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Background : During the 2020-2021 COVID-19 lockdown, social activities were limited by the government-recommended social distancing guidelines leading to an abundance of mental health issues. Methods : We hypothesized that Twitter sentiment analysis may shed some light on Animal Crossing: New Horizons and its impact on mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic. Results : We found the use social gaming and social media may be used as tools to cope with stress during the COVID-19 pandemic. Conclusions : Further research, including randomized designs and prospective measurements of mental health outcomes related to social gaming behavior are required.

Background Computer and video console gaming has been discussed as having great potential in engaging people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and providing a relatively safe platform for social contact. There is a paucity of research in this domain. Aim This paper reports on the evaluation of a site based social gaming programme for young adults with ASD. Methods Semi structured interviews were conducted with six participants and eight parents of seven separate participants approximately 12 months from the commencement of the group. Findings It was identified that the shared interest in gaming provided a motivating platform on which to base social interaction. Participants identified the benefits of the group as getting them out of the house and being a site where they have had meaningful social contact based on something about which they are confident. Parents identified that they had observed similar benefits. They discussed a wish for closer contact with the service provider and an individualized plan for their family member including a plan for transition to other leisure activity work or study. Discussion It became clear that a group and process structure needs to be consciously developed and made explicit to participants and their family/carers to allow realisation of the group aims.

Social media has reshaped business models, economies, politics, and culture around the world. In this paper, we identified social media stocks from various sectors by using a strict, academic definition and then studied their performance and return characteristics. Multivariate regression results demonstrate that being recognized as a social media firm yields extra return. The performance of social media stocks is not associated with macro-level sentiment, but rather with firm-level attention paid by potential investors. Causality tests indicate that the default risk premium and volatility have incremental power in explaining the performance of social media stocks.

Several studies provided evidence for the effectiveness of gamification of health behaviors (e.g., exercising or walking) via video games. However, little is known about whether individuals who endorse specific gaming motivations are more likely to derive health benefits from gaming. Building upon previous studies on gamification of health behaviors, we examined whether specific gaming motives (e.g., potential health benefits) influenced Pokmon GO gaming time and gaming health outcomes, a phenomenon we termed The Pikachu Effect. We introduced health motivation as a novel component among previously established gaming motives, which reflects the ongoing gameplay transformation and increased health potential of modern games. Volunteers (N=444) completed two measurements of Pokmon GO motivations, gaming time, physical activity, and time spent outdoors within a 6 week interval. The results supported the Pikachu effect hypothesis as health motivation and social motivation were related to health outcomes. Furthermore, we replicated previous findings indicating that individuals who spent more time playing Pokmon GO were more physical active. We also evidenced a new Pokmon GO playing behavioral benefit, i.e., increased time spent outdoors among more active players. We explored meaningful individual differences; for example, men played more and derived more benefits from Pokmon GO. These findings suggest that health motivation operates in parallel with previously identified main motives for gaming. Accounting for motivation is essential for a more accurate prediction of gaming time and gaming-related health behaviors. We examined whether gaming health motivation determined greater health benefits.Individuals who played Pokmon Go more were more physically active.Individuals who played Pokmon Go more spent more time outdoors.Health and social gaming motives predicted stronger health outcomes.Men played more and derived more health benefits from Pokmon GO.

Traditional marketing has been using the Internet as a mean of transport for advertising, usually through the use of banners or sponsored links. However, new tendencies in digital marketing are focusing on added interactivity, where the use of games as a marketing tool is not new. Moreover, the portion of population engaged in social networks is quickly increasing, turning these into preferred targets for marketing actions, considering the potential of retrieving valuable personal, demographic and geographic data. Forwarding recent advances in data mining and knowledge extraction to this model would therefore turn it into a powerful tool to measure the impact of marketing and branding actions, while reinforcing marketing strategy. In this paper we present GameFoundry , a new online platform that aims at creating an innovative Web Game Engine and Game Distribution system, which will provide support for knowledge management and game activity monitoring based on simple network games. It is intended to give the users the possibility of playing games in several environments, platforms and social networks, and to provide the clients of this product the ability to create, independently, a set of games with proprietary contents, distribute them over the network and have constant access to game activity, statistics and advanced user profiling, collective behavior and predictive models.

This paper describes the core features and the multi-agent architecture of AMUSE (Agent-based Multi-User Social Environment), a novel agent-based platform for social gaming. AMUSE is designed to offer game developers readymade solutions to many issues that are common to social games like, e.g., advanced management of matches, turns and players. AMUSE is developed on top of WADE to leverage the scalable and solid agent-based deployment environment and the PaaS approach that it provides. This paper first outlines some of the motivations that originated the development of AMUSE. Then, it presents the multi-agent architecture of AMUSE and it enumerates the major applicative features that the platform provides. Finally, the paper briefly outlines initial experiments on game prototyping using the platform.

Social media has changed and reshaped business models, economies, politics, and culture around the world. We identify social media stocks from various sectors by using a strict, academic definition and then study their performance, return characteristics, and contribution to portfolio management. Various multivariate regression results demonstrate that being recognized as a social media firm yields extra return. Investor attention is significantly priced, although investor sentiment is not. This suggests that macro level furor for social media stocks is not the cause, but rather investors paying attention at the firm level to these selections. Causality tests indicate that the default risk premium and volatility have incremental power in explaining the performance of social media stocks.