An impression of home: player nostalgia and the impulse to explore game worlds

This is the accepted version of the paper following peer review.

An Infinite Pebble Game and Applications

We generalize the well-known pebble game to infinite dag's, and we use this generalization to give new and shorter proofs of results in different areas of computer science (as diverse as "logic of programs" and "formal language theory"). Our applications here include a proof of a theorem due to Salomaa, asserting the existence of a context-free language with infinite index, and a proof of a theorem due to Tiuryn and Erimbetov, asserting that unbounded memory increases the power of logics of programs. The original proofs by Salomaa, Tiuryn, and Erimbetov, are fairly technical. The proofs by Tiuryn and Erimbetov also involve advanced techniques of model theory, namely, back-and-forth constructions based on a variant of Ehrenfeucht-Fraisse games. By contrast, our proofs are not only shorter, but also elementary. All we need is essentially finite induction and, in the case of the Tiuryn-Erimbetov result, the compactness and completeness of first-order logic.

Enhancing the health-status of processed meats through ingredient manipulation and its effects on sensory and physiochemical product attributes

An important component of this Ph.D. thesis was to determine the European consumers’ views on processed meats and bioactive compounds. Thus a survey gathered information form over 500 respondents and explored their perceptions on the healthiness and purchase-ability for both traditional and functional processed meats. This study found that the consumer was distrustful towards processed meat, especially high salt and fat content. Consumers were found to be very pro-bioactive compounds in yogurt style products but unsure of their feelings on the idea of them in meat based products, which is likely due to the lack of familiarity to these products. The work in this thesis also centred on the applied acceptable reduction of salt and fat in terms of consumer sensory analysis. The products chosen ranged in the degree of comminution, from a coarse beef patty to a more fine emulsion style breakfast sausage and frankfurter. A full factorial design was implemented which saw the production of twenty beef patties with varying concentrations of fat (30%, 40%, 50%, 60% w/w) and salt (0.5%, 0.75%, 1.0%, 1.25%, 1.5% w/w). Twenty eight sausage were also produced with varying concentrations of fat (22.5%, 27.5%, 32.5%, 37.5% w/w) and salt (0.8%, 1%, 1.2%, 1.4%, 1.6%, 2%, 2.4% w/w). Finally, twenty different frankfurters formulations were produced with varying concentrations of fat (10%, 15%, 20%, 25% w/w) and salt (1%, 1.5%, 2%, 2.5%, 3% w/w). From these products it was found that the most consumer acceptable beef patty was that containing 40% fat with a salt level of 1%. This is a 20% decrease in fat and a 50% decrease in salt levels when compared to commercial patty available in Ireland and the UK. For sausages, salt reduced products were rated by the consumers as paler in colour, more tender and with greater meat flavour than higher salt containing products. The sausages containing 1.4 % and 1.0 % salt were significantly (P<0.01) found to be more acceptable to consumers than other salt levels. Frankfurter salt levels below 1.5% were shown to have a negative effect on consumer acceptability, with 2.5% salt concentration being the most accepted (P<0.001) by consumers. Samples containing less fat and salt were found to be tougher, less juicy and had greater cooking losses. Thus salt perception is very important for consumer acceptability, but fat levels can be potentially reduced without significantly affecting overall acceptability. Overall it can be summarised that the consumer acceptability of salt and fat reduced processed meats depends very much on the product and generalisations cannot be assumed. The study of bio-actives in processed meat products found that the reduced salt/fat patties fortified with CoQ10 were rated as more acceptable than commercially available products for beef patties. The reduced fat and salt, as well as the CoQ10 fortified, sausages were found to compare quite well to their commercial counterparts for overall acceptability, whereas commercial frankfurters were found to be the more favoured in comparison to reduced fat and CoQ10 fortified Frankfurters.

Deer forests, game shooting and landed estates in the South West of Ireland, 1840 - 1970

