Drinking games participation among female students at a regional Australian university

Participation in drinking games (DGs) by university students is often associated with heavy drinking and negative social and health impacts. Although research in Australia indicates that university students tend to drink at risky levels, there is paucity of literature on DGs among students, especially those residing at regional universities. This research examined drinking among female college students of white background. Eighteen female students participated in face-to-face in-depth interviews to describe their DG experiences. Most women played DGs for social and monetary reasons, with many drinking high volumes of alcohol during the game. Excessive drinking was linked with the type of beverage consumed. Despite knowing the health risks associated with DGs, there was a strong social imperative for these young women to play these games. Research and public health initiatives to better understand and address problematic drinking activities in rural and regional Australia have tended to ignore women and the dominant white populations whose heavy drinking has been largely restricted to private spheres.

Online Gaming in Context : the Social and Cultural Significance of Online Games

There is little question of the social, cultural and economic importance of video games in the world today, with gaming now rivalling the movie and music sectors as a major leisure industry and pastime. The significance of video games within our everyday lives has certainly been increased and shaped by new technologies and gaming patterns, including the rise of home-based games consoles, advances in mobile telephone technology, the rise in more 'sociable' forms of gaming, and of course the advent of the Internet. This book explores the opportunities, challenges and patterns of gameplay and sociality afforded by the Internet and online gaming. Bringing together a series of original essays from both leading and emerging academics in the field of game studies, many of which employ new empirical work and innovative theoretical approaches to gaming, this book considers key issues crucial to our understanding of online gaming and associated social relations, including: patterns of play, legal and copyright issues, player production, identity construction, gamer communities, communication, patterns of social exclusion and inclusion around religion, gender and disability, and future directions in online gaming.

Topological localization using optical flow descriptors

We propose a topological localization method based on optical flow information. We analyse the statistical characteristics of the optical flow signal and demonstrate that the flow vectors can be used to identify and describe key locations in the environment. The key locations (nodes) correspond to significant scene changes and depth discontinuities. Since optical flow vectors contain position, magnitude and angle information, for each node, we extract low and high order statistical moments of the vectors and use them as descriptors for that node. Once a database of nodes and their corresponding optical flow features is created, the robot can perform topological localization by using the Mahalanobis distance between the current frame and the database. This is supported by field trials, which illustrate the repeatability of the proposed method for detecting and describing key locations in indoor and outdoor environments in challenging and diverse lighting conditions.

Teachers’ beliefs about the possibilities and limitations of digital games in classrooms

Teachers’ beliefs about what it is (or is not) possible to achieve with digital games in educational contexts will inevitably influence the decisions that they make about how, when, and for what specific purposes they will bring these games into their classrooms. They play a crucial role in both shaping and responding to the complex contextual factors which influence how games are understood and experienced in educational settings. Throughout this article the authors draw upon data collected for a large-scale, mixed-methods research project focusing on literacy, learning and teaching with digital games in Australian classrooms, to focus explicitly on the attitudes,understandings and expectations held about digital games by diverse teachers at the beginning of the project. They seek to identify the beliefs about games that motivated teachers’ participation in a digital games research project while focusing, as well, on concerns that teachers express about risks or limitations of such a project. The authors’ aim is to develop a detailed picture of the mindsets that teachers bring to games-based learning environments, and the relevance of these mindsets to broader debates about the relationship between games, learning and school.

Design for creative activity : a framework for analyzing the creative potential of computer games

This paper describes a design framework intended to conceptually map the influence that game design has on the creative activity people engage in during gameplay. The framework builds on behavioral and verbal analysis of people playing puzzle games. The analysis was designed to better understand the extent to which gameplay activities within different games facilitate creative problem solving. We have used an expert review process to evaluate these games in terms of their game design elements and have taken a cognitive action approach to this process to investigate how particular elements produce the potential for creative activity. This paper proposes guidelines that build upon our understanding of the relationship between the creative processes that players undertake during a game and the components of the game that allow these processes to occur. These guidelines may be used in the game design process to better facilitate creative gameplay activity.

Cultural and linguistic localization of games to bridge the digital and cultural divide in indigenous populations

Localization of technology is now widely applied to the preservation and revival of the culture of indigenous peoples around the world, most commonly through the translation into indigenous languages, which has been proven to increase the adoption of technology. However, this current form of localization excludes two demographic groups, which are key to the effectiveness of localization efforts in the African context: the younger generation (under the age of thirty) with an Anglo- American cultural view who have no need or interest in their indigenous culture; and the older generation (over the age of fifty) who are very knowledgeable about their indigenous culture, but have little or no knowledge on the use of a computer. This paper presents the design of a computer game engine that can be used to provide an interface for both technology and indigenous culture learning for both generations. Four indigenous Ugandan games are analyzed and identified for their attractiveness to both generations, to both rural and urban populations, and for their propensity to develop IT skills in older generations.

