The video game industry is one of the fastest growing markets in the world today. The fact that playing video games has become such a popular recreational activity among youths and adolescents has created a need for research investigating the effects of video game playing. Because of the role of the English language as a global lingua franca, most video games are released in English. Since most video games are released in English, many believe that the utilization of video games can help learners of English to improve their knowledge of how to utilize the English language. The aim of this study is to investigate whether video game playing does positively influence the English receptive vocabulary level of ESL learners. In addition, the present study also investigated the influence of other factors, such as the utilization of online communication tools, the average time spent playing video games, and the type of video games played, on English receptive vocabulary level. The study was conducted using quantitative research methods. Since the aim of the study was to investigate the relation between two separate aspects, the study had to utilize two separate elicitation methods for the data collection: one questionnaire (that was supposed to determine each informant’s video game habits) and one vocabulary test (that was supposed to get an approximation of each informant’s receptive vocabulary level). When the data had been collected, the tests were corrected, and the participants were categorized according to the previously mentioned variables. The mean scores of the categories were later examined and compared to each other. Differences between groups that were of high importance were further examined, with a t-test, to determine whether the difference was statistically significant or not. The results of the study show that the vocabulary level difference between ESL learners that do play video games and ESL learner that do not play video game is insignificant. The results further show that the utilization of online communication tools while playing video games positively influences vocabulary level, as the mean score difference on the vocabulary test between OCT users and OCT non-users was revealed to be significant by the t-test. The analysed data thus show that the influence of the utilization of online communication tools on English receptive vocabulary level are more significant that the influence of playing video games.

Games get boring when they start repeating themselves and do not offer players new content. Procedural content generation (PCG) is increasingly used to generate this content. PCG-based game design decreases the need to have a human designer or a writer to generate the content. Algorithmic creation of game content can augment the creativity of human designers and this makes it possible small so-called indie teams to create the content for their game without the big resources. In this work, the field of PCG is introduced. Application of PCG is shown through a mobile game implementation. The implementation details of the mobile game Rush Hour will be presented that makes use of Foursquare, Twitter and Mapbox APIs, which eases the content creation using open data as the input of PCG.

This thesis examines two works from different mediums, the short story “How to Tell a True War Story” by Tim O’Brien and the video game Battlefield 1, to compare how each constructs empathy using virtual reality and mimetic communication between audience and the work. The thesis draws from both digital media studies and affect theory to construct a nuanced view of how empathy functions in the works. The body responds to empathy physically. As social creatures, humans feel the emotions of those around them, even if those around them are virtually constructed. In other words, the thesis will explore how video games have been used historically and what their effects are on gamers, especially gamers’ bodies and emotional responses to the constructed virtual reality. This work aims to show how the lines of fiction and reality become blurred to establish empathy within a narrative and virtual reality space.

Virtual crowd rendering have been used in film industry with offine rendering methods for a long time. But its existence in interactive real-time applications such as video games is not so common due to the limited rendering power of current graphics hardware. This thesis describes a novel method to improve shadow mapping performance of a crowded scene by taking into account the screen space visibility of the casted shadow of a crowd instance when rendering the shadow maps. A grid-based visibility mask creation method is proposed which is irrelevant to scene complexity. This improves the rendering performance especially when there are many occluded instances of the crowd which is a common scenario in urban environments and accelerates the usage of crowds in real time applications, such as games. We compute visibility of all agents in a crowd in parallel on the graphics processing unit(GPU) without having a requirement of a stencil buer or light direction dependent shadow mask. Technique also improves the view space rendering time by reducing the visibility check cost of the agents that are located on the invisible areas of the scene. The methodology introduced in this thesis gets more effective in each shadow map rendering pass by re-using the same visibility mask for shadow caster culling and enables many local lights with shadows. We also give a brief information about the state of the art of crowd rendering and shadowing, explaining how suitable the method with the implementations of different shadow mapping approaches. The technique is very well compatible with the modern crowd rendering techniques such as skinned instancing, dynamic level of detail(LOD) determination and GPU-based simulation.

The video game is a deeply misunderstood medium, one that is often blamed as a root cause of violence, anti-social behaviour and the laziness of youth. In addition to those who judge video games as corrupting, there are those who note the complexity and instructive power of video games and hope to harness the technology for educational use. This thesis occupies a middle ground between these two poles. I argue that as a distinct textual form, video games are prime sites for encountering power and difference, as well as productive sites through which gamers come to know themselves. Video games are semiotic playing fields that, when theorized as such, call for pedagogical interventions focused on how we teach about the worlds we inhabit both virtual and actual. I end with an explanation of how video games can constructively be theorized as “ethical spaces” for learning about issues of social justice.

