First-Person Shooters, Tunnel Warfare, and the Racial Infrastructures of the US–Mexico Bordere

Digital networked media actively participate in the nation-state’s and tech entrepreneurs’ efforts to imagine and manage the borderlands. These media facilitate virtual forms of thinking about the border both by offering popular reference points for the new technology being developed (e.g. Google Maps, Pokémon Go, Call of Duty) and by providing the actual tools through which these ideas can become actionable. This article analyzes one such reference point within the first-person shooter (FPS) console game Call of Juarez: The Cartel (Ubisoft, 2011). Like other border-themed video games, The Cartel borrows on colonial tropes and ideologies by creating playable narratives that invoke the untamable frontier and position racialized subjects as Other. Through its virtual modes of representation and interaction, the game encodes the racialization processes that continue to shape popular imaginings of the border. While its digital aesthetics animate a dynamic space of possibility, the logic of the first-person shooter reins in the expansiveness of animated space by restricting it to an interactive experience of tunnel warfare, an ideological orientation to the border underground that channels the players’ purposive motion into a space of direct confrontation and racial violence. Analyzing the narrative and procedural work of this ostensibly reactionary video game demonstrates how border infrastructures structure and shape specific forms of racial and colonial violence.

Quiet Eye and Computerized Precision Tasks in First-Person Shooter Perspective Esport Games

The gaze behavior in sports and other applied settings has been studied for more than 20 years. A common finding is related to the “quiet eye” (QE), predicting that the duration of the last fixation before a critical event is associated with higher performance. Unlike previous studies conducted in applied settings with mobile eye trackers, we investigate the QE in a context similar to esport, in which participants click the mouse to hit targets presented on a computer screen under different levels of cognitive load. Simultaneously, eye and mouse movements were tracked using a high-end remote eye tracker at 300 Hz. Consistent with previous studies, we found that longer QE fixations were associated with higher performance. Increasing the cognitive load delayed the onset of the QE fixation, but had no significant influence on the QE duration. We discuss the implications of our results in the context of how the QE is defined, the quality of the eye-tracker data, and the type of analysis applied to QE data.

IMPLEMENTASI ALGORITMA BOYER MOORE PADA PENGEMBANGAN FIRST PERSON SHOOTER GAME TEBAK KATA

Tebak kata merupakan permainan yang menuntut pemain guna menduga kata yang tersembunyi satu demi satu per karakternya. Sampai disaat ini, pertumbuhan game tebak telah jadi banyak varian serupa pencarian kata, teka teki silang, permainan ejaan, serta anagram. Dalam perihal ini buat memberikan sesuatu tantangan baru, pada riset ini hendak melakukan pengembangan First Person Shooter pada permainan tebak kata. Pada pengembangan ini memakai algoritma pencarian string yang dikembangkan oleh Robert S. Boyer serta J. Strother Moore pada tahun 1977 yaitu algoritma Boyer- Moore. Studi yang dicoba yakni memandang berhasilnya Algoritma Boyer Moore dalam menerapkan pencocokkan kata. Berdasarkan hasil pengembangan First Person Shooter pada game Tebak Kata. Melakukan pencarian pattern satu kata pada teks yang berisikan lebih dari satu kata kunci jawaban yang dicara pada game. Tersimpulkan bahwa algoritma Boyer Moore berhasil melakukan pencarian string sebagai kecerdasan buatan pada game.

Eye Movements during dynamic scene viewing are affected by visual attention skills and events of the scene: Evidence from first-person shooter gameplay videos

The role of individual differences during dynamic scene viewing was explored. Participants (N=38) watched a gameplay video of a first-person shooter (FPS) videogame while their eye movements were recorded. In addition, the participants’ skills in three visual attention tasks (attentional blink, visual search, and multiple object tracking) were assessed. The results showed that individual differences in visual attention tasks were associated with eye movement patterns observed during viewing of the gameplay video. The differences were noted in four eye movement measures: number of fixations, fixation durations, saccade amplitudes and fixation distances from the center of the screen. The individual differences showed during specific events of the video as well as during the video as a whole. The results highlight that an unedited, fast-paced and cluttered dynamic scene can bring about individual differences in dynamic scene viewing.

Emergent Tangled Program Graphs in Partially Observable Recursive Forecasting and ViZDoom Navigation Tasks

Modularity represents a recurring theme in the attempt to scale evolution to the design of complex systems. However, modularity rarely forms the central theme of an artificial approach to evolution. In this work, we report on progress with the recently proposed Tangled Program Graph (TPG) framework in which programs are modules. The combination of the TPG representation and its variation operators enable both teams of programs and graphs of teams of programs to appear in an emergent process. The original development of TPG was limited to tasks with, for the most part, complete information. This work details two recent approaches for scaling TPG to tasks that are dominated by partially observable sources of information using different formulations of indexed memory. One formulation emphasizes the incremental construction of memory, again as an emergent process, resulting in a distributed view of state. The second formulation assumes a single global instance of memory and develops it as a communication medium, thus a single global view of state. The resulting empirical evaluation demonstrates that TPG equipped with memory is able to solve multi-task recursive time-series forecasting problems and visual navigation tasks expressed in two levels of a commercial first-person shooter environment.

