Online survey data were collected from 30,000 users of Massively Multi-User Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) over a three year period to explore users' demographics, motivations, and derived experiences. Not only do MMORPGs appeal to a broad age range (M-age = 26.57, range = 11-68), but the appeal is strong (on aver-age 22 hours of usage per week) across users of all ages (r = -.04). An exploratory factor analysis revealed a five factor model of user motivations-Achievement, Relationship, Immersion, Escapism, and Manipulation-illustrating the multifaceted appeal of these online environments. Male players were significantly more likely to be driven by the Achievement and Manipulation factors, while female players were significantly more likely to be driven by the Relationship factor. Also, the data indicated that users derived meaningful relationships and salient emotional experiences, as well as real-life leadership skills from these virtual environments. MMORPGs are not simply a pastime for teenagers, but a valuable research venue and platform where millions of users inter-act and collaborate using real-time 3D avatars on a daily basis. Read more...

We propose a real-time 3D audio rendering pipeline for complex virtual scenes containing hundreds of moving sound sources. The approach, based on auditory culling and spatial level-of-detail, can handle more than ten times the number of sources commonly available on consumer 3D audio hardware, with minimal decrease in audio quality. The method performs well for both indoor and outdoor environments. It leverages the limited capabilities of audio hardware for many applications, including interactive architectural acoustics simulations and automatic 3D voice management for video games. Our approach dynamically eliminates inaudible sources and groups the remaining audible sources into a budget number of clusters. Each cluster is represented by one impostor sound source, positioned using perceptual criteria. Spatial audio processing is then performed only on the impostor sound sources rather than on every original source thus greatly reducing the computational cost. A pilot validation study shows that degradation in audio quality, as well as localization impairment, are limited and do not seem to vary significantly with the cluster budget. We conclude that our real-time perceptual audio rendering pipeline can generate spatialized audio for complex auditory environments without introducing disturbing changes in the resulting perceived soundfield. Read more...

The authors examined whether the nature of the opponent ( computer, friend, or stranger) influences spatial presence, emotional responses, and threat and challenge appraisals when playing video games. In a within- subjects design, participants played two different video games against a computer, a friend, and a stranger. In addition to self- report ratings, cardiac interbeat intervals ( IBIs) and facial electromyography ( EMG) were measured to index physiological arousal and emotional valence. When compared to playing against a computer, playing against another human elicited higher spatial presence, engagement, anticipated threat, post- game challenge appraisals, and physiological arousal, as well as more positively valenced emotional responses. In addition, playing against a friend elicited greater spatial presence, engagement, and self- reported and physiological arousal, as well as more positively valenced facial EMG responses, compared to playing against a stranger. The nature of the opponent influences spatial presence when playing video games, possibly through the mediating influence on arousal and attentional processes. Read more...

Exploration of virtual environments may be accomplished with different interface metaphors. Previous research suggests that vestibular and proprioceptive information provided by immersive interfaces facilitates spatial orientation on simple path-integration tasks. We examine whether these interface variables impact performance across paths of variable complexity. Our immersive interface provided all users the ability to conduct the search component of our task more efficiently. Our results, however, show that the immersive interface was no more effective than our nonimmersive one for maintaining orientation. In fact, the immersive interface had a negative impact on performance (absolute error) for individuals who had extensive experience with playing video games. When measured in terms of consistency of response, our results suggest that having extensive game-play experience will negatively impact orientation performance with both interfaces. We speculate that this is due to the conflicting nature of the skills that avid game players acquire in game-play versus those required to perform in our task. Read more...

Creating controllable, responsive avatars is an important problem in computer games and virtual environments. Recently, large collections of motion capture data have been exploited for increased realism in avatar animation and control. Large motion sets have the advantage of accommodating a broad variety of natural human motion. However, when a motion set is large, the time required to identify an appropriate sequence of motions is the bottleneck for achieving interactive avatar control. In this paper, we present a novel method of precomputing avatar behavior from Unlabeled motion data in order to animate and control avatars at minimal runtime cost. Based on dynamic programming, our method finds a control policy that indicates how the avatar should act in any given situation. We demonstrate the effectiveness Of our approach through examples that include avatars interacting with each other and with the User. Read more...

Investigating male game players, this study explores how game interface (virtual reality and standard console), game content (fighting, shooting, and driving), and game context (human and computer competition) influence levels of presence and hostile expectation bias-the expectation others will think, feel, speak, and act aggressively during social conflict. In addition to game interface and game content influencing hostile expectations, significant interactions were detected for hostile expectations. Presence, although not as predicted, also significantly differed across game interface and game content. Through the development and testing of each gaming experience, this study demonstrates that simply testing violent and nonviolent game situations underestimates the complexity of contemporary video-game play. Read more...