League of Legends Games have, as Gee puts it, a problem of content.

Putting overt academic content into games often dominates play, making it a much less pleasurable and engaging experience. Some games, however, pull off the opposite trick. They make academic content feel as joyful and exciting as play! I want to understand what makes the latter group of games work the way they do.To find out, I chose to deeply investigate a single game that successfully makes academic content playable. Interviewee-I tried playing League of Legends, but it's a horrible experience for a new player. The game has massive, fundamental flaws in its gameplay and balancing (which are shared by most DotA / MOBA games), flaws which encourage this kind of toxic behaviour.It's fast paced, highly competitive and requires strong team work to win, but it has incredibly punishing positive feedback loops that hurt you over and over again for every mistake and make you fall further and further behind as the game goes on. Having a bad / inexperienced player on your team not only ruins their experience and effectively leaves your team a man down (as they're completely useless by the end game, unable to fight AI or human enemies, dying quickly and then spending minutes at a time waiting to respawn), but it also helps the opposing team level up faster, making them not just a waste of space but an actual liability to your team. This highly charged atmosphere inevitably leads to insults, abuse and kick votes, as the team is better off kicking the newbie and carrying on 4 v 5 than keeping them on their team. Which is terrible game design. The fact that a complete newcomer to the game can end up in a match with experienced and ultra competitive players suggests that the matchmaking system doesn't work either (or that newcomers just don't last very long, meaning there aren't enough of them to start a match together). If there were more opportunities to practice, either offline or with other players at a similar skill level, there'd be less friction by the time you work your way up to the big league. But instead the game throws you in at the deep end, lets you inadvertently ruin the match for four other players, and gives your team mates no time or encouragement to help you improve your skills, instead giving them tools to insult you, kick you out of their game or abandon the match entirely. _My research goals across all three projects include the different ways students respond to these experiences. I hope to explore both individual personality differences and larger socio-cultural factors to understand the full range of reactions to game layers for learning not only the overtly positive ones. I am also interested in conceptual / epistemological change

among participants, so that we can begin to understand how a game layer influences their ideas about the underlying activity.

Player behavior in multiplayer online games has been a problem since the beginning of the genre. Efforts to change that behavior have been generally ineffectual, and the toolbox used by publishers has mostly been limited to warnings and the banhammer. Riot Games has been working on changing that using scientific methods, and the results are part of the reason League of Legends has become so popular. GamesIndustry International spoke with Riot's Jeffrey Lin, lead designer of social systems, and producer T. Carl Kwoh about what Riot has been able to accomplish. Lin, who previously worked at Valve and has a PhD in neuroscience, has approached the player behavior issue with scientific methodology. Riot's enormous player base provides a statistically significant amount of data to work with as the developer strives to improve the player experience. However, the issue of players behaving badly is not something that a company can fix by itself, Riot believes. "Player behavior is really a problem that needs to be tackled by the whole community," said Kwoh. "It's not going to be game developers or academics or players; it has to be everyone together." _"When you have a bad day at work, when you go home you have a higher frustration level before you even play a game," Lin explained. "You also have lower tolerance levels for what happens in the game. As soon as something happens in the game, you snap. That person might not do it in a hundred games, but we just have so many players that those mental instances keep happening throughout many games."

For the two meetings (Aug 13 & 15) that we will not meet for our Radio Prod and Broadcast Speech Classes, please be guided by the following things to do: DVC 206 (Radio/TV Production, Direction & Mgt) 1. Prepare for the PSA production which will be graded on Aug. 20 ( 1 & 2) and Aug 22 ( 3, 4 & 5) Please facilitate the groupings. 2. Based on the social issue/social concern you have in mind, look for a person who could best talk about that issue/concern. Make a script for a 5-minute interview. Submit the script on August 20, 2013 before 12:00 noon. MCM 210 (Broadcast Speech and Performance) 1. Interview a local broadcaster/announcer/host about the following: -- reading a "cold copy" or a script that is just handed to him/her to report immediately on air. How does he/she handles this to avoid mispronunciation, mumbling on air and missing the important details of the script. -- making commentary on air without any script... just a newspaper in front of him/her -- how does he/she makes ad lib spontaneously? -- how does he/she handles impromptu speaking engagement or broadcast duty? -- hos does he/she takes care of his voice and throat? Make a write-up based on your the interview guide questions. Put your write-up in a short bondpaper. Submit your work on August 20, 2013. 2. Search on the 2007 Broadcast Code of the Philippines and the provisions in the Philippine Constitution regarding media and broadcasting. Prepare for a long quizz on August 20, 2013.