Problematic Use of Video Games in Schools in Northern Benin (2023)

Objective: To study the problematic use of video games among secondary school students in the city of Parakou in 2023. Methods: Descriptive cross-sectional study conducted in the commune of Parakou from December 2022 to July 2023. The study population consisted of students regularly enrolled in public and private secondary schools in the city of Parakou for the 2022-2023 academic year. A two-stage non-proportional stratified sampling technique combined with simple random sampling was adopted. The Problem Video Game Playing (PVP) scale was used to assess problem gambling in the study population, while anxiety and depression were assessed using the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS). Results: A total of 1030 students were included. The mean age of the pupils surveyed was 15.06 ± 2.68 years, with extremes of 10 and 28 years. The [13 - 18] age group was the most represented, with a proportion of 59.6% (614) in the general population. Females predominated, at 52.8% (544), with a sex ratio of 0.89. The prevalence of problematic video game use was 24.9%, measured using the Video Game Playing scale. Associated factors were male gender (p = 0.005), pocket money under 10,000 cfa (p = 0.001) and between 20,000 - 90,000 cfa (p = 0.030), addictive family behavior (p < 0.001), monogamous family (p = 0.023), good relationship with father (p = 0.020), organization of video game competitions (p = 0.001) and definite anxiety (p Conclusion: Substance-free addiction is struggling to attract the attention it deserves, as it did in its infancy everywhere else. This study complements existing data and serves as a reminder of the need to focus on this group of addictions, whose problematic use of video games remains the most frequent due to its accessibility and social tolerance. Preventive action combined with curative measures remains the most effective means of combating the problem at national level.

A Value for Games Defined on Graphs

Given a graph g=( V,A ) , we define a space of subgraphs M with the binary operation of union and the unique decomposition property into blocks. This space allows us to discuss a notion of minimal subgraphs (minimal coalitions) that are of interest for the game. Additionally, a partition of the game is defined in terms of the gain of each block, and subsequently, a solution to the game is defined based on distributing to each player (node and edge) present in each block a payment proportional to their contribution to the coalition.

Value Iteration-Based Cooperative Adaptive Optimal Control for Multi-Player Differential Games With Incomplete Information

This paper presents a novel cooperative value iteration(VI)-based adaptive dynamic programming method for multi-player differential game models with a convergence proof.The players are divided into two groups in the learning process and adapt their policies sequentially.Our method removes the dependence of admissible initial policies,which is one of the main drawbacks of the PI-based frameworks.Furthermore,this algorithm enables the players to adapt their control policies without full knowledge of others’ system parameters or control laws.The efficacy of our method is illustrated by three examples.

Distributed Optimal Variational GNE Seeking in Merely Monotone Games

In this paper, the optimal variational generalized Nash equilibrium(v-GNE) seeking problem in merely monotone games with linearly coupled cost functions is investigated, in which the feasible strategy domain of each agent is coupled through an affine constraint. A distributed algorithm based on the hybrid steepest descent method is first proposed to seek the optimal v-GNE. Then, an accelerated algorithm with relaxation is proposed and analyzed, which has the potential to further improve the convergence speed to the optimal v-GNE. Some sufficient conditions in both algorithms are obtained to ensure the global convergence towards the optimal v-GNE. To illustrate the performance of the algorithms, numerical simulation is conducted based on a networked Nash-Cournot game with bounded market capacities.

Video Games and School Performances of Dakar High School Students

The triptych (Smartphones, Video games, adolescents) has imposed itself on the collective consciousness in the form of questioning to the point of becoming a social phenomenon. It thus raises concerns about the uses that adolescents make of it and the effects on their academic performance, which we proposed to study among middle school students from the Dakar academy inspection. Where appropriate, we used mixed methods with the collection techniques of questionnaire survey, semi-structured interviews respectively with middle school students, adults (parents, supervisors, teachers, etc.), participant observation and literature review. Concretely, before accessibility to video games, the middle school students were more idle and well-behaved, watched a lot of TV, played with their brothers and sisters or did household chores. The majority of young people had good, very good or excellent conduct and their averages were fair, fairly good or good. With access to a diverse digital environment, middle school students have passionately turned to video games. As a result, their learning time, concentration and submission to parental injunctions have declined significantly. This situation negatively affected their academic performance and encouraged bad behavior.

