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Casinos offer a variety of dining experiences to appeal to the tastes of different customers. The aim of this paper is to investigate the indirect impact of dining by restaurant type on gaming by worth segment.

Data from two hotel‐casinos were analyzed using time series regression analysis. Variables representing restaurant covers at steakhouse, buffet and casual dining venues were used to predict slot coin‐in for five customer worth segments.

Steakhouse dining was a significant predictor of slot coin‐in for high worth players, buffet and casual dining were related to low‐worth gaming volume, whereas medium‐worth players were impacted by a range of dining options.

Regression analysis does not imply causality, and the results may not hold for other casino properties or sample time periods.

The findings have implications for the optimal restaurant mix at casinos and the types of offers that are given to different customer worth segments. This study also helps casino operators evaluate the profitability of each type of restaurant they operate.

The research fills a gap in the casino literature by segmenting customers using the same metric as casino operators, namely gaming worth. It provides new insight into indirect dining‐gaming relationships by investigating different restaurant types.

This paper aims to describe innovations at the Games + Learning + Society Center to explore the future of education.

This paper is an overview of several published studies and design interventions.

Commercial partnerships, particularly generating copyrightable materials can maximize impact and diversify research funding, but they also run counter to the culture and purpose of many research universities.

Researchers interested in forging new partnerships to maximize impact might explore relationships with commercial entities but be aware that they are running counter to the grain of most institutions and goals. Other universities of different sizes, ages and orientations may have different results.

Building private partnerships requires different staffing and skill sets than traditional research. Guidance for staffing key roles and projects are provided.

This paper is a reflection on unique research initiative that generated revenue and helped shape a subfield of education.

This case aims to study the growth, evolution, and social innovation of iThrive Games, a socially minded initiative that aims to create meaningful opportunities using technology for teens to enhance the knowledge, mindsets, and skills they need to thrive through development and across the continuum of mental disorder to wellness. iThrive's focus has been on creating “meaningful games”—that is, games that promote health and well-being of teen players. Founded in 2014 by Dorothy Batten, President of DN Batten Foundation, the organization's mission was to collaborate with game developers, partner with teens across the game development cycle (ideation to testing), and provide resources to foster teen thriving through gameplay. To do so, the organization took a unique social entrepreneurial approach. Drawing on a positive psychology framework and building the brand among key stakeholders including game developers, researchers, funders, youth, educators, and parents, the organization orchestrated a community dedicated to advancing the meaningful games field, and in doing so, have widespread impact.

The purpose of this guest editorial is to provide the introduction and context of the Special Issue on Games for Learning and Dialogue on Humanitarian Work. The Special Issue aims to promote the development, deployment, and analysis of games for the humanitarian sector: it investigates how games can meaningfully engage people and organizations in experiencing, understanding and improving complex systems.

The editorial describes the need and motivation for building a body of knowledge on the use of games in the humanitarian sector. It further gives an overview of the three papers included in this Special Issue and how they contribute to building such a body of knowledge.

Games enable participants to experience the complexity of humanitarian systems, linking decisions with consequences. Even though game-like approaches have been used for decades in disaster management, there is little written about it. The papers included in this Special Issue provide insights and frameworks to learn from, ranging from online tools that reveal inefficiencies in supply chains, to simulated emergency response exercises, to applied improvisation. In addition, the current papers highlight the need for more empirical study of the impact of games.

The Special Issue describes three unique cases, which by no means cover the entire practice of games in the humanitarian sector. However, they do provide insight into the diversity of game-like approaches and signal the current state of practice and research of games for learning and dialogue on humanitarian work.

This editorial gives an overview of how games could be used in practice and why they are relevant for humanitarian work. It further highlights how the contributions in the Special Issue may help in improving humanitarian work.

Although review papers and Special Issues have appeared on particular topics such as climate change, to our knowledge no significant academic attention has been given to humanitarian work with regards to games.

Online games are popular applications of Internet technology, with over 2.8 billion users worldwide. Many players engage in team gameplay, indicating that online games are suitable media through which players connect with their friends. However, past studies have not examined the ability of games to assist players in connecting with their friends, indicating a gap. To fill this gap, the authors propose a new concept, the friend-connecting affordance, which is the ability of an online game to enable players to contact friends within the game.

