E-Sports, also known as progaming (professional gaming) has grown a lot in the last few years. Professional gamers are regularly attending tournaments watched by hundreds of thousands of fans and with prize pools of millions of dollars. There are many video broadcasts of those events and recently betting on e-Sports has also become available. The main goal of this thesis was to create a mobile app for OS Android, which aims to utilize this growth and create a service of providing predictions of results of the e-Sports matches, similar to that existing in regular sports. The application in its current form receives the predictions via Google Cloud Messaging service and shows an Android notification on their arrival. The predictions are then stored on the device into SQLite database so they are available for further view and filtering. After the matches are finished, their results are shown in comparison to the predictions and balance of the predictions is calculated. Users can display information about their subscriptions and predictions under that subscriptions. The app was created in Android Studio IDE with appearance based on the material design guidelines. The app was tested on several devices of different brand and Android version, then it was placed on Google Play for open beta testing. In the future the app will be offered to the users of the service of providing predictions of results of the e-Sports matches.

Achieving a state of balance is essential when developing a video game (Schell, 2019, “Game Mechanics Must Be in Balance,” para. 1). Despite this, game balancing is frequently overlooked in game development curricula (Schreiber, 2016, 00:30). This research describes the development and pilot study of a framework that junior game designers can utilize to gain valuable skills in the area of game balance. The framework produced by this research provides users with the ability to tune weapon parameters and see the effects these changes have on a first-person shooter deathmatch game in real time. Participants in the study utilized the framework to achieve three pacing and balance goals. Data regarding the weapon parameters selected by participants and information about the participants’ usage of the framework is described in detail. This study serves as the groundwork for future research focused on finding a method for teaching junior game designers about game balance.

This dissertation deals with various gender aspects of playing computer games. It describes how gender stereotypes are connected with the level of production, content, and with the players themselves. In this sense, it shows that games are still created mainly by homogeneous male teams, in order to attract male players, they contain mainly male characters, while the female ones are created to be attractive to these ideal male players. However, the primary goal of this dissertation is to describe the different ways and intensities of the relationship with the avatar, the playable character in the game. The analytical part consists of two illustrative case studies, one concerning female heterosexual players, the other male heterosexual players. The basic premise is the fact that the player "plays gender" - that is, performs it similarly to social reality. However, this performance is not just a reconstruction and confirmation of hypothetically stable gender identities, but on the contrary their deconstruction ("playing with gender"). In this sense, the work pays particular attention to situations where the player and the avatar have different genders and the heterosexual player, therefore, identifies with the avatar but also objectifies him/her. This dissertation aims to emphasize the uniqueness of...

Violent video games have been questioned in its influence toward violence and aggressivebehavior in nowadays especially with adolescents and young adults which usually spend theirtime playing games more than other activity. The aim of this research is to find a correlationbetween violent video games exposure, aggressive behavior and self-control in an individual toanswer the question that “Is playing violent video games can lead a person to be more violence,aggressive and lack of self-control more than it should be?” The research will be studied with351 people in the Thailand Gamer Community. An aggressive behavior and impulsive behaviorwill be look into by self-questionnaire: Buss – Perry aggression questionnaire: BPAQ – ShortForm to measure aggressive behavior, the short version of the Self-Control Scale to measure animpulsive behavior and for a violent video games exposure, it will be measured by the time thatparticipants playing video games and how violent it exposure to violent video games andaggressive behavior but the results only show a slightly correlation between these two variables.Nevertheless, the results show no correlation between violent video games exposure andimpulsive behavior.

The topic of video games is expansive, encompassing numerous domains that have yet to be thoroughly examined within a scholarly context. Modern games, especially those in the adventure and role-playing genres, are oftentimes heavily laden with text, and therefore serve as excellent subjects when formulating hermeneutical models for simulated virtual contexts. Furthermore, many games belong under the umbrella of literary studies due to their reliance upon text to forge interactive, fictional narratives. While this means many games possess qualities that render them germane to academics within the sphere of English studies, they remain neglected outliers due to manifold factors, ranging from outmoded biases against the medium, to a lack of established evaluative methodologies. As a result, the field is largely bereft of consensus strategies for engaging digital works featuring literary exposition and dialogue in the form of on-screen text; however, existing theories, including more abstruse ones relating to ergodic literature, hypertext and cybertext, provide a foundation on which to construct new modalities for assessing texts that exist within virtual environs. Research indicates that audience experiences in text-driven games are markedly different than those offered by analog texts due to their interactivity and non-linearity, thus reinforcing the need for the expansion of existing models. Of additional concern, analyses of modern text-oriented games prefigure some important implications for the areas of pedagogy and textual information conveyance in general. These considerations all coalesce to illustrate the exigency for a new or updated theory for understanding and interpreting text in digital substrates, ultimately allowing for inchoate and emergent art facilitated by technology to be recognized as academically relevant.

