Recently, game engines have been widely developed and reused to reduce the cost of large-scale game software development. However, thus far, research into game engine architectures has been very less, and therefore, some confusion still persists within the game industry. Therefore, we propose a 3D game framework developed in our laboratory as a benchmark for architectural comparisons. To show the suitability of the framework as a benchmark, we qualitatively and quantitatively compared it with an open source game engine, jMonkeyEngine. For the quantitative comparison, we ported a tutorial game of jMonkeyEngine to our game framework, and confirmed the advantage of the framework in ease of integration, efficiency of implementation, and performance.

View full abstract

This study primarily examined the flow experience of game play to elucidate the influences of music and sound effect on the player while playing a block-breaking game. The study then examined the “flow” influence of music and sound effects on playing the block-breaking game. The results indicate that “dark and agitated music” reduces the “flow” of game play.

View full abstract

To examine how visual and auditory information are used by players for game play when playing an arcade game with an immersive display, and how this information is associated with enjoyment and sensation of presence, we measured game performance (e.g., a game score) with various visual masks restricting peripheral information (Experiments 1 and 2) and different sound conditions (with and without sound; Experiment 3). The results suggest that players have a certain size of “effective visual space” where peripheral information can be used. Furthermore, the results suggest that auditory information, together with a wide range of visual information, would enhance the player’s enjoyment and sensation of presence during game play.

View full abstract

With focus on microflow phenomenon, this study tried to evaluate how game playing influences anxiety and sleepiness. These psychological effects were evaluated within a time range that began from mid- afternoon to early evening. Ten subjects were asked to play two different types of portable games, a music game and a puzzle game. Subjects were required to play each of these games three times, a total of six plays per subject. Wakefulness and fatigue levels in each subject were measured before and after playing the games. During actual play, measurements of electrodermal activity and “flow” state were obtained. Comparisons were made with respect to the different game types, trial means, and software content. Subjects showed increased arousal levels for both games. On the other hand, the music game decreased the level of sleepiness while increasing the level of vitality, whereas the subjects’ level of anxiety eased while playing the puzzle game.

View full abstract

A total of 884 articles published in an independent Japanese game review magazine from 1994 to 2006 were analyzed to estimate the evaluative components of the target games. The user experience is expressed descriptively in the review articles. After syntactic parsing of the whole article text, a co-occurrence analysis and a cluster analysis were used to determine its underlying conceptual structure. Among 15 clusters obtained, we identified two newly found evaluative components of games, “novelty” and “market,” that were highly interrelated to evaluative adjectives. Also, we analyzed trends of major descriptive contents of the review articles over the 10-year period using the clusters.

View full abstract

This experiment examined the effects of violent videogames on the aggressive behaviors of 33 female university students and what moderates or mediates the effect of these violent video games. The study used a between-subjects design with three treatment conditions: (a) playing a videogame in which violence was greatly rewarded, (b) playing a videogame in which violence was less rewarded, and (c) watching a movie that was not violent. After the participants played video games or watched a video, hostile feeling, negative mood, physiology indexes, and inactivity were measured. Then, the participants had an opportunity to apply electrical current to confederates to assess their aggressive behavior. The results showed that playing violent video games increased aggressive behavior, and rewards moderated this effect. Negative mood and inactivity mediated the effect of violent video games on aggressive behaviors.

View full abstract