Mongolian Traditional Game-“Shagai”Features of Mongolian Traditional Games

In today’s interconnected global society,a crucial aspect that defines the identity of an independent country is its distinctive national heritage and values.Every country has many different cultures,and children’s games exist in every culture.Every culture has unique characteristics and norms that have been agreed upon by the members of the culture(Usman&Yusuf,2022).Mongolians believe that the future of their nation can be discerned through the toys that children play with.These toys reflect Mongolia’s nomadic culture,rich heritage,customs,precious belongings,and unique playthings.Mongolian culture and mentality are nurtured in children through play,and an essential aspect of Mongolian games is their close association with people’s work and way of life.The Mongolian toys stand as a significant intellectual contribution of the Mongolian people to human history.

The Impact of Sports Games on the Psychological Health of Middle School Students

This study conducted a 16-week comparative experiment with 160 students from Jinan No.5 Middle School in Shandong Province as the experimental subjects.During the implementation of the experiment,the subjects were divided into two groups:an experimental group and a control group.The experimental group was subjected to physical exercise interventions using sports game teaching methods during physical education class,while the control group followed traditional physical education teaching methods.The results showed that the psychological health status of the students in the experimental group was significantly better than that of the control group after the experiment.The application of sports games helps to improve the psychological health of middle school students in the course of physical education,promoting a positive and forward direction in student psychology and is an effective means to enhance the psychological health level of middle school students.

Distributed Nash Equilibrium Seeking for General Networked Games With Bounded Disturbances

This paper is concerned with anti-disturbance Nash equilibrium seeking for games with partial information.First,reduced-order disturbance observer-based algorithms are proposed to achieve Nash equilibrium seeking for games with firstorder and second-order players,respectively.In the developed algorithms,the observed disturbance values are included in control signals to eliminate the influence of disturbances,based on which a gradient-like optimization method is implemented for each player.Second,a signum function based distributed algorithm is proposed to attenuate disturbances for games with secondorder integrator-type players.To be more specific,a signum function is involved in the proposed seeking strategy to dominate disturbances,based on which the feedback of the velocity-like states and the gradients of the functions associated with players achieves stabilization of system dynamics and optimization of players'objective functions.Through Lyapunov stability analysis,it is proven that the players'actions can approach a small region around the Nash equilibrium by utilizing disturbance observerbased strategies with appropriate control gains.Moreover,exponential(asymptotic)convergence can be achieved when the signum function based control strategy(with an adaptive control gain)is employed.The performance of the proposed algorithms is tested by utilizing an integrated simulation platform of virtual robot experimentation platform(V-REP)and MATLAB.

A game-theoretic approach for federated learning:A trade-off among privacy,accuracy and energy

Benefiting from the development of Federated Learning(FL)and distributed communication systems,large-scale intelligent applications become possible.Distributed devices not only provide adequate training data,but also cause privacy leakage and energy consumption.How to optimize the energy consumption in distributed communication systems,while ensuring the privacy of users and model accuracy,has become an urgent challenge.In this paper,we define the FL as a 3-layer architecture including users,agents and server.In order to find a balance among model training accuracy,privacy-preserving effect,and energy consumption,we design the training process of FL as game models.We use an extensive game tree to analyze the key elements that influence the players’decisions in the single game,and then find the incentive mechanism that meet the social norms through the repeated game.The experimental results show that the Nash equilibrium we obtained satisfies the laws of reality,and the proposed incentive mechanism can also promote users to submit high-quality data in FL.Following the multiple rounds of play,the incentive mechanism can help all players find the optimal strategies for energy,privacy,and accuracy of FL in distributed communication systems.

