The effect of a mediated environment on the outcome of a facilitated tabletop game

A mixed-methods research to study the effect of a mediated environment on player experience and the result of the game Cue Kitchen, that aims to increase awareness about the invisible symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease in the social environment of people with Parkinson’s

Information Propagation in Complex Networks: Structures and Dynamics

This thesis is a contribution to a deeper understanding of how information propagates and what this process entails. At its very core is the concept of the network: a collection of nodes and links, which describes the structure of the systems under investigation. The network is a mathematical model which allows to focus on a very fundamental...

Scaling Distributed Virtual Environments using Socially Aware Load Partitioning and Interest Management

Massively Multiplayer Online Games are played by millions of people from around the world who play together in large virtual environments. With sometimes even a million gamers playing the same game, the load on the virtual environments they play in needs to be distributed between servers to deal with this many players. Several techniques have...

When Game Becomes Life: The Creators and Spectators of Online Game Replays and Live Streaming

Online gaming franchises such as World of Tanks, Defense of the Ancients, and StarCraft have attracted hundreds of millions of users who, apart from playing the game, also socialize with each other through gaming and viewing gamecasts. As a form of User Generated Content (UGC), gamecasts play an important role in user entertainment and gamer...

Socializing by Gaming: Revealing Social Relationships in Multiplayer Online Games

Multiplayer Online Games (MOGs) like Defense of the Ancients and StarCraft II have attracted hundreds of millions of users who communicate, interact, and socialize with each other through gaming. In MOGs, rich social relationships emerge and can be used to improve gaming services such as match recommendation and game population retention, which...

Massivizing Networked Virtual Environments on Clouds

Networked Virtual Environments (NVEs) are virtual environments where physically distributed, Internet-connected users can interact and socialize with others. The most popular NVEs are online games, which have hundreds of millions of users and a global market of tens of billions Euros per year. Besides entertainments, NVE techniques are used in...

A model to measure Quality of Experience (QoE) of Online Social Gaming

Understanding the impact of socialization on player Quality of Experience (QoE), which is an important aspect in Online Social Games (OSG), has become a hot research topic. Of the various ways of measuring the player's QoE, in this thesis, we propose and make use of the model used to extract objective data from the players in combination with...

Towards Playful Organizations: How online gamers organize themselves (and what other organizations can learn from them)

Gaming has played an important part in our daily lives for quite some time now. As a result, many researchers are interested in the various ways in which gaming has an impact beyond its own context. This dissertation explores one particular type of impact, i.e., the impact of gaming on organizations. It theorizes that gaming is a frame of mind...

Tribler-G: A Decentralized Social Network for Playing Chess Online

There are currently many systems that offer online board games, for instance, social networking sites, where board games enjoy enormous popularity, but also systems such as the Internet Chess Club, which has been around for over a decade. However, these systems are all centralized and typically have drawbacks for the user, such as subscription...

Player communities in multiplayer online games: A systematic review of emperical research

Numerous researchers have written about the social dynamics of player communities in multiplayer online games. Following a systematic review of refereed empirical research publications from 2000-2010, this article synthesizes the key methods and concepts researchers have used to study and characterize player communities, as well as the aspects...