Diploma thesis "Video game playing as a risk factor in adolescence?" deals with actuality of risks for children and youth linked to video games. This topic is currently intensively disscused because of cases of high school shootings. There are concerns that violence in video games is connected to rising of children and youth violence. Another risks refered to video games are addiction and obesity. This diploma thesis deals with these risk too. Goal of this thesis is find out if these risks are real and how great is influence of video games on addiction and obesity. Important topic in this thesis are parents. Parents are important participants who can oversee content of video games played by children and influence amount of time, which children and youth spend by playing of video games.

Players of an open-world video game are more than merely audience members watching a narrative play out--they actively participate and perform in the world. Drawing from scholars like Edmund Husserl, Konstantin Stanislavski, Ossy Wulansari, and PJ Manney, this paper explores principles of performance, phenomenology, and empathy to examine how open-world role-playing games, specifically Red Dead Redemption II, help players experience empathy. Constructing this experience through character attachment, length of play, and identification in a safe experimental space, these games become a bridge leading to greater empathy for people who are different from the player. The immersive nature of these games provides a suitable area for studying the effects of this media on a player's development of empathy for the character they play, others in the game world, and beyond. This paper focuses on this phenomenon through the player's performance of the main character, Arthur Morgan, and attempts to connect how this experience applies to the real-world building of player empathy.

Supermassive Games’s Until Dawn tasks its players with helping eight teenagers survive a night of terror. All eight playable characters may live or die depending on the player’s choices and gameplay proficiency. Despite its intricacies, the game still relies heavily on horror movie tropes, which the characters embody, and they face different treatment based on their gender, race, and sanity. Particularly, the weapons available to them and the scenarios for their deaths and survival contribute to trapping the characters within their given characteristics and forcing them into a role that they cannot ever fully break free from. While the branching narrative style opens up the possibility for the hegemony to be challenged, the characters are so stiffly created that, in spite of the multitudes of choices and paths to go down, all the characters are confined to their archetypes and stereotypes related to their identities regardless of the player’s choices.

Sexualization of video game characters has been noted to have real world consequences. While there are studies surrounding characters designed by video game developers, the same cannot be said for players' choice of attire. This study aims to fill the gap left by qualitative studies in the field of player character customization with quantitative data in an Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game environment. To test our hypothesis of players willingly dressing up their characters in sexualized clothing, we conducted a study of N = 371 characters in Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn (Square Enix Business Division 5, 2013). As we hypothesized, the results showed that character traits variables would have an influence over players’ customization choices and came to a conclusion that there are weak, but positive, connections between player avatar characteristics and how players decide to dress and customize them. / Sexualisering av videospelskaraktärer har noterats få verkliga konsekvenser. Faständet finns studier kring karaktärer designade av videospelsutvecklare, kan detsamma inte sägas om spelarnas val av klädsel. Denna studie syftar till att fylla luckan efter kvalitativa studier inom området för anpassning av spelarkaraktärer med vår kvantitativa studie inom ett Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game miljö. För att testa vår hypotes om att spelare frivilligt klär upp sina karaktärer i sexualiserade kläder, genomförde vi en studie av N = 371 karaktärer i Final Fantasy XIV: A RealmReborn (Square Enix Business Division 5, 2013). Som vi hypotiserade, visade resultaten att karaktärsdragsvariabler hade ett        inflytande över spelarnas anpassningsval och kom till slutsatsen att det finns svaga, men positiva, samband mellan spelaravatarers egenskaper och hur spelare bestämmer sig för att klä sig.

Immersion is essential for player experience in video games. Artificial Intelligence serves as an agent that can generate human-like responses and intelligence to reinforce a player’s immersion into their environment. The most common strategy involved in video game AI is using decision trees to guide chosen actions. However, decision trees result in repetitive and robotic actions that reflect an unrealistic interaction. This experiment applies a genetic algorithm that explores selection, crossover, and mutation functions for genetic algorithm implementation in an isolated Super Mario Bros. pathfinding environment. An optimized pathfinding AI can be created by combining an elitist selection strategy with a uniform distribution crossover and minimal mutation rate.

Star Vault AB is a video game development company that has developed the video game Mortal Online. The company has stated that they believe that players new to the game repeatedly find themselves being lost in the game. The objective of this study is to evaluate whether or not an Artificial Neural Network can be used to evaluate when a player is lost in the game Mortal Online. This is done using the free open source library Fast Artifical Neural Network Library. People are invited to a data collection event where they play a tweaked version of the game to facilitate data collection. Players specify whether they are lost or not and the data collected is flagged accordingly. The collected data is then prepared with different parameters to be used when training multiple Artificial Neural Networks. When creating an Artificial Neural Network there exists several parameters which have an impact on its performance. Performance is defined as the balance of high prediction accuracy against low false positive rate. These parameters vary depending on the purpose of the Artificial Neural Network. A quantitative approach is followed where these parameters are varied to investigate which values result in the Artificial Neural Network which best identifies when a player is lost. The parameters are grouped into stages where all combinations of parameter values within each stage are evaluated to reduce the amount of Artificial Neural Networks which have to be trained, with the best performing parameters of each stage being used in subsequent stages. The result is a set of values for the parameters that are considered as ideal as possible. These parameter values are then altered one at a time to verify that they are ideal. The results show that a set of parameters exist which can optimize the Artificial Neural Network model to identify when a player is lost, however not with the high performance that was hoped for. It is theorized that the ambiguity of the word "lost" and the complexity of the game are critical to the low performance.

Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. The authors conducted an experiment to determine the effects of gender, race, online video gaming experience, and the experimental context in which participants played the video game (online vs. offline vs. no information control) on avatar selection. The qualities of the avatar compared were based on eight objective differences between avatars and individuals: attractiveness, skin tone, height, girth chest size, waist size, hip size, and height. As predicted, those with online gaming experience selected avatars that were taller, thinner, and more attractive relative to their real selves than did participants with no prior online game experience. Non-white participants selected avatars with lighter skin-tones, whereas white participants selected avatars with darker skin-tones. Surprisingly, male participants selected shorter avatars than female counterparts did.

Ce que nous éprouvons en jouant à des jeux vidéo indique quelque chose à propos de nous et transforme notre personne. Déterminer la valeur éthique d’un jeu vidéo requiert en conséquence de porter une attention toute spéciale à son expérience émotionnelle. Dans cette thèse de doctorat, nous nous intéressons aux émotions que nous transmettent les jeux vidéo narratifs et aux vertus qu’elles mettent en pratique. Au cours de cet examen, nous offrons une description psychologique de l’activité vidéoludique, réfléchissons à la place du jeu vidéo dans nos vies et nous munissons d’outils conceptuels pour évaluer en détail les exemples suivants : Dishonored (Arkane Studios, 2012), Frostpunk (11 bit studios, 2018), Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice (Ninja Theory, 2017), Neo Cab (Chance Agency, 2019), Outlast (Red Barrels, 2013), Spec Ops: The Line (Yager, 2012) et Vampyr (DONTNOD, 2018). Notre travail est divisé en trois parties. La première présente une théorie de l’expérience émotionnelle du jeu vidéo. Nous défendons qu’une émotion survient à la rencontre d’une perception conceptuelle et d’une préoccupation, et que les jeux vidéo orchestrent leur expérience émotionnelle à l’intérieur d’une structure de progression. La seconde partie revisite les débats autour des jeux vidéo qui « engagent moralement » et de ceux qui incluent un contenu transgressif. Afin de tenir compte du rôle de l’émotion, nous introduisons une éthique de la vertu selon laquelle le jeu vidéo représente un terrain d’entraînement où se constituent nos dispositions émotionnelles. La troisième partie est consacrée à l’analyse de jeux vidéo potentiellement édifiants, qui communiquent des vertus. Nous explorons plus particulièrement la manière dont ces jeux mettent en relation le courage et la peur ainsi que la justice et la colère. / What we feel when playing video games indicates something about us and transforms our person. Determining the ethical value of a video game hence requires to pay special attention to its emotional experience. In this doctoral thesis, we are interested in emotions transmitted by narrative video games and in virtues they put into practice. During the course of this examination, we will reflect on the place of video games in our lives and will provide conceptual tools to evaluate in detail the following examples: Dishonored (Arkane Studios, 2012), Frostpunk (11 bit studios, 2018), Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice (Ninja Theory, 2017), Neo Cab (Chance Agency, 2019), Outlast (Red Barrels, 2013), Spec Ops: The Line (Yager, 2012) and Vampyr (DONTNOD, 2018). Our work is divided in three parts. The first one presents a theory of the emotional experience of video games. We defend that an emotion occurs at the encounter between a conceptual perception and a concern, and that video games orchestrate their emotional experience within a progression structure. The second part revisits the debate on “morally engaging” video games and on transgressive game content. In order to take into account the role of emotion, we introduce a virtue ethics according to which video games act as a training ground where our emotional dispositions are constituted. The third part is dedicated to the analysis of potentially edifying video games, which communicates virtues. We explore more particularly how courage and fear as well as justice and anger are connected in these games.

Stereotypes and threatening images are present in much of our modern entertainment media often going unnoticed for the effects they may have on society. One media which is relatively new and unexplored when it comes to these stereotypes and images of threat is the video game media. This thesis explores how stereotypes are created and maintained within video games and how securitization efforts affect entertainment media, in order to pursue these aims the game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) is analysed with a content analysis built on the theories of othering and securitization, in order to see how the Russians are portrayed within the game. The analysis shows that the image attached to Russians is overly negative compared to other people in the game, and the common threats which they pose is going to war with the West. Based on these findings, the thesis concludes that video games do reproduce securitization discourses and create stereotypes.

With a recent rise in popularity (and controversy) of challenging games, many have attempted to emulate their success. These games are commonly styled with dark, gritty and often surreal settings and characters. Beyond setting the tone, is there a measurable effect from these visual styles on the perception of challenge, and if so, what are those effects? This study looks at similar research and/or the fields visual style, and/or challenge in games to create a game with two distinct styles, from which as a result, a set of categories to better describe a visual style is proposed. The game is then used as an investigation into what to look for when testing for the impact of visual style on perceived challenge.