Watching other people play videogames —a.k.a. ‘spectator gaming’— is a widespread practice. Yet, it is considered by some as an inadequate form of engagement with games. In this paper, I show that the strongest objection to spectator gaming relies on the claim that some properties of videogames are better, if not exclusively, accessible to the player. After that, I propose two replies to this challenge. The first is that ‘secondary players’, i.e., individuals who indirectly take part in the game, can (...) access the relevant properties. The second reply is that even paradigmatic spectators may engage in simulated play, and therefore, access these properties as well. (shrink)

In this paper I present an in-class game designed to simulate the dynamics of the state of nature. I first explain the mechanics of the game, and how to administer it in the classroom. Then I address how the game can help introduce students to a number of important topics in political philosophy. In broad terms, the game serves to generate discussion regarding to main questions. (1) How does civil society come about? (2) Is the state of nature and the (...) arrangement which arises from it fair? In so doing I suggest how the game can further student understanding of figures such as Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Marx, and Rawls. (shrink)

The mental rotation ability is an essential spatial reasoning skill in human cognition and has proven to be an essential predictor of mathematical and STEM skills, critical and computational thinking. Despite its importance, little is known about when and how mental rotation processes are activated in games explicitly targeting spatial reasoning tasks. In particular, the relationship between spatial abilities and TetrisTM has been analysed several times in the literature. However, these analyses have shown contrasting results between the effectiveness of Tetris-based (...) training activities to improve mental rotation skills. In this work, we studied whether, and under what conditions, such ability is used in the TetrisTM game by explicitly modelling mental rotation via an ACT-R based cognitive model controlling a virtual agent. The obtained results show meaningful insights into the activation of mental rotation during game dynamics. The study suggests the necessity to adapt game dynamics in order to force the activation of this process and, therefore, can be of inspiration to design learning activities based on TetrisTM or re-design the game itself to improve its educational effectiveness. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the comic potential that originates in the way players of digital games take on the dual position of being at once a played self that is internal to the gameworld and a playing self that perceives this world from the outside. I first describe the comic attitude as it is defined within philosophy: as an attitude of distanced and dispassionate reflection towards an incongruity. I then show how the dual position of players during gameplay not only (...) is characterized by incongruities, such as contradictions between the apparent seriousness and the ultimate triviality of in-game actions, but also allows players to dispassionately reflect on these incongruities. I thus argue that digital gameplay entails the inherent possibility of turning players into both a comic object and a laughing subject. (shrink)

What are the identity and persistence conditions of videogames? This paper surveys the contemporary philosophical literature on this topic. Specifically, I discuss various views which attempt to ground the identity of videogame works in their rules, in their algorithmic structure, in their source code, or in contextual parameters surrounding gameplay. While these proposals all have merits of their own, I argue that none of them are satisfactory. My conclusion is therefore negative: we still lack an adequate theoretical model to (...) account for the identity and persistence conditions of videogames. (shrink)

Historically the focus of moral decision-making in games has been narrow, mostly confined to challenges of moral judgement (deciding right and wrong). In this paper, we look to moral psychology to get a broader view of the skills involved in ethical behaviour and how they may be employed in games. Following the Four Component Model of Rest and colleagues, we identify four “lenses” – perspectives for considering moral gameplay in terms of focus, sensitivity, judgement and action – and describe (...) the design problems raised by each. To conclude, we analyse two recent games, The Walking Dead and Papers, Please, and show how the lenses give us insight into important design differences between them. (shrink)

Historically the focus of moral decision-making in games has been narrow, mostly confined to challenges of moral judgement (deciding right and wrong). In this paper, we look to moral psychology to get a broader view of the skills involved in ethical behaviour and how these skills can be employed in games. Following the Four Component Model of Rest and colleagues, we identify four “lenses” – perspectives for considering moral gameplay in terms of focus, sensitivity, judgement and action – and (...) describe the design problems raised by each. To conclude, we analyse two recent games, The Walking Dead and Papers, Please, and show how the lenses give us insight into important design differences between these games. (shrink)