The Confidentiality of Coding Video Games with Cheat Code and Bots for Cheating in a Virtual World

Video games have been around for several decades and have had many advancements from the original start of video games. Video games started as virtual games that were advertised towards children, and these virtual games created a virtual reality of a variety of genres. These genres included sports games, such as tennis, football, baseball, war games, fantasy, puzzles, etc. The start of these games was derived from a sports genre and now has a popularity in multiplayer-online-shooting games. The purpose of this paper is to investigate different types of tools available for cheating in virtual world making players have undue advantage over other players in a competition. With the advancement in technology, these video games have become more expanded in the development aspects of gaming. Video game developers have created long lines of codes to create a new look of video games. As video games have progressed, the coding, bugs, bots, and errors of video games have changed throughout the years. The coding of video games has branched out from the original video games, which have given many benefits to this virtual world, while simultaneously creating more problems such as bots. Analysis of tools available for cheating in a game has disadvantaged normal gamer in a fair contest.

Effects of a closed-loop system against SARS-CoV-2 at the Beijing 2022 Olympic Winter Games:a descriptive and modeling study

BACKGROUND:To assess the efficacy of the epidemic prevention measures of the“closed-loop”system adopted by the Beijing 2022 Olympic Winter Games(BOWG).METHODS:We retrospectively collected and analyzed information,including age,sex,nationality,vaccination status,date of diagnosis,and date of entry,from 280 SARS-CoV-2-positive individuals identified during the BOWG.A susceptibility-exposed-infectious-remove model was employed to evaluate the effectiveness of epidemic prevention strategies on controlling the spread of SARS-CoV-2 under different scenarios during the BOWG.RESULTS:Regarding SARS-CoV-2-positive cases,97.9%were imported,and 96.4%were asymptomatic.The median age was 37 years(range:29–47 years),and 73.9%were male,with the majority of cases being broadcasters and European attendees.Regarding vaccination status,93.5%were fully vaccinated,and six cases were considered to have been infected in the closed-loop system during the BOWG.Assuming that the BOWG adopted a semi-closed-loop management system,the cumulative number of confirmed cases would be 1,137 for quick quarantine measures(3 d later)implemented and 5,530 for delayed quarantine measures(9 d later)implemented.This modeling revealed that stringent pandemic prevention measures and closed-loop management effectively controlled the spread of SARS-CoV-2 during the BOWG.CONCLUSION:Imported cases are considered the main risk factor for SARS-CoV-2 transmission during mass gatherings,but a comprehensive closed-loop system could minimize transmission among attendees and general personnel.

Dart Games Optimizer with Deep Learning-Based Computational Linguistics Named Entity Recognition

Computational linguistics is an engineering-based scientific discipline.It deals with understanding written and spoken language from a computational viewpoint.Further,the domain also helps construct the artefacts that are useful in processing and producing a language either in bulk or in a dialogue setting.Named Entity Recognition(NER)is a fundamental task in the data extraction process.It concentrates on identifying and labelling the atomic components from several texts grouped under different entities,such as organizations,people,places,and times.Further,the NER mechanism identifies and removes more types of entities as per the requirements.The significance of the NER mechanism has been well-established in Natural Language Processing(NLP)tasks,and various research investigations have been conducted to develop novel NER methods.The conventional ways of managing the tasks range from rule-related and hand-crafted feature-related Machine Learning(ML)techniques to Deep Learning(DL)techniques.In this aspect,the current study introduces a novel Dart Games Optimizer with Hybrid Deep Learning-Driven Computational Linguistics(DGOHDL-CL)model for NER.The presented DGOHDL-CL technique aims to determine and label the atomic components from several texts as a collection of the named entities.In the presented DGOHDL-CL technique,the word embed-ding process is executed at the initial stage with the help of the word2vec model.For the NER mechanism,the Convolutional Gated Recurrent Unit(CGRU)model is employed in this work.At last,the DGO technique is used as a hyperparameter tuning strategy for the CGRU algorithm to boost the NER’s outcomes.No earlier studies integrated the DGO mechanism with the CGRU model for NER.To exhibit the superiority of the proposed DGOHDL-CL technique,a widespread simulation analysis was executed on two datasets,CoNLL-2003 and OntoNotes 5.0.The experimental outcomes establish the promising performance of the DGOHDL-CL technique over other models.