The Games Concept Approach (GCA) as a mandated practice : views of Singaporean teachers

This paper reports on the views of Singaporean teachers of a mandated curriculum innovation aimed at changing the nature of games pedagogy within the physical education curriculum framework in Singapore. Since its first appearance over 20 years ago, Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU), as an approach to games pedagogy has gathered support around the world. Through a process of evolution TGfU now has many guises and one of the latest of these is the Games Concept Approach (GCA) a name given to this pedagogical approach in Singapore. As part of a major national curricular reform project the GCA was identified as the preferred method of games teaching and as a result was mandated as required professional practice within physical education teaching. To prepare teachers for the implementation phase, a training program was developed by the National Institute of Education in conjunction with the Ministry of Education and well known experts in the field from the United States. For this part of the study, 22 teachers from across Singapore were interviewed. The data were used to create three fictional narratives, a process described by Sparkes (2002a) and used more recently by Ryan (2005) in the field of literacy. The stories were framed using Foucault’s (1980/1977) notion of governmentality and Bernstein’s (1996) notion of regulative discourse. The narratives reveal tales of confusion, frustration but also of hope and enthusiasm.

All about that base : differing player experiences in video game genres and the unique case of MOBA games

Video games provide unique interactive player experiences (PX) often categorised into different genres. Prior research has looked at different game genres, but rarely through a PX lens. Especially, PX in the emerging area of massive online battle arena (MOBA) games is not well understood by researchers in the field. We address this knowledge gap by presenting a PX study of different game genres, which we followed up with a second semi-structured interview study about PX in MOBA games. Among the results of our analyses are that games that are likely played with other players, such as MOBA games, stimulate less immersion and presence for players. Additionally, while challenge and frustration are significantly higher in this genre, players get a sense of satisfaction from teamwork, competition and mastery of complex gameplay interactions. Our study is the first to contribute a comprehensive insight into key motivators of MOBA players and how PX in this genre is different from other genres.

Creating good lives through computer games

In this chapter we aim to explore how videogames can lead to improvements in wellbeing. Following Keyes (2007) and Huppert and So (2012) we view wellbeing as a multidimensional concept with both hedonic and eudaimonic aspects. In this chapter we take a broad approach in terms of exploring the impact of videogames on the psychological, social, and physical components of wellbeing. We explore how videogames have been shown to have an impact in each of these domains. Although there is a great deal of evidence for the actual and potential positive impacts of videogames, there are many unanswered questions regarding the situations in which there is likely to be an impact of videogame play on wellbeing, as well as the aspects of wellbeing that are likely to be impacted by videogame play. We conclude the chapter by outlining the key questions for future research. Our focus in this chapter is on the positive influences of videogames. We do not explore research on contexts in which negative impacts are possible or subgroups for which videogames could cause harm. However, these questions are obviously important and we see balanced engagement with age-appropriate videogames as a key prerequisite for any of the wellbeing benefits discussed below.

Efficient minimax strategies for square loss games

We consider online prediction problems where the loss between the prediction and the outcome is measured by the squared Euclidean distance and its generalization, the squared Mahalanobis distance. We derive the minimax solutions for the case where the prediction and action spaces are the simplex (this setup is sometimes called the Brier game) and the \ell_2 ball (this setup is related to Gaussian density estimation). We show that in both cases the value of each sub-game is a quadratic function of a simple statistic of the state, with coefficients that can be efficiently computed using an explicit recurrence relation. The resulting deterministic minimax strategy and randomized maximin strategy are linear functions of the statistic.

Second-order quantile methods for experts and combinatorial games

We aim to design strategies for sequential decision making that adjust to the difficulty of the learning problem. We study this question both in the setting of prediction with expert advice, and for more general combinatorial decision tasks. We are not satisfied with just guaranteeing minimax regret rates, but we want our algorithms to perform significantly better on easy data. Two popular ways to formalize such adaptivity are second-order regret bounds and quantile bounds. The underlying notions of 'easy data', which may be paraphrased as "the learning problem has small variance" and "multiple decisions are useful", are synergetic. But even though there are sophisticated algorithms that exploit one of the two, no existing algorithm is able to adapt to both. In this paper we outline a new method for obtaining such adaptive algorithms, based on a potential function that aggregates a range of learning rates (which are essential tuning parameters). By choosing the right prior we construct efficient algorithms and show that they reap both benefits by proving the first bounds that are both second-order and incorporate quantiles.

Interrogating Creative Theory and Creative Work: Inside the Games Studio

The expansion of creative and cultural industries has provided a rich source for theoretical claims and commentary. Much of this reproduces and extends the idea that autonomy is the defining feature of both enterprises and workers. Drawing on evidence from research into Australian development studios in the global digital games industry, the article interrogates claims concerning autonomy and related issues of insecurity and intensity, skill and specialisation, work–play boundaries, identity and attachments. In seeking to reconnect changes in creative labour to the wider production environment and political economy, an argument is advanced that autonomy is deeply contextual and contested as a dimension of the processes of capturing value for firms and workers.