Online games construct a virtual world where gamers can explore and experience various exciting environments. However, studies on gamer behavior rarely investigated the relationships between motivations and spending for online games. Understanding these relationships helps online game service providers manage gamers’ motivations and develop better revenue models. This study investigated the rel...

The developers of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) rely on attractive content such as logical challenges (puzzles) to entertain and generate revenue from millions of concurrent players. While a large part of the content is currently generated by hand, the exponentially increasing number of players and their new demand for player-customized content have made manual content generation u...

Global development of online gaming, especially of Massively Multiplayer Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) has been phenomenal, but has evolved in different ways in different countries. The experiences of this industry (and its developers, players, regulators, and other stakeholders) in the US and China have been particularly interesting. Whereas China has seen the growth of gameplaying in Internet ...

We describe witness-narrator agents, a framework for collaborative narrative generation in persistent virtual environments such as massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs). Witness-narrator agents allow reports of events in the environment to be published to external audiences so that they can keep up with events within the game world (e.g., via a weblog or SMS messages), or fe...

We present the argument that the majority of low-molecular-weight organic compounds made and secreted by microbes play roles as cell-signalling molecules in the environment. Of the large number of compounds isolated to date, only a small fraction have been shown to possess useful therapeutic antibiotic activity. However, most microbial metabolites modulate gene transcription at low concentratio...

Molecular recognition is central to all biological processes. For the past 50 years, Koshland's 'induced fit' hypothesis has been the textbook explanation for molecular recognition events. However, recent experimental evidence supports an alternative mechanism. 'Conformational selection' postulates that all protein conformations pre-exist, and the ligand selects the most favored conformation. F...

MaSE provides a detailed approach to the analysis and design of MAS. MaSE combines several established models into a comprehensive methodology and provides a set of transformation steps that shows how to derive new models from the existing models. Thus MaSE guides the developer in the analysis and design process. Future work on MaSE will focus on specializing it for use in adaptive multiagent a...

This study surveyed Dutch adolescents and adults about their video gaming behavior to assess the prevalence of problematic gaming. A representative national panel of 902 respondents aged 14 to 81 took part in the study. The results show that gaming in general is a wide-spread and popular activity among the Dutch population. Browser games (small games played via the internet) and offline casual ...

Within the past few years, studies on microRNA (miRNA) and cancer have burst onto the scene. Profiling of the miRNome (global miRNA expression levels) has become prevalent, and abundant miRNome data are currently available for various cancers. The pattern of miRNA expression can be correlated with cancer type, stage, and other clinical variables, so miRNA profiling can be used as a tool for can...

Along with the success of the massively multiplayer role-playing gaming industry in Asia, online gaming-related crimes have grown at an amazing rate. Most of the criminal cases are related to virtual properties since markets have developed for the virtual properties giving them real world values. There has been little research and resulting technologies for MMRPG virtual property protection. In...