Accurate statistical analysis of Fortnite gameplay data is essential for improving gaming strategies and performance. In this study, we present a novel approach to analyze Fortnite statistics using machine learning techniques. Our dataset comprises a wide range of gameplay metrics, including eliminations, assists, revives, accuracy, hits, headshots, distance traveled, materials gathered, materials used, damage taken, damage to players, damage to structures, and more. We collected this dataset to gain insights into Fortnite player performance and strategies. The proposed model (...) employs advanced machine learning algorithms and data preprocessing techniques. We aim to identify key performance indicators and influential factors that contribute to Fortnite success. By exploring patterns and relationships within the dataset, our model can provide valuable insights into gameplay optimization. Our research involves feature analysis to determine the most influential factors in predicting Fortnite performance. These factors include eliminations, assists, revives, accuracy, hits, headshots, distance traveled, materials gathered, materials used, damage taken, damage to players, damage to structures, and more. By understanding the impact of these factors, we aim to help Fortnite players enhance their skills and strategies. Through extensive training and validation of our machine learning model, we achieved remarkable results, with an accuracy rate of [Your Accuracy Rate]% and an average error of [Your Average Error]. This research not only provides valuable insights into Fortnite gameplay but also offers a foundation for future research in the field of esports analytics and performance optimization. (shrink)

During my childhood I was fascinated by videogames. One game that stands out in my memory is Pacman. It wasn’t the gameplay that interested me so much as the behavior of the ghosts. As you watch them roam around the maze, you get the feeling that they are intelligent. They seem to be making decisions about how best to catch Pacman. But how free are their decisions? One of the interesting things I noticed was that I could play exactly (...) the same game over and over if I moved Pacman in precisely the same way each time. The ghosts always followed the same behavioral pattern and didn’t deviate from that pattern until I changed my pattern. Experimenting with Pacman in this way revealed to me something about the ghosts’ behavior. True, they make decisions, but their decisions are firmly and predictably determined by the way I move around the maze. (shrink)

What might it mean to read video games as a source for critical theological reflection? This project explores the extent to which FromSoftware’s 2015 classic Bloodborne can be read in just this way for at least two reasons. Firstly, the game makes visible foundational but often taken-for-granted Christian themes, as well as their internal paradoxes. Secondly, Bloodborne’s gameplay is structured through these themes in ways that invite the player to take on a mode of theological reflection which allows them (...) to think creatively beyond the conditions giving rise to these paradoxes. (shrink)

The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in educational gamification marks a significant advancement, transforming traditional learning methods by offering interactive, adaptive, and personalized content. This approach makes historical content more relatable and promotes active learning and exploration. This research presents an innovative approach to heritage education, combining AI and gamification, explicitly targeting the Silk Roads. It represents a significant progression in a series of research, transitioning from basic 2D textual interactions to a 3D environment using photogrammetry, combining historical authenticity and (...) immersive gameplay. It features AI-driven characters developed in Unreal Engine, which provides heritage insights augmented by personalized interactions, highlighting the importance of collaborative tools like interactive quizzes for enriching education and promoting critical thinking and community among learners. In conclusion, this research underlines the transformative impact of AI and gamification in heritage education enhancement, integrating real-time voice conversation and interactive pedagogical methods into immersive 3D environments as a supplementary tool. (shrink)

Players of videogames describe their gameplay in the first person, e.g. “I took cover behind a barricade.” Such descriptions of gameplay experiences are commonplace, but also puzzling because players are actually just pushing buttons, not engaging in the activities described by their first-person reports. According to a view defended by Robson and Meskin (2016), which we call the fictional identity view, this puzzle is solved by claiming that the player is fictionally identical with the player character. Hence, on (...) this view, if the player-character fictionally performs an action then, fictionally, the player performs that action. However, we argue that the fictional identity view does not make sense of players' gameplay experiences and their descriptions of them. We develop an alternative account of the relationship between the player and player-character on which the player-character serves as the player's fictional proxy, and argue that this account makes better sense of the nature of videogames as interactive fictions. (shrink)

This study aimed to identify real-life experts working for a port authority and lay people (students) who played The Sustainable Port, a serious game aiming to simulate the dynamics occurring in a port area. To achieve this goal, we analyzed eye gaze data collected noninvasively using low-grade webcams from 28 participants working for the port authority of the Port of Rotterdam and 66 students. Such data were used for a classification task implemented using a MiniRocket classifier, an algorithm used for (...) time-series classification. The classifier reached an F1 score of 0.75 (SD = 0.07), a PR AUC of 0.73 (SD = 0.14), and an ROC AUC of 0.75 (SD = 0.15) providing evidence that it is possible to identify real-life experts about maritime port management using data that can be obtained from a webcam. We speculate that the gaze direction used to train the MiniRocket may contain relevant information about the cognitive processes and decisions occurring throughout the gameplay. We suggest that the methods here presented not only can be used to detect experts playing simulations, such as serious games, but also to identify experts tackling screen-presented tasks. (shrink)

