First Person Shooter

Character attachment have been studied thoroughly from the view of psychology and media researches. In game playing, the player-avatar relationship is a form of character attachment and affects a good game design as well as management systems such as character customizing and in game purchasing policy. In this paper, we investigate such player-avatar relationship on the theme of team-based FPS where in general the attachment is not expected to be high. However, from the online survey for Tom Clancy"s Rainbow 6 Siege mania groups, we find that there are different character attachment patterns with respect to the role of players in the teamattacker, defender, and supporter. It shows that attackers think avatar as an "object, but the defenders show more "avatar as others" than the attackers. The supporters show high responsibility for the avatar and their play style is most like "avatar as symbiote" manner.

This paper describes the development of an end-to-end quality measurement method that allows us to quantify the perceived quality of Interactive Gaming, with an emphasis on the so-called First Person Shooter (FPS) game Quake IV. We conducted a number of subjective experiments to quantify the impact of network parameters on the perceived quality of this recent FPS game. Making use of a multi-dimensional regression analysis we developed the Quake IV G-model which enables us to predict a gamer's Quake IV quality rating (expressed in a Mean Opinion Score) based on measured ping and jitter values. Our G-model shows a very high correlation (R = 0.98) with the subjective data.

Computer games make learning fun and support learning through doing. Edutainment software tries to capitalize on this however, it has failed in reaching the levels of motivation and engagement seen in mainstream games. In this context, we have integrated a mainstream first-person shooter game, Counter-Strike, into the curriculum of our Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems course. In this paper we describe this integration and a platform to support the creation of Counter-Strike agents. In addition, a questionnaire was posed to our students to assess the success of our approach. Results show that students found the idea of applying a firstperson-shooter game motivating and the integration with the curriculum useful for their education.

A pilot study was carried out which, in part, aimed to identify patterns in observational behaviour amongst players of Half Life 2, a contemporary first person shooter (FPS) game. Participants played for ten minutes in one or two environments and their eye movements were ...

Multi-player online games (MOGs) have become increasingly popular on today’s Internet. Meanwhile, the IEEE 802.11 (Wi-Fi) wireless networks have been widely used. We study how well an underlying 802.11g network supports a first-person-shooter (FPS) game, often considered the most demanding MOG in terms of network performance. We measure the latency and loss ratio performance experienced by the game traffic; these network-layer metrics were shown to have large impact on the gaming quality experienced at the application layer. The effect on performance of the following factors were examined: the number of game clients, the distance between game clients and the wireless access point, the enabling of data encryption, and the inclusion of FTP and video streaming background traffic. Our experimental results show that FTP and video streaming traffic significantly affect the game traffic performance, whereas the distance and the use of data encryption have rather minimal impact. We also obs...

Since the inception of E-sports we have seen casual video game players develop into professionals who push the boundary of game mastery to new heights via coordinated team play. This short paper explores how a group of video game players adopt military-style communication methods and strategies to coordinate their actions in the popular tactical First Person Shooter (FPS) video game DayZ (Bohemia Interactive, 2014). Utilising the key components of team interaction in the context of distributed and ad-hoc military teams (Pascual et al., 1997), it is shown how a group of players evolved their interactions from team play to squad play. It is argued that squad play is an advancement of the strategic and tactical thinking embodied in team play through the adoption of real-world military interaction and communication strategies.

In this paper we explore the use of Hierarchical-Task-Network (HTN) representations to model strategic game AI. We will present two case studies. The first one reports on an experiment using HTNs to model strategies for Unreal Tournament® (UT) bots. We will argue that it is possible to encode strategies that coordinate teams of bots in first-person shooter games using

Since the inception of E-sports we have seen casual video game players develop into professionals who push the boundary of game mastery to new heights via coordinated team play. This short paper explores how a group of video game players adopt military-style communication methods and strategies to coordinate their actions in the popular tactical First Person Shooter (FPS) video game DayZ (Bohemia Interactive, 2014). Utilising the key components of team interaction in the context
of distributed and ad-hoc military teams (Pascual et al., 1997), it is shown how a group of players evolved their interactions from team play to squad play. It is argued that squad play is an advancement of the strategic and tactical thinking embodied in team play through the adoption of real-world military interaction and communication strategies.