Analysis of Students’ Preferences and Engagement with Mobile Games: A Study of Game Assets and Colour Impact

Mobile games are gaining in popularity among students, although the factors driving engagement remain poorly understood. This study, conducted among 378 students studying for a Bachelor’s degree in Computer and Digital Sciences at the Université Virtuelle de Côte d’Ivoire, explores the influence of game assets and colours on player engagement. Using an online questionnaire, the study identified students’ gaming preferences and their perception of colours. The results show that the key elements most favoured by students are graphics, sound design, the game system, narrative, interactivity and accessibility. What’s more, colour plays a decisive role in their preferences and commitment to educational mobile games.

Evolutionary games and spatial periodicity

Spatial interactions are considered an important factor influencing a variety of evolutionary processes that take place in structured populations.It still remains an open problem to fully understand evolutionary game dynamics on networks except for certain limiting scenarios such as weak selection.Here we study the evolutionary dynamics of spatial games under strong selection where strategy evolution of individuals becomes deterministic in a fashion of winners taking all.We show that the long term behavior of the evolutionary process eventually converges to a particular basin of attraction,which is either a periodic cycle or a single fixed state depending on specific initial conditions and model parameters.In particular,we find that symmetric starting configurations can induce an exceedingly long transient phase encompassing a large number of aesthetic spatial patterns including the prominent kaleidoscopic cooperation.Our finding holds for any population structure and a broad class of finite games beyond the Prisoner’s Dilemma.Our work offers insights into understanding evolutionary dynamics of spatially extended systems ubiquitous in biology and ecology.

Using Didactic Games in Teaching Mathematic

This article aims to examine the effect of the use of didactic games in mathematics teaching on students’achievements and knowledge accumulation in the classroom.The study also assessed the students’perceptions of these learning games.The study was carried out with the experimental pre-test-post-test control group design.The research team of this study is five.The class consists of 64 students.Two groups of fifth grade students were randomly assigned as experimental and control groups.According to the results,it is shown that didactic games increase students’academic achievements and are an effective tool for lecturing.

Equilibrium Strategy of the Pursuit-Evasion Game in Three-Dimensional Space

The pursuit-evasion game models the strategic interaction among players, attracting attention in many realistic scenarios, such as missile guidance, unmanned aerial vehicles, and target defense. Existing studies mainly concentrate on the cooperative pursuit of multiple players in two-dimensional pursuit-evasion games. However, these approaches can hardly be applied to practical situations where players usually move in three-dimensional space with a three-degree-of-freedom control. In this paper,we make the first attempt to investigate the equilibrium strategy of the realistic pursuit-evasion game, in which the pursuer follows a three-degree-of-freedom control, and the evader moves freely. First, we describe the pursuer's three-degree-of-freedom control and the evader's relative coordinate. We then rigorously derive the equilibrium strategy by solving the retrogressive path equation according to the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman-Isaacs(HJBI) method, which divides the pursuit-evasion process into the navigation and acceleration phases. Besides, we analyze the maximum allowable speed for the pursuer to capture the evader successfully and provide the strategy with which the evader can escape when the pursuer's speed exceeds the threshold. We further conduct comparison tests with various unilateral deviations to verify that the proposed strategy forms a Nash equilibrium.

