In this study, the authors propose to discuss scalability challenges posed by Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) scenarios, while outlining issues specific to the context of online interactive experiences and game genres. These scalability issues concern: game simulation, content distribution, communication and coordination, and structural scalability. The authors present a critical revie...

Over the past years, researchers and practitioners in marketing fields have seen a dramatic growth of online games. This growth and development also influence players’ behavior and market change of hardware and software companies. This study proposes a model for selecting the optimal virtual products for online games by referring to the views of online players. The proposed model adopts the “mo...

Serious games are defined as games with a purpose. These games serve a purpose beyond play in difference to games, whose purpose is nothing than the play activity itself. Human Computation Games, a particular form of a serious game, engage humans to solve problems, the computer cannot solve, at least today. Humans solve the problems voluntarily and with fun, because the tasks and their solution...

To keep an online game interesting to its users, it is important to know them. In this paper, in order to characterize user characteristics, we discuss clustering of online-game users based on their trails using Self Organization Map (SOM). As inputs to SOM, we introduce transition probabilities between landmarks in the targeted game map. An experiment is conducted confirming the effectiveness ...

In addition to playing games together, making games together has offered new opportunities for social interaction and community building in online spaces. This paper presents an empirical study of how making indie games become interactive and collaborative social experiences in an Asian female-dominated online gaming community. It contributes to the CSCW community by providing a better understa...

In this paper we report possibilities and experiences from employing Counter-Strike, a popular multi-player Internet computer game and its resulting online community in research on cooperative behaviour. Advantages from using this game include easy availability of rich data, the emphasis on team-playing, as well as numerous possibilities to change the experiment settings. We use descriptive gam...

This paper discusses a case study where the artificial society approach is used to examine effects of a robot rental mechanism in a multiplayer online game, under development at the authors’ laboratory. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed rental mechanism, namely, better game balance and inflation control. These results also indicate that the artificial society approach ha...

The paper covers issues of item-selling based payment model(micro-transactions) in Korean online games. Firstly, we characterize two payment models in online game: subscription based payment model and item-selling based payment model. We then investigate and characterize itemselling based payment model in online games and introduce two online games, “Kart Rider” and “Special Force” which have b...