Skilled play : positioning the player at the centre of the digital game

This thesis argues that a focus on the player and the skill sets required to play video games - a player-skill perspective - provides a productive framework from which to examine and address many contemporary 'problem areas' within game studies. Familiarity, social performativity, and material mastery form three crucial, interlocking junctures where skill and mastery are framed as essential components for undertanding games. The game controller is positioned as a 'gatekeeper' between player and game; a precluding factor in engaging with the medium. Participant responses from original qualitative research, which places a primacy on female voices, are framed within a gaming climate of historically increasing complexification of game genres and material components, and point to several trends in how women can (and do) contend with gendered technology.

Skilled play : positioning the player at the centre of the digital game

This thesis argues that a focus on the player and the skill sets required to play video games - a player-skill perspective - provides a productive framework from which to examine and address many contemporary 'problem areas' within game studies. Familiarity, social performativity, and material mastery form three crucial, interlocking junctures where skill and mastery are framed as essential components for undertanding games. The game controller is positioned as a 'gatekeeper' between player and game; a precluding factor in engaging with the medium. Participant responses from original qualitative research, which places a primacy on female voices, are framed within a gaming climate of historically increasing complexification of game genres and material components, and point to several trends in how women can (and do) contend with gendered technology.

Talent development in women’s cricket: Perceptions and practices of elite players and coaches

Talent development is at the forefront of research in sport, where female athletes remain underrepresented. With ongoing success and rapid participation growth, there is an opportunity to describe and assess talent development in cricket for female athletes. Research in other sports recommends a holistic approach to talent development, where the connection between individual, task and environmental factors is maintained. A series of semi-structured interviews was conducted to draw from the experiential knowledge of 16 elite female athletes and 7 coaches alongside empirical knowledge regarding player development (individual), training task design and talent development environments. Both players and coaches reported positive early learning experiences, linear career trajectories and early entrance into talent programs, suggesting some early specialisation. Exposure to boy’s/men’s cricket appeared to fast-track skill development in players, and player skill adaptability was considered crucial to expert performance by both cohorts. Training design typically involved functional games-based scenarios, or misaligned task deconstruction in contrast to contemporary skill development practices. Aims for discrete stages of the pathway were ambiguous for both cohorts, potentially limiting the value they provide, and transition between stages appeared fluid to coaches in contrast to the rigidity described by players. Finally, growing professionalism in cricket for female athletes through greater investment, contracts and player support has propagated a skill gap between pathway stages identified by both cohorts, which needs addressing. Closing this skill gap can be achieved by improving coaching practices and support at the amateur levels of cricket to develop the next generation of elite female cricketers.

Relating Competitive Golfers’ Perceived Emotions and Performance

The present study examined relationships between golfers’ self-perceived emotions (e.g., irritability, nervousness, tension), task-oriented coping, perceived control, and performance during a golf competition. We implemented a process-oriented golf analysis in which competitors rated these variables hole-by-hole in a competitive golf round. Within a two-level Bayesian multivariate autoregressive model, we showed that (a) within persons, emotions and task-oriented coping were reactions that stemmed from performance on the previous hole; and (b) between persons, player skill level predicted both better scores and the ability to limit the influence of negative affect on performance. These findings highlight the complex nature of the relationship between emotions and performance. Future studies might use a similarly ecologically valid research design to more precisely measure aspects of time and potentially moderating effects of player skill level and personality. An increased understanding of the dynamic relationship between emotions and performance can promote the development of effective psychological interventions for optimal performance outcomes.

The Separate and Joint Influence of Teammate and Opponent Skill on Player Skill Development

Individuals constantly interact with and are affected by environments. In the context of team-based online video games, of particular interest is whether players are affected by their peers - teammates and opponents. In this article, I present a large-scale study on the effect of inter-player skill gap on skill learning. A dataset from an online game, Conquer Club, is used to describe changes in skill of players interacting with teammates and opponents of varying skill levels. Linear and nonlinear regression analyses have been performed to understand the separate and joint influence of teammates and opponents skill. Results confirm the importance of opponents’ skill levels with respect to players’ skill development, and show that competing against higher level opponents is beneficial to skill increments. But this study fails to conclude if players' changes in skill are influenced by teammates' skill and are moderated jointly by teammates and opponents' skill. Additionally, there is a nonlinear relationship between skill improvements and pregame skill. Reasons for these results are discussed at the end.

Gameplay Analysis of Multiplayer Games with Verified Action-Costs

Measuring player skill cannot be done by considering their historical success alone as the relative skill of their opponents must be considered along with confounding factors such as luck and circumstance. With a specifically designed game, every possible player action can be attributed a cost, the value by which a player reduces their maximum probability of winning. By considering the costs of the actions made by a player we can obtain a more accurate representation of how skilful they are. We developed such a game, the mobile game RPGLite, and compared the actions players made with the cost values we had calculated. Through this analysis we made several observations about RPGLite which we share here to demonstrate the utility of action-costs for gameplay analysis. We show how they can be used to identify game states which players have difficulty making the best moves from, to measure how players learn over time and to compare the strengths and complexity of the characters of RPGLite. Commercial titles could benefit from similar tools—we discuss the feasibility of applying our approach to more complex games.

The relative roles of skill and luck within 11 different golfer populations

Drawing on the golf-related example of regression to the mean as presented by Kahneman in his best-selling book, Thinking Fast and Slow, this study shows how the regression-to-the-mean phenomenon is revealed in first- and second-round scoring in 11 different golfer populations, ranging from golfers with the highest level of skill (professional golfers on the PGA TOUR) to amateur groups of much lower skill. Using the mathematics of truncated normal distributions, the study introduces a new method for estimating the mix between variation in scoring due to differences in player skill and that due to luck. Estimates of the skill/luck mix are very close to those obtained using the regression-based methodology of Morrison and are nearly identical to those implied by fixed effects regression models where fixed player and round effects are estimated simultaneously. The study also sheds light on the “paradox of skill,” originally suggested by Gould and developed further by Mauboussin, as it relates to golf by showing that luck plays a more important role in determining player scores in higher-skilled golfer groups compared with lower-skilled groups.

Old school renaissance as a style of play

I consider a style of play of tabletop role-playing games which focuses on objective player skill without extensive fixed ruleset, and describe it using two major hobbyist theories. This establishes one use of hobbyist theories -- a framework for discussion styles of play. The style of play is associated with the old school renaissance (OSR) movement and can be seen as an expansion of war gaming and board gaming to scenarios where the rules do not cover all eventualities, hence requiring human (referee) judgment, but keeping the element of player skill as objective as possible.This type of knowledge of a gaming style can help a player to understand their and others' preferences and practices and to communicate them more clearly to others.A designer can use this type of information to know what kind of content is relevant for their audience.

Gamification based Skill Prediction using Blockchain Technology

Skill prediction is the process of withdrawing information from existing data for the purpose of determining their existing skills and future trends. Player gameplay data are collected from various sites and it is validated using blockchain technology. This ensures that the chain remains immutable, because any change in a block’s data will invalidate every block that follows it. Players are then clustered using the K-means clustering algorithm, a clustering approach based on partitions is implemented. To increase the accuracy of prediction, players are classified into groups. Euclidean distance is computed to measure the distance or the (dis)similarity between each pair of players. Decision tree algorithm is used to predict player skill. The efficiency of the proposed method can be assessed using the measures such as precision, recall, F-Score, correlation of Matthews and Fallout rate. The proposed system improves the performance of the system as well as predict more accurate skill using kmeans clustering and decision tree.