An increasing amount of games is released on multiple platforms, and game designers face the challenge of integrating different interaction paradigms for console and PC users while keeping the core mechanics of a game. However, little research has addressed the influence of game controls on player experience. In this paper, we examine the impact of mouse and keyboard versus gamepad control in first-person shooters using the PC and PlayStation 3 versions of Battlefield: Bad Company 2. We conducted a study with 45 participants to compare player experience and game usability issues of participants who had previously played similar games on one of the respective gaming systems, while also exploring the effects of players being forced to switch to an unfamiliar platform. The results show that players switching to a new platform experience more usability issues and consider themselves more challenged, but report an equally positive overall experience as players on their comfort platform.

When a filmmaker makes a film with herself as a subject, she is already divided as both the subject matter of the film and the subject making the film. The two senses of the word are immediately in play - the matter and the maker - thus the two ways of being subjectified as both subject and object. Subjectivity finds its filmic expression, not surprisingly, in very personal ways, yet it is nonetheless shaped by and in relation to collective expressions of identity that can transform the cinema of 'me' into the cinema of 'we'. Leading scholars and practitioners of first-person film are brought together in this groundbreaking collection to consider the theoretical, ideological, and aesthetic challenges wrought by this form of filmmaking in its diverse cultural, geographical, and political contexts.

Theorist Alexander Galloway has asserted that the subjective camera of First-Person Shooter games marks a distinct break from cinematic traditions. In this article, I suggest that the FPS camera might belong to a longer tradition of “searching” cameras that begins with another kind of First-Person camerawork, handheld cinematography for documentary films. The horror genre provides two notable analogues for the FPS camera: the “Killer POV” sequences that were an emblem of the slasher era, and the faux-documentary handheld cameras of the “found footage” cycle that came to prominence in the cinema alongside the rise of the FPS in video gaming. Found footage, unlike FPS, is predicated on looking within the film being a fundamentally vulnerable act, and on the helplessness of the viewer to intervene into the action onscreen. While the “shooter” in “First-Person Shooter” indicates a marriage of action and looking, games like Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Layers of Fear have, like found footage films, equated “horror” with a sense of helplessness and vulnerability by removing combat as an option, and by minimizing the player’s capacity for control. Thus, the contemporary horror genre is being defined across media through an emphasis on the vulnerability and impotence of the searching camera.

Documentaries have increasingly used the first person, with a number of prominent filmmakers finding critical and commercial success with this intimate approach. Jewish filmmakers have particularly thrived in this genre, using it to explore disparate definitions of the self in relation to the larger groups of family and community.

In First Person Jewish, Alisa S. Lebow examines more than a dozen films from Jewish artists to reveal how the postmodern impulse to turn the lens inward intersects provocatively (and at times unwittingly) with historical tropes and stereotypes of the Jew. Focusing her efforts on Jewish filmmakers working on the margins, Lebow analyzes the work of Jonathan Caouette, Chantal Akerman, and Alan Berliner, among others, also including a discussion of her own first person film Treyf (1998), made with Cynthia Madansky. The filmmakers in this study, Lebow argues, are confronting a desire to both define and reimagine contemporary Jewishness.

Using a multidisciplinary approach to first person films, Lebow shows how this form of self-expression is challenging both autobiography and documentary and, in the process, changing the art of cinema and recording the cultural shifts of our time

