Issues on Acting in Digital Dramas

With advanced technology there are new possibilities to interact in virtual environments. Game players are being given more and more new opportunities to intervene as avatars in what is happening in the game, take on roles, and alter the flow of the stories. Through the interaction of many users new storylines and plot constructs are developed, which demonstrate many typical characteristics of modern dramas which are performed in real theatres – the plot is, for example, non-linear and attention is no longer paid to uniting time, place, and plot. These digital “performances” differ greatly from plays performed on real stages, however they are programmed as computer games with the result that the plot must fit into a pre-defined interaction pattern. The players are not casted like real actors. They step out onto the virtual stage as non-trained avatar actors and apart from the usual help options there is initially no director to instruct them. Also, the actions of the virtual actors are not foreseeable and the stories told have no distinct dramatic composition. One of the challenging problems of tomorrow’s iTV is how to generate a digital drama that looks like a real movie but which emerges out of the interaction of many users. The problem of actors’ credibility has been widely discussed in the relevant literature, however only in the context of the traditional theatre play. This chapter describes the concept of a future digital drama and investigates some fundamental aspects of acting in digital environments. The focus is put on the “competitive acting”, a new paradigm for digital stage plays of the future which combine drama with interaction-driven dialogue and action elements in converged media.

Interactive Visualization and Exploration of Video Spaces through Colors in Motion

This chapter identifies challenges and concepts inherent to the visualization and exploration of video spaces and presents an approach through ColorsInMotion, an interactive environment to process, visualize and explore a video space with a semantic focus on cultural aspects like music and dance, and stressing features such as their color dominance, rhythm and movement, at the level of the video space and the individual videos. It provides means to capture, experience, and express videos’ properties and relations, allowing to gain insights into our culture and to influence the expression of its intrinsic aesthetics in creative ways.

Lovely Place to Buy!

Ubiquitous services offer huge business potential for grocery stores, however they also for increase the shopper’s experience. This chapter especially devotes the issue of exploiting the possibilities of ubiquitous services while shopping. It presents clear guidelines and implications for the development of systems aiding the consumer through their shopping activities.

P2P SCCM

Peer-to-Peer Service-oriented Community Coordinated Multimedia (SCCM) is envisioned as a novel paradigm in which the user consumes multiple media through requesting multimedia-intensive Web services via diversity display devices, converged networks, and heterogeneous platforms within a virtual, open and collaborative community in this chapter. A generic P2P SCCM scenario is created and examined first. A SCCM model is designed with the adoption of the service orientation approach and principles. A tunneled hierarchical P2P model is designed for improving performance of service lookup and session setup. Next, performance analysis is presented with the average number of service lookup hops in the tunneled hierarchical P2P model. Finally, a prototype service implementation is presented with the design of content annotation service and application on face detection.

Re-coding the Algorithm

This chapter highlights the different types of play possible within videogames, developing Roger Caillois’ (1958) original categories of “paidia” and “ludus”. The game is examined in terms of Lev Manovich’s (2001) concept of the “algorithm”, in order to see how different syntagms of play are possible within the greater game paradigm. Play is categorised in terms of purposeful play, defined as the play intended by the designer, as opposed to appropriated play, which is discovered by players seeking more from the system. It is through these new terms that different types of motivation for play are discussed, leading to an analysis of how playing outside of the intended rules of the game can be considered through new terminology beyond the often negative connotations of cheating.

Teaching Group Decision Making Skills to Emergency Managers via Digital Games

This chapter discusses how a focus on establishing the appropriate learning outcomes of an educational programme, and creatively incorporating these learning outcomes within the design of a game, can lead to the development of a useful educational game. Specifically, it demonstrates the process involved in generating game design criteria from a multi-disciplinary literature review. The design of a game that has been developed as part of a project to train emergency managers in group decision making and communications skills is presented, along with some initial evaluations of that game design. It appears that the game presented can function as a valid practical element of a programme for the training of group decision making and communication skills with emergency management personnel.

Exploring the Ecosystems and Principles of Community Innovation

In this chapter, we explore some of the contemporary configurations of what we will refer to as community innovation. We probe the relevance of the phenomena by illustrating and comparing the digital ecosystems that surround some communities that innovate together in a world of social media and Web 2.0 tools. In particular, two cases are used to illustrate the arguments: a collective venture for designing electric car conversion kits (eCars – Now!) and a looser collective representing the development ties of LEGO® user groups with the firm. These cases are presented through their existing ecosystem and communication tools and the ways in which their stories challenge linear and individualistic models of innovation. We argue that, for these communities, configuring and constructing an appropriate set of communication tools and new media seem critical in negotiating a place for themselves between grassroots cultural innovation and corporate control. In doing this, we also suggest some social principles that drive community innovation practices, as they are present through our examples.

A Knowledge-Based Multimedia Adaptation Management Framework for Ubiquitous Services

The range of multimedia contents and services on the Internet, the diversity of terminals, and the heterogeneity of network technologies make it less and less feasible and rather costly for providers to prepare contents and services in advance in all conceivable formats. There is a need to incorporate dynamic adaptation management into existing multimedia content/service delivery networks. We propose an Adaptation Management Framework (AMF) that provides architectural and functional support allowing dynamic and autonomous content/service adaptation without introducing additional complexities to the actual content/service provider or the user. The AMF provides functionalities needed in such an automated adaptation process, including context representation, adaptation decision making and adaptation operations selection across heterogeneous entities and platforms. It alleviates the complexity of those tasks using ontology representation formalism and knowledge-based processing techniques. It deploys itself as well as associated third-party applications, such as adaptation tools, as Web Services to enhance the interoperability among different entities. The AMF can be plugged into content/service delivery networks as an adaptation engine and serves as an invisible service enabler for ubiquitous content/service delivery.

Analyzing User Behavior in Digital Games

User research in digital game development has in recent years begun to expand from a previous existence on the sideline of development, to a central factor in game production, in recognition that the interaction between user and game is crucial to the perceived user experience. Paralleling this development, the methods and tools available for conducting user research in the industry and academia is changing, with modern methods being adopted from Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Ubiquitous tracking of player behavior and player-game interaction forms one of the most recent additions to the arsenal of user-research testers in game development and game research. Player behavior instrumentation data can be recorded during all phases of game development, including post-launch, and forms a means for obtaining highly detailed, non-intrusive records of how people play games. Behavioral analysis is a relatively recent adoption to game development and research. However, it is central to understanding how games are being played. In this chapter, the current state-of-the-art of behavior analysis in digital games is reviewed, and a series of case studies are presented that showcase novel approaches of behavior analysis and how this can inform game development during production. The case studies focus on the major commercial game titles Kane & Lynch: Dog Days and Fragile Alliance, both developed by IO Interactive/Square Enix Europe.

Unravelling Intellectual Property in a Specialist Social Networking Site

This chapter examines how the complexity of motivations and practices found in a specialist social networking site intersect with the institutions of intellectual property. The popular niche or specialist social networking site (SNS) called Ravelry, which caters to knitters, crocheters and spinners, is used as a case study. In this site people use, buy, sell, give away, and consume in a mixed economy that can be characterised as a ‘social network market’(Potts et al., 2008). In a co-creative social networking site we find not only a multidirectional and multi-authored process of co-production, but also a concatenation of amateurs, semi-professionals and professionals occupying multiple roles in gifting economies, reputation economies, monetised charitable economies and full commercial economies.