Sustainable Development of Internet Literature in the Era of Games and Animation:Challenges and Opportunities

The rapid development of Internet literature not only made itself the source of information about animation and the gaming industry,but also boosted the creation of super writers who are now establishing themselves as IP(intellectual property)producers and providers.Rather than creating literary classics,these writers prefer producing commercial novels targeted at a certain group of readers.Meanwhile,the structure of their works tends to cater to the preferences of online games and animation,with the narrative and characters in the novel adjusting accordingly.These changes have enhanced the influence of Internet literature.But an excessive emphasis on IP gradually converts the novels into scripts for games with highly stereotyped content and structure.Fastpaced writing also renders their works with a lack of polish,including such serious problems as mismatched plots and repetitive narratives.Therefore,Internet literature is in urgent need of positive guidance,as its development will be stalled due to the excessive emphasis on IP.

On Topics in Quantum Games

This work concentrates on simultaneous move non-cooperating quantum games. Part of it is evidently not new, but it is included for the sake self consistence, as it is devoted to introduction of the mathematical and physical grounds of the pertinent topics, and the way in which a simple classical game is modified to become a quantum game (a procedure referred to as a quantization of a classical game). The connection between game theory and information science is briefly stressed, and the role of quantum entanglement (that plays a central role in the theory of quantum games), is exposed. Armed with these tools, we investigate some basic concepts like the existence (or absence) of a pure strategy and mixed strategy Nash equilibrium and its relation with the degree of entanglement. The main results of this work are as follows: 1) Construction of a numerical algorithm based on the method of best response functions, designed to search for pure strategy Nash equilibrium in quantum games. The formalism is based on the discretization of a continuous variable into a mesh of points, and can be applied to quantum games that are built upon two-players two-strategies classical games, based on the method of best response functions. 2) Application of this algorithm to study the question of how the existence of pure strategy Nash equilibrium is related to the degree of entanglement (specified by a continuous parameter γ ). It is shown that when the classical game GC has a pure strategy Nash equilibrium that is not Pareto efficient, then the quantum game GQ with maximal entanglement (γ = π/2) has no pure strategy Nash equilibrium. By studying a non-symmetric prisoner dilemma game, it is found that there is a critical value 0γc such that for γγc there is a pure strategy Nash equilibrium and for γ≥γc there is no pure strategy Nash equilibrium. The behavior of the two payoffs as function of γ starts at that of the classical ones at (D, D) and approaches the cooperative classical ones at (C, C) (C = confess, D = don’t confess). 3) We then study Bayesian quantum games and show that under certain conditions, there is a pure strategy Nash equilibrium in such games even when entanglement is maximal. 4) We define the basic ingredients of a quantum game based on a two-player three strategies classical game. This requires the introduction of trits (instead of bits) and quantum trits (instead of quantum bits). It is proved that in this quantum game, there is no classical commensurability in the sense that the classical strategies are not obtained as a special case of the quantum strategies.

智能媒体视野下Riot Games的文化输出与粉丝经济

在日新月异的互联网与新媒体环境中,携带着独特话语体系的粉丝文化自然而然地进入了电竞文化并重塑了围绕着电竞赛事的信息经济。身处此境的Riot Games(拳头游戏)秉持一种“去传统体育化”的理念。本文从电竞产业的用户整体情况切入,提出Riot Games依托电竞产业中厂商与用户直接联系的优势,在经营游戏及其赛事的同时还借助智能媒体进行虚拟偶像K/DA、动画剧集《英雄联盟:双城之战》等文化衍生品的生产与传播,并探讨其在“电子竞技+”模式下基于粉丝参与行为的商业模式所进行的探索与实践,以期为电子竞技文化的价值延展与电子竞技生态的可持续性发展研究提供参考。

Analysis of Differences Between Popular Mobile Games in China and Japan From a Cross-Cultural Perspective: A Case Study of Genshin Impact and Uma Musume: Pretty Derby

Genshin Impact and Uma Musume:Pretty Derby are two of the hottest mobile games in China and Japan,respectively,in the past two years,both of which have gained enormous popularity and revenue in their home countries.This paper focuses on the cross-cultural perspective,and analyzes the differences between the two games and their reasons for their popularity from three aspects:character design,cultural background,and game genre.