Studies have shown that regular video game use might improve cognitive and social skills. In contrast, other studies have documented the negative outcomes of excessive gaming visa -vis health and socio-professional spheres. Both positive and negative outcomes of video game use were linked to their structural characteristics (i.e., features that make the game appealing or are inducements for all gamers to keep playing regularly). The current study tested whether active video gamers from main genres (massively multiplayer online role-playing games, online first person shooter, multiplayer online battle arena) differed in a laboratory task that measured inhibitory control. Eighty-one gamers performed the Hybrid-Stop Task, assessing restraint (go/no-go trials) and cancellation (stop-signal trials) processes of a prepotent response. They completed additional self-reported questionnaires measuring demographics, problematic video game use, impulsivity traits, and depressive symptoms. Results showed that when confounding variables were controlled for, participants who favored online first person shooter were characterized by accelerated motor responses yet reduced abilities to cancel a prepotent response. No differences between groups were identified regarding the restraint process. The findings of this pilot study might have clear implications for video gaming research by supporting the critical importance of distinguishing between video game genres when considering their specific potential benefits and detrimental effects.

This paper provides a critical overview of the notion of genre in game studies and in the video game industry. Using the concept of genre requires one to acknowledge the recent developments of genre theory in other fields of research; one such development is the contestation of the idea of generic evolution. After a comparative analysis, video game genres are found to differ from literary and film genres precisely on the basis of evolution. The technological imperatives that characterize video game production are also pinpointed as relevant to the establishment and development of video game genres. Evolution is linked to the processes of innovation, and so a model of innovation is laid out from a compare-and-contrast approach to literary and film genre innovation. This model is tested through the history and analysis of the First-Person Shooter genre. This results in new insights for the question of genre in video games, as it is established that genre is rooted not in game mechanics, but in game aesthetics; that is, play-experiences that share a phenomenological and pragmatic quality, regardless of their technical implementation.

The combination of psychophysiological and psychometric methods provides reliable measurements of affective user experience (UX). Understanding the nature of affective UX in interactive entertainment, especially with a focus on sonic stimuli, is an ongoing research challenge. In the empirical study reported here, participants played a fast-paced, immersive first-person shooter (FPS) game modification, in which sound (on/off) and music (on/off) were manipulated, while psychophysiological recordings of electrodermal activity (EDA) and facial muscle activity (EMG) were recorded in addition to a Game Experience Questionnaire (GEQ). Results indicate no main or interaction effects of sound or music on EMG and EDA. However, a significant main effect of sound on all GEQ dimensions (immersion, tension, competence, flow, negative affect, positive affect, and challenge) was found. In addition, an interaction effect of sound and music on GEQ dimension tension and flow indicates an important relationship of sound and music for gameplay experience. Additionally, we report the results of a correlation between GEQ dimensions and EMG/EDA activity. We conclude subjective measures could advance our understanding of sonic UX in digital games, while affective tonic (i.e., long-term psychophysiological) measures of sonic UX in digital games did not yield statistically significant results. One approach for future affective psychophysiological measures of sonic UX could be experiments investigating phasic (i.e., event-related) psychophysiological measures of sonic gameplay elements in digital games. This could improve our general understanding of sonic UX beyond affective gaming evaluation.

Ce dossier étudie les transformations des représentations de genre dans les jeux-vidéos de type « FPS » des années 90 à 2000 en montrant leurs conséquences sur la reproduction de ces représentations. Méthode : Les sources historiques sont analysées par une méthode interprétative inspirée des approches ethnographiques et des Games Studies. Résultats : Mon analyse montre l’adéquation des représentations au modèle militaro-viril, mais que celui-ci est variable et contingent. Conclusion : Il faut considérer le contexte historique de production du jeu-vidéo, le contexte social de la pratique et saisir le parcours des acteurs lors de la pratique pour comprendre son rôle dans la socialisation.

The present article develops the concept of selective realism to understand how design features and narrative frames of first- and third-person shooters (F/TPS) exclude attention to salient, yet unpleasant, features of warfare such as problematic forms of violence, long-term psychological impacts, or sociopolitical blowbacks. Identifying four specific filters that frame player experiences, I argue that the resulting selectivity is significant because it is characteristic of the F/TPS genre as a whole that, through its wide dissemination, impacts upon the cultural framing of actual warfare. The article illustrates features of selective realism before it conducts in-depth analysis of the titles Spec Ops: The Line and The Last of Us to show how critical game design can invite a conscious unraveling of the generic frames and the ideological positions these invite. The article concludes with a reassessment of arguments regarding alleged sociopolitical impacts of war- and violence-themed computer games.