Testing Moral Disengagement and Proteus Effect Predictions on Feelings of Guilt and Self-Empowerment Attributed to Bearing Guns

This study (179 participants, mean age 19. 98, 85% female) examined how violence justification via avatar role manipulations affected first-person shooter game players' subsequent feelings of guilt and self-empowerment attributed to bearing guns in the real-world. In support of the moral disengagement in violent video games model, an independent samples t-test suggested that participants assigned to play as gang members shooting at police officers felt guiltier than those assigned to play as police officers shooting at gang members. In support of Proteus effect predictions linked with self-perception and priming mechanisms, a one-way repeated measures analysis of variance suggested that self-empowerment attributed to carrying guns for both avatar roles increased from baseline to after gameplay, but avatar roles did not influence the increase. The lack of influence could be because participants did not adopt avatar behaviors with undesirable connotations. The results highlight avatar-user bonds through which the associations raised by virtual personas affected players' emotions and self-perception when engaging in simulated violence.

Using Visual Guides to Reduce Virtual Reality Sickness in First-Person Shooter Games: Correlation Analysis

Background The virtual reality (VR) content market is rapidly growing due to an increased supply of VR devices such as head-mounted displays (HMDs), whereas VR sickness (reported to occur while experiencing VR) remains an unsolved problem. The most widely used method of reducing VR sickness is the use of a rest frame that stabilizes the user's viewpoint by providing fixed visual stimuli in VR content (including video). However, the earth-fixed grid and natural independent visual background that are widely used as rest frames cannot maintain VR fidelity, as they reduce the immersion and the presence of the user. A visual guide is a visual element (eg, a crosshair of first-person shooter [FPS]) that induces a user's gaze movement within the VR content while maintaining VR fidelity, whereas there are no studies on the correlation of visual guide with VR sickness. Objective This study aimed to analyze the correlation between VR sickness and crosshair, which is widely used as a visual guide in FPS games. Methods Eight experimental scenarios were designed and evaluated, including having the visual guide on/off, the game controller on/off, and varying the size and position of the visual guide to determine the effect of visual guide on VR sickness. Results The results showed that VR sickness significantly decreased when visual guide was applied in an FPS game. In addition, VR sickness was lower when the visual guide was adjusted to 30% of the aspect ratio and positioned in the head-tracking direction. Conclusions The experimental results of this study indicate that the visual guide can achieve VR sickness reduction while maintaining user presence and immersion in the virtual environment. In other words, the use of a visual guide is expected to solve the existing limitation of distributing various types of content due to VR sickness.

“No One is Ever Ready for Something Like This.” – On the Dialectic of the Holocaust in First-Person Shooters as Exemplified by Wolfenstein: The New Order

For almost three decades, the depiction of the Holocaust was considered taboo in digital games. While World War II became a popular historicizing setting for digital games, the crimes of the Nazi regime and the Holocaust in particular remained conspicuously absent. In this article we show that discussions about the fundamental suitability of specific media or media forms for dealing responsibly with the memory of the Nazi regime’s crimes have already taken place several times and that similar arguments can now be applied to the digital game. With this in mind, we pursue the question of whether only so-called serious games are suitable for this purpose, or whether, on the contrary, mainstream blockbuster games – here specifically the first-person shooter Wolfenstein: The New Order – can find ways to maintain the memory of the Holocaust without trivializing it. We approach this question by analyzing chapter 8 of Wolfenstein: The New Order, in which protagonist William “B.J.” Blazkowicz allows himself to be deported to a Nazi concentration camp. We discuss this camp scene dialectically, on the one hand, as an encouragement to rethink the first-person shooter and, on the other hand, as a reproduction of a superficial iconography of the Holocaust.

Fear and loathing in VR: the emotional and physiological effects of immersive games

Compared to traditional screen-based media, virtual reality (VR) generally leads to stronger feelings of presence. The current study aimed to investigate whether playing games in VR resulted in a stronger sense of presence than playing on a TV, and whether these feelings of presence affected players’ emotional and physiological responses to the games. Two experiments were conducted among 128 students, comparing the effects of playing either a survival horror game (N = 59) or a first-person shooter (N = 69) on a TV or in VR on physiological and subjective fear, hostility and enjoyment. Results showed that playing games in VR resulted in a stronger sense of presence, lower heart rate variability and a stronger subjective sense of fear. The feeling of presence thereby mediated the effects of VR on fear. The effects of playing a first-person shooter in VR on hostility were mixed, and gaming in VR was not more enjoyable than on TV. Regardless of the type of game or display medium, hostility increased significantly post-play. This study provides evidence that commercial VR games can affect feelings of presence and the physiological and emotional state of players.