As artefacts, the worlds of digital games are designed and developed to fulfil certain expressive, functional, and experiential objectives. During play, players infer these purposes and aspirations from various aspects of their engagement with the gameworld. Influenced by their sociocultural backgrounds, sensitivities, gameplay preferences, and familiarity with game conventions, players construct a subjective interpretation of the intentions with which they believe the digital game in question was created. By analogy with the narratological notion of the implied author, we call (...) the figure to which players ascribe these intentions ‘the implied designer’. In this article, we introduce the notion of the implied designer and present an initial account of how appreciators ascribe meaning to interactive, fictional gameworlds and act within them based on what they perceive to be the designer’s intentions. (shrink)

This study aimed to evaluate if eye blinks can be used to discriminate players with different performance in a session of Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) Tetris. To that end, we developed a state-of-the-art method for blink extraction from EAR measures, which is robust enough to be used with data collected by a low-grade webcam such as the ones widely available on laptop computers. Our results show a significant decrease in blink rate per minute (blinks/m) during the first minute of playing (...) Tetris. After having defined 3 groups of proficiency based on in-game performance (Novices, Intermediates, and Experts) we found out that expert players display a significantly lower decrease in blinks/m compared to novices during the first minute of gameplay, which shows that Tetris players' proficiency can be detected by looking at eye blinks/m variations during the early phase of a game session. This difference in blinks/m is observed throughout the entire game session, which supports the general conclusion that proficient Tetris players have a lower decrease in blinks/m, even when playing more difficult levels. Finally, we offer some interpretations of this effect and the relationship that our results may have with the visual cognitive workload experienced during the gameplay. (shrink)

In Games: Agency as Art, Thi Nguyen has given us a deep and compelling picture of agency as much more layered, volatile, environment-dependent and discontinuous than it appears in most philosophical accounts. Games ‘inscribe … forms of agency into artifactual vessels’.1 1 When we play a game, we take up a form of agency, including a set of motivations, values and goals, which has been artificially provided by the game. Our purpose in playing, in the kinds of gameplay that (...) interest Nguyen, is to have the aesthetic experience of first-personally exercising the kind of agency sculpted by the game. As we move in and out of gameplay, we take up and drop values, motives, and goals that are provided to us by the game. Games can expand our autonomy and the richness of life by allowing us to practice different forms of agency, taking on different ends for the aesthetic experience of striving to meet them. While I am on board with these central moves of Nguyen’s book, in this essay I will argue that the situation is substantially messier than Nguyen portrays it as being. Game play, I will claim, is inextricably embedded and entangled in its larger social, material and cultural context. Conversely, I will argue, everyday life is routinely sculpted in ways Nguyen claims are distinctive of games. (shrink)

Inferentialists about scientific representation hold that an apparatus’s representing a target system consists in the apparatus allowing “surrogative inferences” about the target. I argue that a serious problem for inferentialism arises from the fact that many scientific theories and models contain internal inconsistencies. Inferentialism, left unamended, implies that inconsistent scientific models have unlimited representational power, since an inconsistency permits any conclusion to be inferred. I consider a number of ways that inferentialists can respond to this challenge before suggesting my own (...) solution. I develop an analogy to exploitable glitches in a game. Even though inconsistent representational apparatuses may in some sense allow for contradictions to be generated within them, doing so violates the intended function of the apparatus’s parts and hence violates representational “gameplay.”. (shrink)

Researchers interested in player’s experience would assumedly, across disciplines, agree that the goal behind enquiries into player’s experience is to understand the how games’ features end up affecting the player’s experience. Much of the contemporary interdisciplinary research into player’s experience leans toward the empirical-scientific, in the forms psychology, sociology and cognitive science, to name a few. In such approaches, for example demonstrating correlation between physiological symptoms and an in-game event may amount to ‘understanding’. However, the experience of computer game play (...) is a viable topic also for computer game studies within the general tradition of humanities. In such context, the idea of ‘understanding an experience’ invites an approach focusing on the experienced significance of events and objects within computer game play. This focus, in turn, suggests turning to the principles associated with phenomenology, among which is the idea of describing things as they appear, or as they are given, in the experience, from the first-person perspective. From the first-person perspective the challenge lies not in the subjective experience’s inaccessibility but in the inherent personal richness of the experience’s content. Rather than trying to embrace the richness by engaging in direct introspection, it makes sense to focus the search on the conditions of the player’s experience. In this paper, I discuss the idea of “firstperson perspective” in the context of computer game studies. I propose that conditions for player’s experience could be sought from the materiality of the computer game artefact, rather than from the ‘processual’ or ‘ideal game’. I derive the notion of gameplay condition3 from the overlap of the player’s “lusory attitude” and the materiality of the single-player computer game artefact as it appears in the player’s experience. (shrink)

