The online game industry is an emerging entertainment software industry. It is successful and fast growing. Prior studies have identified characteristics of this industry that are distinctive from traditional entertainment industries. Currently one of the most important business challenges this industry faces is securing investments for development or evaluation of development projects. An onli...

Affordable and accessible Internet has changed the way video games are played, allowing individuals to connect worldwide in shared gaming spaces. On the surface participation within these environments may seem socially beneficial, as these highly social, playful spaces allow players to connect, interact with, and learn from others. However, there is a growing concern that increased participatio...

Unlike the traditional online game infrastructure—the central server approach, we propose a hybrid scheme for multiplayer online games in this paper. This scheme effectively combines the peer-to-peer model and client-server model to solve the problems of scalability, performance and cost limitation. This scheme is suitable for online games playing in a geographical area in which the online play...

Online gaming is a convergence industry segment with a proven revenue model and an existing user base. Inserting advertisements in games provides another revenue opportunity for the game designer and service providers. Virtual advertisement is the method of inserting advertisements into the game in a non-obstructive way. For online game service providers, changing these virtual advertisement sc...

Despite the growing popularity of online game playing, there have been no surveys comparing adolescent and adult players. Therefore, an online questionnaire survey was used to examine various factors of online computer game players (n = 540) who played the most popular online game Everquest. The survey examined basic demographic information, playing frequency (i.e. amount of time spent playing ...

Real-Time Strategy (RTS) games provide a challenging platform to implement online reinforcement learning (RL) techniques in a real application. Computer as one player monitors opponents’ (human or other computers) strategies and then updates its own policy using RL methods. In this paper, we firstly examine the suitability of applying the online RL in various computer games. RL application depe...

As the online service industry has continued to grow, illegal activities in the online world have drastically increased and become more diverse. Most illegal activities occur continuously because cyber assets, such as game items and cyber money in online games, can be monetized into real currency. The aim of this study is to detect game bots in a massively multiplayer online role playing game (...