This thesis is concentrated on the historical aspects of the elitist field sports of deer stalking and game shooting, as practiced by four Irish landed ascendancy families in the south west of Ireland. Four great estates were selected for study. Two of these were, by Irish standards, very large: the Kenmare estate of over 136,000 acres in the ownership of the Roman Catholic Earls of Kenmare, and the Herbert estate of over 44,000 acres in the ownership of the Protestant Herbert family. The other two were, in relative terms, small: the Grehan estate of c.7,500 acres in the ownership of the Roman Catholic Grehan family, and the Godfrey estate of c.5,000 acres, in the ownership of the Protestant Barons Godfrey. This mixture of contrasting estate size, owner's religions, nobleman, minor aristocrat and untitled gentry should, it is argued, yield a diversity of the field sports and lifestyles of their owners, and go some way to assess the contributions, good or bad, they have bequeathed to modern Ireland. Equally, it should help in assessing what importance, if any, applied to hunting. In this context, hunting is here used in its broadest meaning, and includes deer stalking and game shooting, as well as hunting with dogs and hounds on foot and horseback. Where a specific type of hunting is involved, it is so described; for example, fox hunting, stag hunting, hare hunting. Similarly, the term game is sometimes used in sporting literature to encompass all species of quarry killed, and can include deer, ground game (hares and rabbits), waterfowl, and various species of game birds. Where it refers to specific species, these are so described; for example grouse, pheasants, woodcork, wild duck, etc. Since two of these estates - the Kenmare and Herbert - each created a deer forest, unique in mid-19th century Ireland, they form the core study estates; the two smaller estates serve as comparative studies. And, equally unique, as these two larger estates held the only remnant population of native Irish red deer, the survival of that herd itself forms a concomitant core area of analysis. The numerary descriptions applied to these animals in popular literature are critically reassessed against prime source historical evidence, as are the so-called deer forest 'clearances'. The core period, 1840 to 1970, is selected as the seminal period, spanning 130 years, from the creation of the deer forests to when a fundamental change in policy and administration was introduced by the state. Comparison is made with similar estates elsewhere, in Britain and especially in Scotland. Their influence on the Irish methods and style of hunting is historically examined.

Early warning sign attributes for the safety of drinking water treatment works

A proactive risk management strategy seeks to prevent accidents from taking place and maintain the safety of a system. In this context, the task of identifying and disseminating early warning signs and signals is among the most important. The problem is that warning signs that are present before an accident takes place are often being overlooked and not picked up or identified as warning signs. If these warning signs were responded to, then an accident may be averted. Accidents occuring in the critical domain of a drinking water treatments works can have serious implications for the public health of consumers of the water supplied. Realising and comprehending early warning signs is a major challenge for the domain of systems safety and especially in the domain of a water treatment works. The approaches that are typically used to enhance the realisation, comprehension and dissemination of early warning signs in the water treatment domain in Ireland mainly involves the creation of accident scenarios, the use of monitoring data and procedures for the dissemination of warnings. While all of these approaches are all useful to inform the mental or process models of possible accident scenarios, nevertheless, accidents are still occurring in this domain. Therefore, a new approach to enhance the comprehension of and effective dissemination of early warning signs is required in order to improve safety and proactive risk management strategies. The contributions of this thesis is the provision of a set of attributes associated with the early warning sign concept that provides meaningful data on the early warning signs and allows recipients to better comprehend them. The values of these attributes were customised for application in the water treatment domain. This research proves that early warning signs at a water treatment works received with information on their attributes are comprehended and communicated more effectively and efficiently than the usual pragmatic approach and thereby improves the safety and proactive risk management strategies.

The Design and Implementation of an Educational Computer Game and Its Study as a Motivational Tool for Middle School ESOL Students

Gemstone Team ILL (Interactive Language Learning)

Mental hoop diaries: emotional memories of a college basketball game in rival fans.

The rivalry between the men's basketball teams of Duke University and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (UNC) is one of the most storied traditions in college sports. A subculture of students at each university form social bonds with fellow fans, develop expertise in college basketball rules, team statistics, and individual players, and self-identify as a member of a fan group. The present study capitalized on the high personal investment of these fans and the strong affective tenor of a Duke-UNC basketball game to examine the neural correlates of emotional memory retrieval for a complex sporting event. Male fans watched a competitive, archived game in a social setting. During a subsequent functional magnetic resonance imaging session, participants viewed video clips depicting individual plays of the game that ended with the ball being released toward the basket. For each play, participants recalled whether or not the shot went into the basket. Hemodynamic signal changes time locked to correct memory decisions were analyzed as a function of emotional intensity and valence, according to the fan's perspective. Results showed intensity-modulated retrieval activity in midline cortical structures, sensorimotor cortex, the striatum, and the medial temporal lobe, including the amygdala. Positively valent memories specifically recruited processing in dorsal frontoparietal regions, and additional activity in the insula and medial temporal lobe for positively valent shots recalled with high confidence. This novel paradigm reveals how brain regions implicated in emotion, memory retrieval, visuomotor imagery, and social cognition contribute to the recollection of specific plays in the mind of a sports fan.

Design of Scheduling Algorithms Using Game Theoretic Ideas

Scheduling a set of jobs over a collection of machines to optimize a certain quality-of-service measure is one of the most important research topics in both computer science theory and practice. In this thesis, we design algorithms that optimize {\em flow-time} (or delay) of jobs for scheduling problems that arise in a wide range of applications. We consider the classical model of unrelated machine scheduling and resolve several long standing open problems; we introduce new models that capture the novel algorithmic challenges in scheduling jobs in data centers or large clusters; we study the effect of selfish behavior in distributed and decentralized environments; we design algorithms that strive to balance the energy consumption and performance.

