-00:00

No. TR-96-07. (FebruaryJanuary, 1996)

Classical planning is useful because it generates a partially ordered set of steps to achieve a goal consistent with the planner's world model. Situated activity is useful for agents which responds quickly to changes in the interactive world. Unfortunately, everyday-world activity cannot rely on the costly, brittle plans of a theorem proving, nor can it resort to the stateless decisions of a situated automaton to cope with delayed feedback from the world. The only way for an agent to carry out...

Learning to Win: Case-Based Plan Selection in a Real-Time Strategy Game

Aha — 2008-01-23T12:05:24-00:00

Case-Based Reasoning Research and Development (2005), pp. 5-20.

While several researchers have applied case-based reasoning techniques to games, only Ponsen and Spronck (2004) have addressed the challenging problem of learning to win real-time games. Focusing on Wargus, they report good results for a genetic algorithm that searches in plan space, and for a weighting algorithm ( dynamic scripting) that biases subplan retrieval. However, both approaches assume a static opponent, and were not designed to transfer their learned knowledge to opponents with substantially different strategies. We introduce a plan retrieval algorithm that, by using three key sources of domain knowledge, removes the assumption of a static opponent. Our experiments show that its implementation in the Case-based Tactician (CaT) significantly outperforms the best among a set of genetically evolved plans when tested against random Wargus opponents. CaT communicates with Wargus through TIELT, a testbed for integrating and evaluating decision systems with simulators. This is the first application of TIELT. We describe this application, our lessons learned, and our motivations for future work.