The authors built a model to explain how games' friend-connecting affordances influence game loyalty. The authors gathered responses from 1,347 online players and used structural equation modeling to test the model.

The authors found that friend-connecting affordances and team participation influence game loyalty. Gaming intensity and gaming history can moderate the impact of friend-connecting affordances.

This new affordance can be realized through various game elements, offering unique and actionable insights to game makers. The authors also compared the friend-connecting affordances among a number of popular online games, providing insights specific to each game and increasing the practical value of the findings.

This paper aims to provide a framework for understanding and differentiating among different forms of game-based teaching and learning (GBTL).

The framework is based on an analysis of existing literature and descriptions of GBTL in varied higher education settings, combined with case examples of the author’s personal experience as instructors of GBTL courses.

Four frames or categories of GBTL approaches were identified: the action frame, the structuring frame, the bridging frame and the design frame. Each frame represents a spectrum of related yet varied strategies and assumptions.

This framework is a first attempt at providing an analytic tool for making sense of the varied instantiations of GBTL in higher education. It can be useful as a heuristic tool for researchers as well as a generative model for designing future GBTL practices.

Among scholarly analyses of sport demand, few have considered the demand for match replays despite replays' indispensable role in sport broadcasts. Different from live matches, viewers of match replays generally have access to match outcomes. Outcome uncertainty is thus less relevant in attracting viewers. This paper addresses this research gap by analyzing the demand for replays of competitive esports matches.

We collected match replay data for two competitive esports leagues, CrossFire Pro League and King Pro League, from two Chinese esports online platforms, Douyu.com and Huya.com. Drawing on two economic theories of superstar effects—a skilled-based theory and a popularity-based theory, we performed regression analyses and dominance analyses to examine the demand for esports match replays.

Our results indicated skill to be more important in the demand for tactical games while non-skill-popularity is more instrumental in attracting viewers to replays of leisurely games. The platform with knowledge-sharing features also exhibited a stronger skill impact for tactical games.

Findings contribute to the understanding of sport match replays and offer implications for esports organizers and broadcasters to market games effectively.

The purpose of this paper is to inform designers and researchers about the current state of play in videogames in education and its broader context.

This synthetic piece reflects the author’s past decade of work and observation in the domain. It is not a research piece but a reflective essay.

Structural issues inflect the development of games for learning. Here, the author argues for the incubation of a new indie scene in educational domains on par with the burgeoning indie scene in commercial entertainment games.

This is a short essay for scholars, designers and leaders in games for learning who work inside academics yet aspire to have their work impact not only on publications but also on products.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the marketing literature and practice by examining the effect of product pricing on consumer behaviours with regard to the assertiveness and the sentiments expressed in their product reviews. In addition, the paper uses new data collection and machine learning tools that can also be extended for other research of online consumer reviewing behaviours.

Using web crawling techniques, a large data set was extracted from the Google Play Store. Following this, the authors created machine learning algorithms to identify topics from product reviews and to quantify assertiveness and sentiments from the review texts.

The results indicate that product pricing models affect consumer review sentiment, assertiveness and topics. Removing upfront payment obligations positively impacts the overall and pricing specific consumer sentiment and reduces assertiveness.

The results reveal new effects of pricing models on the nature of consumer reviews of products and form a basis for future research. The study was conducted in the gaming category of the Google Play Store and the generalisability of the findings for other app segments or marketplaces should be further tested.

The findings can help companies that create digital products in choosing a pricing strategy for their apps. The paper is the first to investigate how pricing modes affect the nature of online reviews written by consumers.

This paper aims to address opportunities and tensions when creating game-based learning practices in higher education. By detailing examples from a university in the Southeastern USA and the communities it serves, we suggest game-based research and learning be approached as a unifying influence adaptable across contexts.

We use a working example methodology where someone with expertise “works through” a well-known issue while making the thinking overt. In this manner, we reveal processes, successes and challenges infusing game-based learning in higher education to deepen understanding between fields and encourage research and practice with games across disciplines.

The working example demonstrates that games served as a unifying influence in three primary ways, which included redesigning courses and implementing programmatic changes; using existing programs to promote interdisciplinary teaching and research; and increasing outreach and partnerships. In each example, games served to strengthen or support the initiatives.

This paper extends literature on the value of games to promote research and learning. Significantly, it provides an example for others in game-based learning fields to consider when building similar programs in higher education.