Browsing by Subject "video games"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Control of a virtual vehicle influences postural activity and motion sickness
    (2011-05-06) Dong, Xiao; Yoshida, Ken; Stoffregen, Thomas
    Everyday experience suggests that drivers are less susceptible to motion sickness than passengers. In the context of inertial motion (i.e., physical displacement), this effect has been confirmed in laboratory research using whole body motion devices. We asked whether a similar effect would occur in the context of simulated vehicles in a visual virtual environment. We used a yoked control design in which one member of each pair of participants played a driving video game (i.e., drove a virtual automobile). A recording of that performance was viewed (in a separate session) by the other member of the pair. Thus, the two members of each pair were exposed to identical visual motion stimuli but the risk of behavioral contagion was minimized. Participants who drove the virtual vehicle (drivers) were less likely to report motion sickness than participants who viewed game recordings (passengers). Data on head and torso movement revealed that drivers tended to move more than passengers, and that the movements of drivers were more predictable than the movements of passengers. Prior to the onset of subjective symptoms of motion sickness movement differed between participants who (later) reported motion sickness and those who did not, consistent with a prediction of the postural instability theory of motion sickness. The results confirm that control is an important factor in the etiology of motion sickness, and extend this finding to the control of non-inertial virtual vehicles.
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    Engaging Gaming Communities For Human Rights: An NGO Toolkit
    (2024-05-01) Hassan, Wajih
    This paper explores everything nonprofit organizations (NGOs) need to know about when engaging online gaming communities for human rights purposes. The research employs qualitative methods such as interviews with gaming community influencers; digital ethnography such as participant observation and engagement with several online gaming communities and some content analysis over different social media platforms; and a literature review. This paper focuses on understanding humanitarian work within gaming communities, tools and methods that NGOs need to use and be aware of in online gaming spaces, and provides a toolkit that encapsulates the information from this research into a practical and easily digestible guidance for NGOs hoping to utilize online gaming communities for human rights.
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    Gaming Bodies: Video Game Corporeality in Characters, Players, and Representations
    (2016-05) Anderson, Sky
    This dissertation explores the concept of bodies as it arises in various sites of video game culture. It answers the implicit call found in game studies research to define, explore, and describe video game bodies, but the varied nature of bodies and games, and the inherent lack of a foundational theory of the subject to guide its exploration, necessitates the study of several possible sites of investigation in order to propose characteristics of video game bodies. To this end, I performed four case studies within a diverse range of sites of video game culture in order to discover what video game bodies mean in these particular instances. The sites of investigation include: third-person character bodies in action video games, the game streaming website Twitch.tv, the exercise game Wii Fit U, and the gaming habits of mobile game players. The guiding methodologies of each case study vary depending on the site of analysis, and the variety of methods speaks to the diversity of the subject matter. However, each case study followed a similar research plan: I formed a research question aimed at focusing on the nature and role of video game bodies in the given site of analysis, and I followed a method appropriate for the question at hand. For the most part, the methods are humanistic with an emphasis on qualitative content analysis, interviews, and grounded theory. My findings suggest four preliminary characteristics of gaming corporeality, or the nature of bodies in/of video games, which share several similarities that I discuss in the conclusion. The characteristics are as follows: the aesthetics game characters’ bodies, strategies of drawing awareness to game players’ bodies, the gamification of game players’ bodies, and the temporal/spatial agency of players’ bodies. Ultimately, I argue that the four sites and characteristics of video game bodies share three commonalities, which I call the three I’s of digital viscera: immersion, interactivity, and intuition.