Notre objet est une communauté de 300 à 400 passionnés-collectionneurs de vieux ordinateurs et de vieux jeux vidéo des années 1970-90, autrement appelés « vieilles machines », dispersés dans toute la France ainsi qu’en Belgique et en Suisse. Cette communauté est organisée en premier lieu par des forums sur internet bien qu’émanant d’associations locales. Ces forums servent à l’échange d’informations et de matériel de collection entre passionnés. Un système de valeur riche et complexe organise les relations sociales autours de l’amour et de l’utilisation des vieilles machines, d’une volonté de partage du savoir et du rejet de la spéculation. Le partage est au cœur de l’imaginaire et des pratiques de cette communauté. Il n’est pourtant pas la règle dans les économies qui l’entourent (eBay, brocantes, sites d’enchères divers). Or à l’époque des fondateurs de la communauté vers 1998, les passionnés pouvaient alors s’approvisionner gratuitement ou presque. Ils ont donc ressenti la mise en place d’un marché extérieur comme une forme d’expropriation. Ils ont donc réorganisé les règles de vie et d’échange au sein de la communauté pour contrecarrer la hausse des prix interne que générait la hausse sur le marché extérieur. Ils ont à la fois promu la notion d’échange mutuellement profitable contre l’idée de profit, organisé un système de tabou sur les prix réel des objets, tirant parti du statut de prescripteurs. Ils ont ainsi réussi à créer une niche économique, un marché à bas prix, à l’accès fermement contrôlé mais au sein duquel, une fois intégré, après avoir construit une situation par une « carrière » chacun peut profiter d’un système d’entraide généralisée. / This work is about a community of 300 to 400 hobbyist-collectors of micro-computers and video-games from the 70’s to the 90’s which they call “vieilles machines”. They are scattered all over France, Belgium and Switzerland. This community communicates through online forums although they belong to local offline associations. These forums are mainly used to exchange objects and information among collectors. A rich and complex system of value and representations organizes the social relationships. The main points are: the love of the “vieilles machines”, the will to use them, sharing knowledge and rejection of speculation. Sharing is the very basis of the social imaginary of the community. Sharing isn’t however the rule in neighboring economic systems (eBay, garage sales other online auction websites). Yet, during the first time of the community around 1998, when these objects were only obsolescent technical rubbishes, the community members could collect for free or very few money. Thus they felt as if they have been stolen when an outside market developed and prices increased. As a reaction, they changed social norms and exchange rules inside the community in order to temper the internal increase of the prices caused by outside market’s increase. They both promoted the idea of mutually satisfactory exchange and organized a taboo on the object’s real price using the position of major online opinion leaders on their subjects. They managed to create a niche economy, a low price market in which one cannot integrate easily but in which when fully integrated, after building one’s position through a “career” one can beneficiate from an extend system of generosity and mutual aid.

The purpose of this essay has been to research about adaptive music by analyzing and designing a music system which could handle adaptive music for our game A Story About My Uncle. This essay also goes through the thought  process and techniques used when composing adaptive music, for example vertical re-orchestration and horizontal re-sequencing. For designing the system, I used an object oriented analysis and design approach, utilizing two of its models, the use case model and the class model. With the help of these models and a few system requirements based on the music composition, I was able to design a system which handles the composed music as planned. Although the system works in-game, there are still some issues that should be resolved to perfect the adaptive music experience. / Syftet med uppsatsen har varit att forska om adaptiv musik genom att analysera och designa ett system som kan hantera adaptiv musik till vårt spel A Story About My Uncle. Denna uppsats går också igenom tankeprocessen och tekniker som används när man komponerar adaptive music, som t.ex. vertikal re-orkestrering och horisontel re-sekvensering. För att designa systemet använde jag mig av två modeller inom objekt orienterad analys och design, fallmodellen och klassmodellen. Med hjälp av dessa två modeller och ett fåtal systemkrav baserad på den komponerade musiken kunde jag designa ett system som hanterar musiken som det hade varit tänkt. Även om systemet fungerar i spelet, så finns det fortfarande några problem som borde lösas för att fullända det adaptiva musiksystemet