The technically interesting aspect of our work is the surprising connections we establish between approximation and online algorithms, economics, game theory, and queuing theory. It is the interplay of ideas from these different areas that lies at the heart of most of the algorithms presented in this thesis.

The main contributions of the thesis can be placed in one of the following categories.

1. Classical Unrelated Machine Scheduling: We give the first polygorithmic approximation algorithms for minimizing the average flow-time and minimizing the maximum flow-time in the offline setting. In the online and non-clairvoyant setting, we design the first non-clairvoyant algorithm for minimizing the weighted flow-time in the resource augmentation model. Our work introduces iterated rounding technique for the offline flow-time optimization, and gives the first framework to analyze non-clairvoyant algorithms for unrelated machines.

2. Polytope Scheduling Problem: To capture the multidimensional nature of the scheduling problems that arise in practice, we introduce Polytope Scheduling Problem (\psp). The \psp problem generalizes almost all classical scheduling models, and also captures hitherto unstudied scheduling problems such as routing multi-commodity flows, routing multicast (video-on-demand) trees, and multi-dimensional resource allocation. We design several competitive algorithms for the \psp problem and its variants for the objectives of minimizing the flow-time and completion time. Our work establishes many interesting connections between scheduling and market equilibrium concepts, fairness and non-clairvoyant scheduling, and queuing theoretic notion of stability and resource augmentation analysis.

3. Energy Efficient Scheduling: We give the first non-clairvoyant algorithm for minimizing the total flow-time + energy in the online and resource augmentation model for the most general setting of unrelated machines.

4. Selfish Scheduling: We study the effect of selfish behavior in scheduling and routing problems. We define a fairness index for scheduling policies called {\em bounded stretch}, and show that for the objective of minimizing the average (weighted) completion time, policies with small stretch lead to equilibrium outcomes with small price of anarchy. Our work gives the first linear/ convex programming duality based framework to bound the price of anarchy for general equilibrium concepts such as coarse correlated equilibrium.

A Video Game-Integrated Electromyography Biofeedback Device for Use in Physical Therapy

We present a novel system to be used in the rehabilitation of patients with forearm injuries. The system uses surface electromyography (sEMG) recordings from a wireless sleeve to control video games designed to provide engaging biofeedback to the user. An integrated hardware/software system uses a neural net to classify the signals from a user’s muscles as they perform one of a number of common forearm physical therapy exercises. These classifications are used as input for a suite of video games that have been custom-designed to hold the patient’s attention and decrease the risk of noncompliance with the physical therapy regimen necessary to regain full function in the injured limb. The data is transmitted wirelessly from the on-sleeve board to a laptop computer using a custom-designed signal-processing algorithm that filters and compresses the data prior to transmission. We believe that this system has the potential to significantly improve the patient experience and efficacy of physical therapy using biofeedback that leverages the compelling nature of video games.

Adapting Behavioral Parent Training as an Interactive Computer Game

Behavioral Parent Training (BPT) is a well-established therapy that reduces child externalized behaviors and parent stress. Although BPT was originally developed for parents of children with defiant behaviors, the program’s key concepts are relevant to parenting all children. Since parents might not fully utilize BPT due to cost and program location, we created an online game as a low-cost, easily accessible alternative or complement to BPT. We tested the game with nineteen undergraduate students at the University of Maryland. The experimental group completed pretest survey on core BPT knowledge, played the game, and completed a BPT posttest, while the control group completed a pretest and posttest survey over a three week period. Participants in the experimental group also completed a survey to indicate their satisfaction with the overall program. The experimental group demonstrated significantly higher levels of BPT knowledge than the control group and high levels of satisfaction. This suggests that an interactive, online BPT platform is an engaging and accessible way for parents to learn key concepts.

Innovations in learning and teaching approaches using game technologies - can "The Movies" teach how to make a movie?

The use of games technology in education is not a new phenomenon. Even back in the days of 286 processors, PCs were used in some schools along with (what looks like now) primitive simulation software to teach a range of different skills and techniques – from basic programming using Logo (the turtle style car with a pen at the back that could be used to draw on the floor – always a good way of attracting the attention of school kids!) up to quite sophisticated replications of physical problems, such as working out the trajectory of a missile to blow up an enemies’ tank. So why are games not more widely used in education (especially in FE and HE)? Can they help to support learners even at this advanced stage in their education? We aim to provide in this article an overview of the use of game technologies in education (almost as a small literature review for interested parties) and then go more in depth into one particular example we aim to introduce from this coming academic year (Sept. 2006) to help with teaching and assessment of one area of our Multimedia curriculum. Of course, we will not be able to fully provide the reader with data on how successful this is but we will be running a blog (http://themoviesineducation.blogspot.com/) to keep interested parties up to date with the progress of the project and to hopefully help others to set up similar solutions themselves. We will also only consider a small element of the implementation here and cover how the use of such assessment processes could be used in a broader context. The use of a game to aid learning and improve achievement is suggested because traditional methods of engagement are currently failing on some levels. By this it is meant that various parts of the production process we normally cover in our Multimedia degree are becoming difficult to monitor and continually assess.