Through defining cinematic subjectivity as both composite and aggregate, this article examines cinema’s Turing test – the relationship between artificial intelligence and cinema – via the case study of Hardcore Henry (2015). It does so via analysing how the film is composed of a series of (semi-)subjective images that deliberately imitate the style of first-person shooters in the entanglement of vision and tactility and investigating how the electronic consciousness formulated by the film is ‘pure intelligence’ in both senses.

The medium of digital games employs numerous methods in creating a sense of historicity and an illusion of historical experience. These schemes vary from realistic modelling and simulation to use of archive material and discursive practices. The present article examines different approaches in depicting World War II in massively multiplayer online games (MMO) War Thunder and Heroes & Generals. The two historical games represent different sub-genres, vehicle simulation games and first-person shooters, respectively. The sub-genres impose a host of cultural conventions that influence design choices and gameplay styles. These socially constructed traditions pose both challenges and opportunities in generating and maintaining historical accuracy.

In this introductory work we present our first approach to a computer controller player for first-person shooter videogames, where we have applied genetic algorithms in order to evolve the best dodge rules. This paper is a report of the results obtained by our bot during the first competition held in Trondheim, Norway, during the IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC 2009).

Introduction On 15 March 2019, a 28-year-old Australian man attacked two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The terrorist live streamed his first shooting onto Facebook using a GoPro camera straddled to his helmet. This footage resulted in a rather surreal aesthetic – the first-person shooter (FPS) aesthetic that is. The FPS aesthetic aided the live stream to last seventeen minutes, at which point the terrorist already shot over forty worshippers at the Al Noor Mosque for the world to see. Despite Facebook’s efforts to perfect their algorithms in detecting violence and terrorism among other problematic content, their artificial intelligence software struggled to recognise the gruesome reality of the shooter’s live stream and its later re-uploads. According to the global studies and communication professor Tony Lemieux, these algorithms are not advanced and reliable enough, and could potentially confuse a first-person-shooter computer game with real-life violent footage (Perrigo)....

This paper deals with representations of femininity in the horror themed first person shooter trilogy, F.E.A.R. By relying on post-Freudian psychoanalysis and feminist film theory, I intend to highlight the way in which the representations of Alma, the main female antagonist, reflect a series of dominant patriarchal anxieties. The horror element of each game is based on a particular anxiety, such as the fear of maternal authority or female sexual agency. These anxieties are, however, not independent, since most, if not all of them, can be understood as embodiments of what Julia Kristeva called abjection. Consequently, my paper begins with an exposition of the critical method, and continues with three other sections, each dealing with an instalment of the trilogy. Since my aim is to analyse the visual representations of Alma, considerably less attention will be given to the ludic side of the video games, with the exception of the discussion of F.E.A.R. 3, where the choice of the avatar and player performance influence the outcome of the game and, therefore, have bearing on the overall psychoanalytic implications of the cultural product. Because I do not expect many of my readers to be familiar with the video games, I will provide a very brief synopsis of the plot in each section.

... Network Quality of Experience ... Abstract—As the service requirements of network applications shift from high throughput to high media quality, interactivity, and responsiveness, the definition of QoE (Quality of Experience) has become multidimensional. ...

This paper demonstrates the applicability of reinforcement learning for first person shooter bot artificial intelligence. Reinforcement learning is a machine learning technique where an agent learns a problem through interaction with the environment. The Sarsa( ) algorithm will be applied to a first person shooter bot controller to learn the tasks of (1) navigation and item collection, and (2) combat. The results will show the validity and diversity of reinforcement learning in a first person shooter environment.