In this report, a method for simulating interactive height-field based water on a parallel architecture is presented. This simulation is designed for faster than real time applications and is highly suitable for video games on current generation home computers. Specifically, the implementation proposed in this report is targeted at the Sony PlayStation 3. This platform requires code to be both highly parallelized and data oriented in order to take advantage of the available hardware which makes it an ideal platform for evaluating parallel code. The simulation captures the dispersive property of water and is scalable from small collections of water to large lakes. It also uses dynamic Level Of Detail to achieve constant performance while at the same time presenting high fidelity animated water to the player. This report describes the simulation method and implementation in detail along with a performance analysis and discussion.

Localisation is the process of taking a product and adapting it to fit the culture in question. This usually involves making it both linguistically and culturally appropriate for the target audience. While there are many areas in video game translations where localisation holds a factor, this study will focus on localisation changes in the personalities of fictional characters between the original Japanese version and the English localised version of the video game Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn and its expansion Heavensward for PC, PS3 and PS4. With this in mind, specific examples are examined using Satoshi Kinsui's work on yakuwarigo, role language as the main framework for this study. Five non-playable characters were profiled and had each of their dialogues transcribed for a comparative analysis. This included the original Japanese text, the officially localised English text and a translation of the original Japanese text done by myself. Each character were also given a short summary and a reasoned speculation on why these localisation changes might have occurred. The result shows that there were instances where some translations had been deliberately adjusted to ensure that the content did not cause any problematic issues to players overseas. This could be reasoned out that some of the Japanese role languages displayed by characters in this game could potentially cause dispute among the western audience. In conclusion, the study shows that localisation can be a difficult process that not only requires a translator's knowledge of the source and target language, but also display some creativity in writing ability to ensure that players will have a comparable experience without causing a rift in the fanbase.

Detta kandidatarbete undersöker problemet med konvergeringen av narrativ och interaktion och varför en konvergering mellan dessa hämmar deltagarens inlevelse i ett spel. Utifrån spelet Traverser redovisas i detta kandidatarbete processen och resultatet av hur ett interaktivt narrativ kan väcka inlevelse hos deltagaren genom att låta berättandet ske subtilt och icke-linjärt, där spelaren uppmanas till att vilja utforska narrativet på egen hand i form av en miljö i Traverser. This bachelor’s thesis discusses the problem of converging narrative and interaction and why the convergence between the two tends to arrest the participants immersion within a game. Through an interactive narrative by letting the narration take place subtly and nonlinearly, this bachelor’s thesis reports the process and result of how an interactive narrative could provoke immersion within the game Traverser, where the actor is urged to explore the narrative independently in the shape of an environment. / Detta är en reflektionsdel till en digital medieproduktion.

Field of view in virtual environments such as games is the angular cone-of-vision a camera uses to display content on screen, and is subject to various characteristics and effects. Some of these effects have been documented based on simulation. However little to no research is readily available regarding video games. This paper set out to document and verify if field of view can reliably be used to affect potential game design aspects, particularly for first-person cameras. Several factors were identified and tests constructed which had participants play through a virtual first-person environment on regular computer hardware (no head-mounted display or other viewing mediums). The measured properties were distance, scale and speed as a function of field of view. According to the results, distances appear longer, objects appear smaller and movement faster at higher field of view, however at varying amounts depending on the context, scenario and viewing angle of the camera. In addition it was also shown that text readability and peripheral vision were significantly affected. It was concluded that field of view can be used within games and virtual applications to enable certain game design elements, and that field of view also should be a consideration in designing a game as it may be interpreted differently given a different field of view.

This thesis contains an analysis of transgender characters in games. The method for selecting the characters was based on the importance of the character in the game with the requirement that the game must have sold at least half a million units. The goal was to analyse well-known characters in gaming history to get an overview of how the game industry has represented transgender in games. Out of 102 characters only six of them met the requirements and have been analysed with the use of queer theory. Gender and how the characters break the norms of what is feminine and what is masculine is in focus. In the analysis, the characters are examined through their mannerism, design, personality and dialogue. The analysis is then summarized into identifiable patterns. The result of this thesis is a better understanding of how transgender characters are portrayed in the game industry.