Learning and practising supply chain management strategies from a business simulation game: a comprehensive supply chain simulation

An Internet based supply chain simulation game (ISCS) is introduced and demonstrated in this paper. Different from other games and extended from the Beer Game, a comprehensive set of supply chain (SC) management strategies can be tested in the game, and these strategies can be evaluated and appraised based on the built-in Management Information System (MIS). The key functionalities of ISCS are designed to increase players SC awareness, facilitate understanding on various SC strategies and challenges, foster collaboration between partners, and improve problem solving skills. It is concluded that an ISCS can be used as an efficient and effective teaching tool as well as a research tool in operations research and management science. Problems and obstacles have been observed while engaging in the SC business scenario game. The actions proposed and implemented to solve these problems have resulted in improved SC performance.

Making sense of game based user data: learning analytics in applied games

Digital learning games are useful educational tools with high motivational potential. With the application of games for instruction there comes the need of acknowledging learning game experiences also in the context of educational assessment. Learning analytics provides new opportunities for supporting assessment in and of educational games. We give an overview of current learning analytics methods in this field and reflect on existing challenges. An approach of providing reusable software assets for interaction assessment and evaluation in games is presented. This is part of a broader initiative of making available advanced methodologies and tools for supporting applied game development.

Amplifying applied game development and uptake

The established (digital) leisure game industry is historically one dominated by large international hardware vendors (e.g. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo), major publishers and supported by a complex network of development studios, distributors and retailers. New modes of digital distribution and development practice are challenging this business model and the leisure games industry landscape is one experiencing rapid change. The established (digital) leisure games industry, at least anecdotally, appears reluctant to participate actively in the applied games sector (Stewart et al., 2013). There are a number of potential explanations as to why this may indeed be the case including ; A concentration on large-scale consolidation of their (proprietary) platforms, content, entertainment brand and credibility which arguably could be weakened by association with the conflicting notion of purposefulness (in applied games) in market niches without clear business models or quantifiable returns on investment. In contrast, the applied games industry exhibits the characteristics of an emerging, immature industry namely: weak interconnectedness, limited knowledge exchange, an absence of harmonising standards, limited specialisations, limited division of labour and arguably insufficient evidence of the products efficacies (Stewart et al., 2013; Garcia Sanchez, 2013) and could, arguably, be characterised as a dysfunctional market. To test these assertions the Realising an Applied Gaming Ecosystem (RAGE) project will develop a number of self contained gaming assets to be actively employed in the creation of a number of applied games to be implemented and evaluated as regional pilots across a variety of European educational, training and vocational contexts. RAGE is a European Commission Horizon 2020 project with twenty (pan European) partners from industry, research and education with the aim of developing, transforming and enriching advanced technologies from the leisure games industry into self-contained gaming assets (i.e. solutions showing economic value potential) that could support a variety of stakeholders including teachers, students, and, significantly, game studios interested in developing applied games. RAGE will provide these assets together with a large quantity of high-quality knowledge resources through a self-sustainable Ecosystem, a social space that connects research, the gaming industries, intermediaries, education providers, policy makers and end-users in order to stimulate the development and application of applied games in educational, training and vocational contexts. The authors identify barriers (real and perceived) and opportunities facing stakeholders in engaging, exploring new emergent business models ,developing, establishing and sustaining an applied gaming eco system in Europe.

What serious game studios want from ICT research: identifying developers’ needs

Although many scholars recognise the great potential of games for teaching and learning, the EU-based industry for such “serious” games” is highly fragmented and its growth figures remain well behind those of the leisure game market. Serious gaming has been designated as a priority area by the European Commission in its Horizon 2020 Framework Programme for Research and Innovation. The RAGE project, which is funded as part of the Horizon 2020 Programme, is a technology-driven research and innovation project that will make available a series of self-contained gaming software modules that support game studios in the development of serious games. As game studios are a critical factor in the uptake of serious games, the RAGE projects will base its work on their views and needs as to achieve maximum impact. This paper presents the results of a survey among European game studios about their development related needs and expectations. The survey is aimed at identifying a baseline reference for successfully supporting game studios with advanced ICTs for serious games.