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Believable Non-Player Characters (NPCs) help motivate player engagement with narrative-driven games. An important aspect of believable characters is their contextually-relevant reactions to changing situations, which emotion often drives in humans. Therefore, giving NPCs "emotion" should enhance their believability. For adoption in industry, it is important to create processes for developing tools to build NPCs "with emotion" that fit with current development practices. Psychological validity—the grounding in affective science—is a necessary quality for plausible emotion-driven NPC behaviours. Computational Models of Emotion (CMEs) are one solution because they use at least one affective theory/model in their design. However, CME development tends to be insufficiently documented such that its processes seem unsystematic and poorly defined. This makes it difficult to reuse a CME’s components, extend or scale them, or compare it to other CMEs. This work draws from software engineering to propose three methods for acknowledging and limiting subjectivity in CME development to improve their reusability, maintainability, and verifiability: a systematic, document analysis-based methodology for choosing a CME’s underlying affective theories/models using its high-level design goals and design scope, which critically influence a CME’s functional requirements; an approach for transforming natural language descriptions of affective theories into a type-based formal model using an intermediate, second natural language description refining the original descriptions and showing where and what assumptions informed the formalization; and a literary character analysis-based methodology for developing acceptance test cases with known believable characters from professionally-crafted stories that do not rely on specific CME designs. Development of EMgine, a game development CME for generating NPC emotions, shows these methods in practice. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / Video games can deeply engage players using characters that appear to have emotionally-driven behaviours. One way that developers encode and carry knowledge between projects is by creating development tools, allowing them to focus on how they use that knowledge and create new knowledge. This work draws from software engineering to propose three methods for creating development tools for game characters “with emotion”: a process for analyzing academic emotion literature so that the tool’s functions are plausible with respect to real-life emotion; a process for translating academic emotion literature into mathematical notation; and a process for creating tests to evaluate these kinds of development tools using narrative characters. The development of an example tool for creating game characters "with emotion", EMgine, demonstrates these methods and serves as an example of good development practices.

Through the lens of hegemonic masculinity in the contemporary game development industry, this paper will present the current state of the LGBTQ+ representation in major Japanese fighting games that were released from 2010 to 2021. By performing a quantitative data analysis of the characters from the games, where each character is coded for their gender and sexuality, the frequency of representation can be determined over the period of time and across games which can indicate the state of LGBTQ+ representation in these games.  Not much research has been conducted in the field of gender studies and representation when specifically focusing on fighting games. It is also a genre that has the reputation of not having good representation and inclusion in the games, but also within the community. It is a genre where the characters are front and center and play a primary part in the appeal of the game, so having good representation should be a requirement. Many players will want to be able to identify and connect with the characters they play but for many this is not a possibility due to the lack of diversity. The results show that there may be a slight increase in the representation over time, but the numbers are still surprisingly low. This shows us the importance of needing to bring more attention to this topic as it is a critical issue that is present within this game genre but also within the gaming industry as a whole.

While gamification has been extensively studied in specific fields, such as education and health, its application in other domains remains understudied. This thesis explores how battle passes, a common gamification system found in video games, are implemented and examines their potential challenges and limitations within and beyond video games. The study adopted a mixed-methods research approach, gathering qualitative and quantitative data through a survey designed to inquire battle pass users about how they use and are affected by the battle pass systems in Apex Legends, Destiny 2, Fortnite, Overwatch 2 and Valorant. The results indicate that gamers generally prefer completing the battle pass through passive generation of XP by playing the game. Challenges are still considered a fun addition to the battle pass system, although with varying levels of enjoyment. Gamers are motivated to complete even unenjoyable challenges to earn higher rewards, both highlighting the power of extrinsic motivators and the risks of implementing battle passes. It is important that companies implement battle passes responsibly, as these systems can be manipulative and exploitative. For example, entities implementing battle passes should consider that battle passes can cause exhaustion in users, and participation should as a consequence be optional. While the intentions of companies cannot be controlled, informing battle pass users about the potential negative impacts of battle passes can help them to protect themselves from exploitation. Overall, this study offers a foundation for future investigation into the effectiveness of gamification and battle passes.

Video games are a unique form of media in that they can persuade through interactivity. This thesis examines two categorical modes of video game interactivity, kinesthetic mechanics and non-kinesthetic mechanics, to suggest ways in which kinesthetic mechanics are more persuasive than non-kinesthetic mechanics. Video game mechanics are rules by which the game is played, and kinesthetics refers to non-trivial, time and space sensitive, dexterous inputs. This thesis utilizes methods of discourse analysis and autoethnographic personal narrative to look for five rhetorical methods that are utilized by game developers and experienced by players. This process suggests correlations between developer intention, user community experience, and my own gameplay experience. These rhetorical methods are: immersion and self-presence, kinesthetic resonance, narrative persuasion, affordance and enthymeme, and self-determination theory (SDT) motivation. These rhetorical methods can be found in most contemporary video games and are utilized to get players to engage with a game and elaborate on the themes and messages therein. I hypothesize that each of these methods is more persuasive through kinesthetic mechanics and compare and contrast experiences with a game that has kinesthetic mechanics and a game that has non-kinesthetic mechanics to test my hypotheses. My findings suggest that kinesthetic mechanics can prove to be more persuasive through certain rhetorical methods, however, more data could be helpful particularly where community experience is concerned. I conclude with recommended methods and considerations for future research. / Media Studies & Production / This thesis contains supplemental material that was not uploaded due to copyright restrictions. If you need to access the material, please contact the author directly.

How moral alignments are used in video games is an issue under discussion. This study looks at two methods of presenting it to the player. One is covert and tracks alignment behind the scenes, and the other shows how the score changes according to choices. 20 participants played either version of the artefact, an interactive text story, where the difference is the method for alignment tracking used. Survey responses are then used to establish the players’ perceived enjoyment and engagement with the story, as well as their engagement with moral dilemmas that were a part of the artefact. / <p>Det finns övrigt digitalt material (t.ex. film-, bild- eller ljudfiler) eller modeller/artefakter tillhörande examensarbetet som ska skickas till arkivet.</p>