This study explores the experiences of parents around video games and their adolescent children. Nine parents participated in individual and focus group interviews which asked them to reflect and consider their interactions, opinions, and beliefs about video games and their adolescent children who are gamers. Drawing on Critical Discourse Analysis the data revealed themes of power, fear, and judgment. The analysis is best represented by ethnodramatic scripts. These scripts depict parents’ concerns of video games, perceptions of their adolescent children, their beliefs about parenting, and the influence of societal messages. The complexities and sometimes contradictions available in the scripts suggest that more conversations are necessary about how parenting, video games, and gamers intersect so that many of the fears can be overcome and more critical approaches can be adopted. / Graduate

This dissertation examines how gender is expressed and performed in the virtual gaming community of World of Warcraft. Players were approached through the medium of the game and through various on-line bulletin boards to answer surveys and open-ended interview questions about their experiences as a female player or with female players in this virtual society. In addition to answering questions, this project involved participant observations within several different types of realms or servers in World of Warcraft in order to gain a better understanding of community dynamics. The premise for this research is working through an idealistic notion that virtual communities might break down gender lines through allowing members to pick their gender or doing away with biological differences in gender altogether. This research hopes to dissect this idea and, furthermore, fill an important gap in existing sociological studies about virtual societies and games by making the argument that gender stereotypes carry over from the physical world into virtual spaces and, consequently, affect the vabried interactions of players within this virtual community as well as the gender performance of female players, in particular. Observations and game design suggests that many of the aesthetic principles of the female avatars available in World of Warcraft cater to attracting heterosexual male players. Clothing and armor is revealing and female avatars are highly sexualized not just through appearance, but through programmed behaviors in the game. This research examines the effects of such pre-conditioned parameters on the population of this top ranked game.

This thesis critically interrogates the role of local context in the adoption and interpretation of video technology and gaming practices in the little studied locale of India. Video gaming is a recent phenomenon in India which has been rapidly increasing in popularity, yet it has gained little academic attention in digital gaming research. The project seeks to understand the emergence of practices of consumption of video games in India from the point of view of Indians themselves through the exploration of how Indian video gamers situate, interpret and negotiate the practice of video game play. In his book Video Gamers (2012), Gary Crawford makes a case for analysing game play as a practice, situated within everyday experiences and social networks. Crawford identifies two deficiencies in gaming studies: the dominance of a Western-centric viewpoint and the disregard for player context. This research addresses these shortcomings in two ways. First, through situating the field research in Chandigarh. Second, by employing a mixed methods qualitative approach - observations, interviews, focus groups, field notes, pictures and video recordings – to elicit the detail of the gamers' cultural context. Situating these practices within the broader social, historical, geographical and cultural milieu allows for the conceptualisation of contextual factors in terms of their influence on the adoption and interpretation of the global gaming practice in a local setting. These methods allow for the examination of, first, multiple culturally embedded factors and, second, the players' processes of sense making applied to video gaming. Each method makes the social world of the gamers visible in different ways. Fieldwork predominantly took place in video gaming parlours. Investigating game players in the space of the video gaming parlour enabled a more honed understanding of how the practice of video gaming was ‘glocalised’ within particular social, geographical and cultural contexts. A smaller second study was conducted in Manchester, to collect data in a setting that is culturally different from India. This contrasting data provided greater sensitivity to cultural factors in India which might have otherwise been overlooked or which had been obscured. The research draws theoretically upon Bourdieu’s theories of social field, habitus, and capital, combining these with Goffman’s notions of dramaturgy and framing, and Robertson’s concept of glocalisation. These concepts provided a theoretical framework that enabled a interrogation of the data to reveal the sociocultural processes embedded in the gaming parlours, and the individual’s creative engagements with video game products themselves. The methodological and theoretical framework, then, were complementary, offering both an experiential and contextual approach. This study found that video gamers interpret and make sense of the practice of video gaming through their contextual situation, and that they will both consciously and unconsciously attempt to glocalise the practice of video gaming so that it becomes culturally more acceptable.