Morality has always been a pressing issue in video game scholarship, but became more contentious after “realistic” violence in games became possible. However, few studies concern themselves with how players experience moral dilemmas in games, choosing instead to focus on the way games affect postplay behavior. In my thesis I discuss the moral choices players encounter in the Metal Gear series of games; then, I analyze and compare the responses of players with and without martial career experiences. My argument is (...) that the moral choices players encounter during gameplay affect them differently, particularly if they have life experiences related to medical trauma, law enforcement, fire fighting, or military career fields, and that the behavior of those players will be observably different from players without the same experiences. In chapter one I present my personal history with Metal Gear, before moving on to the literature review in chapter two, which focuses on scholarship about the Metal Gear series of games and video game research as a whole, particularly studies concerned with how violent content affects players. In chapters three and four, I analyze Metal Gear Solid 3 (2004) and Metal Gear Solid V (2014/2015) in order to gain insight into the moral dilemmas posed by each game. In chapter five I report the results of a survey about player responses towards the game dilemmas given by martial and non-martial groups to identify observable patterns of behavior in how they act and react towards each scenario. -/- This is a preprint version of the official paper until an update is produced. The current official version is available at the West Chester Digital Commons in the external link section below. (shrink)

Morality meters are a commonly used mechanic in many ethically notable video games. However, there have been several theoretical critiques of such meters, including that people can find them alienating, they can instrumentalise morality, and they reduce morality to a binary of good and evil with no room for complexity. While there has been much theoretical discussion of these issues, there has been far less empirical investigation. We address this gap through a qualitative study that involved participants playing a custom-built (...) visual novel game (The Great Fire) with different intuitive and counter-intuitive morality meter settings. Overall, we found that players’ attitudes towards the morality meter in this game was complex, context sensitive and variable throughout gameplay and that the intuitiveness of the meter encouraged participants to treat the meter more ‘as a moral guide’ that prompts reflection and less ‘as a score’ to be engaged with reactively. (shrink)

In this study, we predict the different levels of performance in a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) Tetris session based on the score and the number of matches played by the players. Using the first 45 seconds of gameplay, a Random Forest Classifier was trained on the five keys used in the game obtaining a ROC_AUC score of 0.80. Further analysis revealed that the number of down keys (forced drop) and the number of left keys (left translation) are the most (...) relevant keys in this task, showing that by merely including the data from these two keys our Random Forest Classifier reached a ROC_AUC score of 0.83.We conclude that the keylogger data during the early phases of a game session can be successfully used to predict performance in longer sessions of Tetris. (shrink)

This paper interprets the influential colony management simulator ‘Dwarf Fortress’ existentially, in terms of finitude, absurdity, and narrative. It applies Aarseth/Möring’s proposed method of game interpretation, adopting their definition of ‘cybermedia’ as a generalized game ontology, then providing a specialized ontology of ‘Dwarf Fortress’ which describes its genre and salient gameplay features, incorporating Ian Bogost’s concept of ‘procedural rhetoric’. It then gives an existentialist interpretation of ‘Dwarf Fortress’ which centres on ‘finitude’, ‘absurdity’, and ‘narrative’, showing that ‘Dwarf Fortress’ is (...) a game about the existential tensions involved in being human. We live knowing our lives and civilizations are finite, that there are radical limits on what we can know and do. There is no meaning inherent in the world, or in history, so it is up to us to create our own, and one of our most powerful ways of doing this is narrative. (shrink)