The video game is a deeply misunderstood medium, one that is often blamed as a root cause of violence, anti-social behaviour and the laziness of youth. In addition to those who judge video games as corrupting, there are those who note the complexity and instructive power of video games and hope to harness the technology for educational use. This thesis occupies a middle ground between these two poles. I argue that as a distinct textual form, video games are prime sites for encountering power and difference, as well as productive sites through which gamers come to know themselves. Video games are semiotic playing fields that, when theorized as such, call for pedagogical interventions focused on how we teach about the worlds we inhabit both virtual and actual. I end with an explanation of how video games can constructively be theorized as “ethical spaces” for learning about issues of social justice.

Academic work dealing with the overlap between video games and female representation is limited in both volume and proper research. Most texts agree on three supposed flaws with video games: they alienate female participants, there are no games for female players, and female players cannot relate to female characters. This thesis sheds light on these points, not only citing specific counter-examples, but also showing how many of these issues reflect on a larger societal problems.

This dissertation aims at positioning adventure games in game studies, by describing their formal aspects and how they have integrated game design with stories. The adventure game genre includes text adventures (also known as interactive fiction), graphical text adventures, and graphic adventures, also referred to as point-and-click adventure games. Adventure games have been the first videogames to evidence the difficulty of reconciling games and stories, an already controversial topic in game studies. An adventure game is a simulation, the intersection between the rule system of the game and its fictional world. The simulation becomes a performance space for the player. The simulation establishes how the player can interact with the world of the game. The simulated world integrates a series of concatenated puzzles, which structure the performance of the player. Solving the puzzles thus means advancing in the story of the game. The integration of the story with the simulation is done through the performance of the player. The game design establishes a specific set of actions necessary to complete both the game and the story, and this set of actions constitutes a behavior that must be restored through performance. The player can also explore the world and its workings, which is necessary to solve the puzzles. By solving the puzzles, the player restores this pre-set behavior. The simulation in adventure games may not be evident because of a historical shift in the level of abstraction, which determines how the world is implemented in the game mechanics. Adventure games have increasingly curbed the agency of the player in the world, in order to facilitate completing the story of the game. This move to a less fine-grained interaction has affected different aspects of game design, from reducing the number of possible actions to limiting the interactivity of non-player characters. The dissertation discusses how adventure games have integrated story with the performance in the simulated world of the game. This integration is further evidenced by how they apply to the four basic elements that bridge story and game design: space, player character, non-player character and time. The qualities of these elements help us understand how the player performs in the simulation, and how that performance is designed. Analyzing the properties of the simulation in adventure games helps draw comparisons with other videogame genres. The rich history of adventure games can inform the game design of other videogames, particularly in relation to the creation of fictional worlds, strategies to script the interactor, and design of non-player characters.

This thesis explores the idea of how people 'do gender' in their online use of avatars, specifically avatar choice. A secondary question of whether or not a chatterbot can be used as a potential interviewer will also be examined as a tool acquiring large amounts of interview data. Gender is one of the ways in which we structure our society, and is completely omnipresent. We cannot opt out of participating in our gender, as we are constantly performing and reaffirming it. Because of this, gender performance and choice spills over into all domains. This includes entertainment such as massively multiplayer online games, both in how the designers make the game, and what the players bring to the game. Deconstructing how and why people engage in these gendered practices and choices becomes an interesting avenue of research, because it allows researchers to partially separate the mental aspects of gender from physical attributes, as the players' physical bodies are not actually in the game. Through the lens of the popular massively multiplayer online game, World of Warcraft, this thesis will utilize a qualitative user research study to understand how gender affects avatar choices. Prior research identified areas where players brought real world gender norms into the games they played. This research study will extend previous research by having players identify why they made the choices they made for their avatars, and how they feel about those choices. The methodology for this study will also involve using a chatterbot as a way of gathering interviews. In normal person-to-person interview studies, recruiting and organizing meetings for these interviews can often be a difficult task. This thesis brings in the idea of using a chatterbot as a mechanism to gather more interviews in a shorter time span to alleviate the problem of getting these one-on-one interviews in some types of studies.

While considering the role of media in shaping and examining histories, we must also grapple with formal limitations in approaching and understanding the past. The thesis aims to bring video games into critical conversations regarding history, memory, and nostalgia by considering the similar and unique perspectives the medium can bring alongside film, television, radio, and literature. Player positionality and interactivity within the unconventional, non-linear game storytelling form allows for different engagements with history. Focusing on the futuristic, post-apocalyptic role-playing game Fallout 3 (2008), this study interrogates the game’s nuanced presentation of genre as a cultural mediation of the past, the negotiation of memory with history, and our problematic assumptions about technology and narratives of progress. While the study finds games may provide rewarding and potentially critical explorations of history, the self-reflexive nature of video gaming emphasizes the medium’s possibilities, limitations, and implications as a cultural product shaped by the very forces constructing history. / text