Videogame Sciences and Arts

Esports fans have been known for being heavy consumers of competitive gaming content and for being digital natives who love to comment about esports on numerous social platforms. This has attracted various sponsors interested in capitalizing in this social buzz. However, there have been signs that this high vocality can in fact heavily damage several sponsors. Hence, this research aimed to determine if esports fans’ high vocality is a benefit and/or a risk to these sponsors. To achieve this, we adopted a qualitative exploratory design to interview, via digital platforms, 10 esports sponsorship experts. In total, we interviewed two endemic and three non-endemic esports sponsors and five marketing agencies with experience in esports sponsorships. They were sampled via a nonprobability purposive heterogeneous method and were reached via the companies’ website contact sections. Data were analyzed with the assistance of NVivo 10. The overall results showed that all experts agreed that this high vocality can both benefit and damage esports sponsors. The uniformity in the answers showed that this element is not a greater benefit or risk to a particular type of esports sponsor. Ergo we considered that the high vocality of esports fans is a double-edged sword. This study is necessary because, despite esports’ massive growth, this field has received scant scientific attention, with the specific areas of esports marketing and esports sponsorships being even more severely overlooked. Besides, from a business standpoint, the findings are highly significant for every sponsor looking to better comprehend esports and its fanbase.

The Atlas of the Video Game Industry in Portugal published its second edition in 2020, with the main goal of mapping, characterizing, and analyzing the evolution of the video game industry on a national scale. This paper presents information on the current situation and recent trends (2016–2020) in the video game sector in Portugal (companies, employment, products, economic and financial situation, networks, and public support), as well as the main expectations regarding the development of this industry in the national context. Methodologically, the video game sector is characterized based on the collection and analysis of original data from a survey conducted with video game companies and independent creators, which develop activities in Portugal.

This paper analyzes the situation of video game specialized media specific to Basque language. We focus not only on the available offerings in Basque language, but also on the informative demands of the video game consumers from the Basque Country. This research is set in the context of regional or minority languages in Europe and helps to draw the current situation of media in places that struggle to maintain their own identity and culture. First, we describe the specialized media in Spain. We explain the historical development of magazines and how video games reached the traditional media. Then, we take a general look at the specialized media in Basque language taking into account the sociolinguistic characteristics of the Basque society. As a case of study for video games, we analyze the blog of the video games Association Game Erauntsia. The next step is to study the demand of Basque speaking video game fans regarding their need to be informed. The data is interpreted after the survey conducted to members of the Game Erauntsia community. Considering the demands and the offer of specialized media, we bring up some conclusions that set new guidelines to fulfill the needs of the audience.

Although game development is a recent profession, many of its issues have been associated with the straining working conditions experienced by workers to keep themselves in the industry. This requires balancing job demands and job resources, and, in cases of extreme and prevalent job demands, it can elicit burnout as an occupational phenomenon. This study aims to identify burnout and job demand-resources levels among game developers, their relationship, and variation according to social individual/labour characteristics. An online questionnaire collected data from 193 game developers. Regarding burnout, results showed moderate levels of exhaustion and disengagement, while job demands revealed high levels of mental and concentration demands, moderate levels of time, emotional, material, and physical demands. For job resources, we found high levels of autonomy and moderate values of personal development, quality of personal relations, ethical, and social utility of work. Exhaustion is positively correlated with working hours per week and job demands, and negatively with job resources. The same happens with disengagement, except for mental and concentration demands. Time demands explained 27% of exhaustion, and personal development explained 14% of exhaustion and 51% of disengagement. Therefore, game developers face very demanding work conditions, alerting to the need to develop strategies for burnout prevention, and for the adequate manage of job demands using job resources, thus, promoting happier and healthier workplaces.

In the following paper, three different science fiction scenarios in which pedagogy and video games meet will be analyzed, considering the aforementioned genre not only as entertainment, but also as an experimental and technoscientific laboratory. In these narratives, different problems will be analyzed with which to approach Game Based Learning in relation with psychometrics, behaviorism and non-directive pedagogies.

Students are being more often challenged not only to play but also to create games when there is increasing evidence of the impact, in terms of learning, of students’ involvement in creating their own games centred on educational content. Nevertheless, the game making process has certain specificities that are not usually recognized by the public but are relevant to create good games. Taking this into consideration, the Gamers4Nature project developed a Toolkit to Game Design to support users, with and without previous experience, during a game creation process. This paper focus on the analysis of undergraduate students’ engagement using the Toolkit through the creation of game narratives focused on environmental preservation. A total of 46 undergraduate students from a Social Sciences (non-ICT course) participated in 2-h game narrative design sessions, using the Toolkit’s resources to develop their game’s narrative. As a result, 14 game narratives were created. Participants considered the Toolkit easy to use, not having preponderant usability issues. Although additional tests are still needed, namely with larger and diversified groups, preliminary results indicate that the Toolkit is a resource capable of assisting users with no previous experience during the game design process, namely in the writing of game’s narratives.

The video game industry is constantly innovating, with new mediums and ways for players to interact with the game environment. Voice interaction in games is an ever evolving field, especially with advances in Natural Language Processing. In that vein, there has been a increasing number of conversational agents with natural language interaction capabilities deployed into video games. In this paper, we improve the Virtual Suspect game with a natural language interaction using the tools provided by Amazon Alexa. We followed an iterative, user-centered approach when designing the new interaction, collecting feedback and data from three User Studies in order to improve the interaction with the Virtual Suspect. Our findings suggest that the usage of natural language to support the interaction with game characters can improve the player experience.

Reinforcement learning is a machine learning technique that makes a decision based on a sequence of actions. This allows changing a game agent’s behavior through feedback, such as rewards or penalties for their actions. Recent work has been demonstrating the use of reinforcement learning to train agents capable of playing electronic games and obtain scores even higher than professional human players. These intelligent agents can also assume other roles, such as creating more complex challenges to players, improving the ambiance of more complex interactive games and even testing the behavior of players when the game is in development. Some literature has been using a deep learning technique to process an image of the game. This is known as the deep Q network and is used to create an intermediate representation and then process it by layers of neural network. These layers are capable of mapping game situations into actions that aim to maximize a reward over time. However, this method is not feasible in modern games, rendered in high resolution with an increasing frame rate. In addition, this method does not work for training agents who are not shown on the screen. In this work we propose a reinforcement learning pipeline based on neural networks, whose input is metadata, selected directly in the game state, and the actions are mapped directly into high-level actions by the agent. We propose this architecture for a tower defense player agent, a real time strategy game whose agent is not represented on the screen directly.