The authors examined emotional valence-and arousal-related phasic psychophysiological responses to different violent events in the first-person shooter video game "James Bond 007: NightFire" among 36 young adults. Event-related changes in zygomaticus major, corrugator supercilii, and orbicularis oculi electromyographic (EMG) activity and skin conductance level (SCL) were recorded, and the participants rated their emotions and the trait psychoticism based on the Psychoticism dimension of the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire-Revised, Short Form. Wounding and killing the opponent elicited an increase in SCL and a decrease in zygomatic and orbicularis oculi EMG activity. The decrease in zygomatic and orbicularis oculi activity was less pronounced among high Psychoticism scorers compared with low Psychoticism scorers. The wounding and death of the player's own character (James Bond) elicited an increase in SCL and zygomatic and orbicularis oculi EMG activity and a decrease in corrugator activity. Instead of joy resulting from victory and success, wounding and killing the opponent may elicit high-arousal negative affect (anxiety), with high Psychoticism scorers experiencing less anxiety than low Psychoticism scorers. Although counterintuitive, the wounding and death of the player's own character may increase some aspect of positive emotion.

Analyzing three contemporary documentaries (Andrés Di Tella's Fotografias, Sandhya Suri's I for India, and Tania Cypriano's Grandma has a Video Camera) this chapter explores the relationship between the camera and migration, arguing that it serves not only as a recording device per se, but as a mobility mechanism, setting certain migratory journeys in motion.

At Aalborg University’s department of Medialogy, we are utilizing the Problem Based Learning method to encourage students to solve game design problems by pushing the boundaries and designing innovative games. This paper is concerned with describing this method, how students employ it in various projects and how they learn to analyse, design, and develop for innovation by using it. We will present various cases to exemplify the approach and focus on how the method engages students and aspires for innovation in digital entertainment and games.

We explore how expert First Person Shooter (FPS) players coordinate actions using a shared voice channel. Our findings emphasize the importance of the temporality and spatiality of these tactical verbal communications ("callouts"). From here, we outline potential designs to mitigate problems in the production/interpretation of call-outs to better support coordination.

Modern computer games are becoming increasingly complex and only experienced players can fully master the game controls. Accordingly, many commercial games now provide aids to simplify the player interaction. These aids are based on simple heuristics rules and cannot adapt neither to the current game situation nor to the player game style.

First-person shooter robot controllers (bots) are generally rule-based expert systems written in C/C++. As such, many of the rules are parameterized with values, which are set by the software designer and finalized at compile time. The effectiveness of parameter values is dependent on the knowledge the programmer has about the game. Furthermore, parameters are non-linearly dependent on each other. This paper presents an efficient method for using a genetic algorithm to evolve a set of parameters for bots which play as well as parameters tuned by a human with expert knowledge about the game's strategy. This indicates genetic algorithms as being a potentially useful method for tuning bots.

In his seminal work on social contract theory, Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes described the anarchic pre-societal condition of the state of nature. In this predicament – aptly named as “the war of all against all” – people lived poor, short and brutish lives. The dystopian world simulated in the survival horror game DayZ mirrors this natural state of man. The game invites players to roleplay survivors of a zombie apocalypse. The present paper examines the factors contributing to pervasive violence, moral ambiguity and degeneration of human condition, which are prominent features of DayZ’s gameplay. The article will situate DayZ into the context of Hobbesian state of nature and explicate elements that render this hypothetical condition perpetual.

The first-person shooter (FPS), with its subjective view point and relentless action, gives its players an intense, often violent, virtual experience. There has been considerable debate about the effects of this mediated experience. Of particular concern is whether these games stage a propaganda campaign for the interests of governments and the military-industrial complex. Some fear that these games are leading us toward a perpetual state of war. However, such discussions have usually focussed on a very narrow selection from the FPS genre. This article examines a large sample, over 160 individual titles, of FPSs with a contemporary setting. The enemies presented by these games are analyzed and found to be far wider than a narrow examination of games based on topical conflicts would suggest, being instead inspired by arangeofpolitical,cultural,andliterarysources.AnyanalysisofFPSgamesneedsto take this diversity into account.