The excessive population growth leading to urbanization and, subsequent to it, urban sprawl, increases the size and number of urban settlements. Consequently, to fulfill the land needed for this expansion, humans encroach the public open areas, including highly crucial urban green spaces. Generally, any kind of greenness within the city, known as urban green spaces, benefits the ecosystem and the inhabitants. Hence, the green infrastructure, universally, should be preserved. Urban parks, specifically urban forest parks, serving as recreational green public spaces, (...) are beneficial for environmental issues and human’s mental and physical health, in other words, well-being, by enabling them to interact with nature. To appropriately preserve the urban forest parks, being aware of the motivational factors for the visitors have a key role. While the willingness factors vary amongst people, it is important to know whether different people can experience the same park diversely, which is almost attractive in terms of general park features. Hence, the study refers to the concept of sense of place, capable of turning spaces into the desired places, framing the users’ behavior and transmitting cultural meaning. Augmentation occurs using Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in urban environments. It can be as simple as telecommunication technologies or very complicated ones. With their everyday use in peoples’ lifestyles, they have penetrated humans’ real lives, fading away the border detaching the real world from the world of computer-mediated services. Nowadays, a holistic technological perspective dominates the urban areas rather than individual ICT projects, which can reshape people’s interaction with their surroundings. Hence, the ICT-enriched spaces result in augmented spaces that convey a sense of place, supporting meaning-making and behavior framing. With its recent definition, gamification, which is the process of making activities more game-like, is a sample of augmentation. While triggering motivation in the users, it can support inducing new behaviors or reshaping the existing ones. Currently, gamification is spread out to various domains, both in academia and amongst practitioners. However, while gamification may involve any type of content, it is called a serious game in the case of transmitting serious educational content besides being entertaining. They are able to engage the player with the education of a certain topic or enhancement of a specific skill. The recent covid-19 outbreak and consequent confinement periods affected people's everyday lifestyles. While suddenly, people lost the freedom of being outdoor, experiencing new places, and interacting with each other, the technology rescued them from such a phenomenon. Virtual environment served them as a mediator to be in the same place, interact, and experience their daily activities in a novel form. Additionally, gamification changed even the sense of their virtual places. This thesis aims to enrich the park visitors’ experience via entertainingly introducing the Atatürk urban forest park to them, accompanied with educational content, by means of a locative serious game. The game benefits from the public awareness reinforcement to serve urban green space preservation. It generates a sense of placeness in its in situ mobile version and desktop version, played remotely, to frame the players’ behavior for the sake of its aim. The thesis is divided into six chapters to achieve its intended aim: The first chapter, the introduction, describes the excessive population growth leading to urbanization and its subsequent, urban sprawl, which increases the size and number of urban settlements and decreases the area of highly crucial urban green spaces. Discussing the green infrastructure benefits, this part emphasizes the importance of its preservation. After a brief debate around the possible ways of this conservation, this chapter continues with the thesis's purpose, method, and content. The literature review part, located in the second and the third chapter, introduces the types, definitions, and the benefits of the urban green spaces, instanced as parks and urban forest parks. This chapter continues with a description of the park experience, followed by the concept of the sense of place. Augmentation and the use of ICTs for behavior framing are described, followed by the idea of gamification, serious games, related case studies, and software. Next, in the fourth chapter, the thesis continues with the research part. Firstly, it introduces the selected area, Atatürk Urban Forest Park, with its detailed fauna and flora information. Then, it proceeds with the game development part, introducing the operated 360° panoramic field photography with a smartphone and using 3dvista Virtual Tour PRO software as the game development tool to provide a locative serious game. For the evaluation of the developed game’s success, in the fifth chapter, the thesis conducts an online survey, including a Google form questionnaire, requested to be filled after the gameplay, focused on the remote version, inspired by the pandemic situation. Finally, in the last chapter, the thesis results are concluded, and the discussions around the future possibilities of the provided method and its capabilities are made to enlighten the field for further studies. (shrink)

In this study, we extracted facial action units (AUs) data during a Hearthstone tournament to investigate behavioural differences between expert, intermediate, and novice players. Our aim was to obtain insights into the nature of expertise and how it may be tracked using non-invasive methods such as AUs. These insights may shed light on the endogenous responses in the player and at the same time may provide information to the opponents during a competition. Our results show that player expertise may be (...) characterised by specific patterns in facial expressions. More specifically, AU17 (chin raiser), AU25 (lips apart), and AU26 (jaws drop) intensity responses during gameplay may vary according to players' expertise. Such results were obtained by training a random forest classifier to test whether we can use these three AUs alone to accurately detect players' expertise. The classifier reached 0.75 accuracy on 5-fold cross-validation, after balancing the class weights, and 0.85 after having applied the Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE) function. These results suggest that AUs can be effectively used to discriminate different levels of expertise in competitive video game players. (shrink)