On 15 March 2019, a 28-year-old Australian man attacked two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The terrorist live streamed his first shooting onto Facebook using a GoPro camera straddled to his helmet. This footage resulted in a rather surreal aesthetic-the first-person shooter (FPS) aesthetic that is. The FPS aesthetic aided the live stream to last seventeen minutes, at which point the terrorist already shot over forty worshippers at the Al Noor Mosque for the world to see. Despite Facebook's efforts to perfect their algorithms in detecting violence and terrorism among other problematic content, their artificial intelligence software struggled to recognise the gruesome reality of the shooter's live stream and its later re-uploads. According to the global studies and communication professor Tony Lemieux, these algorithms are not advanced and reliable enough, and could potentially confuse a first-person-shooter computer game with real-life violent footage (Perrigo). The reality of this error is, of course, more complicated than that as will be discussed later. Nevertheless, the obvious danger of the malfunction lies in the spread of hate and inspiration, as painfully proven by the Halle synagogue attack televised via Twitch on 9 October 2019. To rub salt into the wound, players of sand-box games like Minecraft or Garry's Mod have recreated the site of the Al Noor Mosque in order to re-enact the event. A modding project in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has also been initiated not long after the attack to create careful model of the original site. Beyond 'playbour', a controversial game studio created a small first-person shooter game based on the Christchurch shooting, in which the gamer plays in the avatar body of the terrorist and massacres an entire town of unarmed civilians while live-streaming the entire act.

Good artificial intelligence for strategy and first person shooter games requires tactical information. Tactical information assists agents in choosing appropriate places to place vulnerable resources, safe paths for moving through the world, and the most effective places to attack the enemy. Unfortunately, providing this information can be very expensive, as it typically requires keeping one or more full map arrays around. In this paper, we present influence points, a technique for providing tactical information by annotating navigation meshes. This greatly improves the memory cost of storing the information, and reduces the cost of updates as the world changes.

This paper inspects the concept of immersion in video games as a gradient category resulting from the degrees of interactivity and immediacy. By factoring in the objective technological affordances of media, as well as the subjective impression that these affordances help create, and the culturally constructed nature of gameplay experience, I argue that high degrees of interactivity and immediacy are not achieved solely by giving the player more freedom of action, and, respectively, by inflecting the content of the narrative as little as possible with the medium's specific narrative affordances. Quite on the contrary, it is necessary that freedom be limited and content be manipulated for the video game to have high degrees of narrativity and playability, thus ensuring player engagement. In the absence of player engagement, the mediated nature of gaming experience becomes obvious and the level of immersion decreases. In the last section, I explore the relationship between video games and film and point out the consequences the remediation of film has regarding the level of immediacy.

The authors examined emotional valence-and arousal-related phasic psychophysiological responses to different violent events in the first-person shooter video game "James Bond 007: NightFire" among 36 young adults. Event-related changes in zygomaticus major, corrugator supercilii, and orbicularis oculi electromyographic (EMG) activity and skin conductance level (SCL) were recorded, and the participants rated their emotions and the trait psychoticism based on the Psychoticism dimension of the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire-Revised, Short Form. Wounding and killing the opponent elicited an increase in SCL and a decrease in zygomatic and orbicularis oculi EMG activity. The decrease in zygomatic and orbicularis oculi activity was less pronounced among high Psychoticism scorers compared with low Psychoticism scorers. The wounding and death of the player's own character (James Bond) elicited an increase in SCL and zygomatic and orbicularis oculi EMG activity and a decrease in corrugator activity. Instead of joy resulting from victory and success, wounding and killing the opponent may elicit high-arousal negative affect (anxiety), with high Psychoticism scorers experiencing less anxiety than low Psychoticism scorers. Although counterintuitive, the wounding and death of the player's own character may increase some aspect of positive emotion.

The main sources of inspiration for the design of more engaging synthetic characters are existing psychological models of human cognition. Usually, these models, and the associated Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, are based on partial aspects of the real complex systems involved in the generation of human-like behavior. Emotions, planning, learning, user modeling, set shifting, and attention mechanisms are some remarkable examples of features typically considered in isolation within classical AI control models. Artificial cognitive architectures aim at integrating many of these aspects together into effective control systems. However, the design of this sort of architectures is not straightforward. In this paper, we argue that current research efforts in the young field of Machine Consciousness (MC) could contribute to tackle complexity and provide a useful framework for the design of more appealing synthetic characters. This hypothesis is illustrated with the application of a novel consciousness-based cognitive architecture to the development of a First Person Shooter video game character.

First-person shooter robot controllers (bots) are generally rule-based expert systems written in C/C++. As such, many of the rules are parameterized with values, which are set by the software designer and finalized at compile time. The effectiveness of parameter values is dependent on the knowledge the programmer has about the game. Furthermore, parameters are non-linearly dependent on each other. This paper presents an efficient method for using a genetic algorithm to evolve a set of parameters for bots which play as well as parameters tuned by a human with expert knowledge about the game's strategy. This indicates genetic algorithms as being a potentially useful method for tuning bots.

One of the major challenges in developing techniques for realistic and high performance visualization of outdoor environments is rendering of vegetation. The issue of rendering dense foliage or forests is especially pressing in simulators and other virtual reality based game applications, such as first person shooters. The greatest problem is that convincing modeling of trees, bushes and undergrowth would require great numbers of polygons beyond what graphics hardware can cope with today or in the next few years to come. This paper presents recent extensions and improvements to the authors’ previous work on foliage rendering. It reviews some of the landmark techniques used in real-time PC applications, including the authors’ novel solution of using 2.5 dimensional impostors for tree rendering, followed by the in-depth discussion of extending the later algorithm to rendering dense forest for human-scale simulation. The method presented takes full advantage of the programmable renderi...

The introduction and popularity of the Nintendo Wii home console has brought attention to the natural mapping motion capturing controller. Using a sample that identified sports as their most frequently played video games, a mental models approach was used to test the impact that perceived controller naturalness (traditional controller vs. natural mapping motion capturing controller) had on perceptions of spatial

In this paper we employ a steady state genetic algorithm to evolve different types of behaviour for bots in the Unreal Tournament 2004™ computer game. For this purpose we define three fitness functions which are based on the number of enemies killed, the lifespan of the bot and a combination of both. Long run experiments were carried out, in which the evolved bots' behaviours outperform those of standard bots supplied by the game, particularly in those cases where the fitness involves a measure of the bot's lifespan. Also, there is an increase in the number of items collected, and the behaviours tend to become less aggressive, tending instead towards a more optimised combat style. Further “short run” experiments were carried out with a further type of fitness function defined, based on the number of items picked. In these cases the bots evolve performances towards the goal they have been aimed, with no other behaviours arising, except in the case of the multiple objective one. We conclude that in order to evolve interesting behaviours more complex fitness functions are needed, and not necessarily ones that directly include the goal we are aiming for.

Does what Susan Siegfried call ‘the rhetorics of battle painting’ still provide an effective vehicle for mediating the experience of armed conflict?

This essay considers the role played by America’s Army, a multiplayer military-style ‘first-person shooter’ (FPS) video game, in order to contend that the rhetorics employed by French 19th century battle painters continue to function effectively in video games as modern representations of war because the
political conditions giving rise to such representations are decidedly similar. It is argued that the
success of war games such as America’s Army is indicative of the U.S.A.’s pro-war ideology and serves to disseminate a nexus of national values both within and beyond their political borders.

Since at least the arrival of 3D graphical displays in the mid-1990s, video games have employed visual perspective to make the flat computer screen appear to be a deep and immersive game world. This essay delineates the three major perspectival modes present in video games today—the first-person, the third-person, and the strategy mode—in order to identify the way in which they make certain political structures operable within the game’s architecture. While periodization is typically elaborated by the historian, sociologist or cultural theorist, here we find a form of periodization internal to the perceptual architecture of contemporary digital media. Such a periodization, this essay argues, is central to the classificatory tools by which subjects and non-subjects are marked out within the societies of control.