A new hybrid Video Game Difficulty Balancing method which stands in between the two traditional methods (Static and Dynamic) has been suggested in this project aiming to discreetly estimate the player’s difficulty preference and make the respective in-game adjustment. This method has been based on the hypothesis that the user’s difficulty preferences can be to some extent predicted by some of their in-game actions. A casual mobile game containing a User Testing part has been developed for this purpose and played by 56 participants. The extracted results offer some insights on various gamers’ demographic groups behaviors and some indications that the intended prediction is feasible.

Background: LANs are popular due to the unique social features where gamers share the samepassion, meet, and compete with like-minded gamers. Further, a LAN forms new and unexploredfeelings and impressions for gamers; therefore, it should be further explored. Therefore,understanding the gamers' motivations will allow for a better understanding of the unexploredbenefits gained. Purpose: By studying the phenomenon of LANs, this research aims to explore the motivationsfor attending a LAN by discovering and understanding the connection between benefits andmotivations. Method: To fulfil the purpose of this thesis, being of exploratory nature, qualitative research wasused. The empirical data was accumulated through fifteen semi-structured interviews. The datahas been analysed and interpreted using an abductive approach incorporating a thematic analysis. Conclusion: This study explored the motivations and benefits of LAN attendance from a U&Gperspective. The findings showed three motivations for attending a LAN competition, diversionand social interaction. Furthermore, the gained benefits are rewards, information, skills, escape,entertainment, relationships, socialisation and finding new teammates. The analysis resulted indeveloping a conceptual model illustrating the motivations and benefits.

This is a study of how game design has influenced my artistic process as a music producer fora video game called Sang: The Desert Blade. The artistic practice is used to explore a conceptin game design called ludonarrative. The experiences gathered from this exploration arepresented with examples of music that have been created and implemented for the gameduring this study. The music examples are contextualized together with video documentationfrom my creative process and video recordings of the game. The study concludes that videogame music is directly interconnected with game design and its aesthetics is directly affectedby the degree to which a music producer is included in the development team. The study alsoshows how unpredictability is a fundamental part of game design and suggests how it can beexplored in future artistic research of video game music. / Det här är en studie om hur speldesign har påverkat min konstnärliga process sommusikproducent för ett dataspel som heter Sang: The Desert Blade. Den konstnärligapraktiken används för att undersöka ett koncept inom speldesign som kallas ludonarrativ.Erfarenheterna från undersökningen presenteras genom musikexempel som har skapats ochimplementerats i spelet under studien. Musikexemplen kontextualiseras tillsammans medvideodokumentation från min kreativa process och med videoinspelningar från spelet. Studiendrar slutsatsen att dataspelsmusik är direkt sammanlänkad med speldesign och dess estetik ärdirekt påverkad av den grad som en musikproducent involveras i spelets utvecklingsteam.Studien visar också hur oförutsägbarhet är en fundamental del av speldesign och föreslår hurdet kan undersökas i framtida konstnärlig forskning av dataspelsmusik.

In this essay, the author examines religion and how it is represented in the video game Ghost of Tsushima. With the representation term and its meaning from Stuart Hall, the author aims to analyse religious aspects in the game’s environment and story, thus in the end picking out the representation that the games create of religion.      Using qualitative content analysis and semiotics, the author picks out temples, monks, amulets, and Kami as the main religious aspects that are found in-game. As it turns out the religious aspects in-game create the impression of Buddhist overturn in the Shinto religion. Many aspects stem from Buddhism, which correlate to the period and how Shinto assimilated Buddhist practises over time. The monks and temples are all of Buddhist origin, except for the official shrines to the Kami in-game. Overall, the Kami and Shinto, in general, are not present beyond being used for mechanics in the game while Buddhism is represented with more important aspects with major characters and meanings shown or talked about. The author does note that both religious traditions are presented more as merged, having become indistinguishable during the period in accordance with historical research. The essay concludes thus that religion is mostly represented in the characters like the warrior monk Norio and the monk Junshin who are followed more closely and represent religion through their actions and words.

Many games are set in 3D worlds and have shifting camera viewpoints. In this study, we attempt to create and evaluate a Proof-of-Concept Worldspace Heatmap System that accounts for the shifting camera views in 3D game worlds, in an attempt to improve user testing processes. We test the system by conducting a stimulated recall user study, in which we examine the areas in a game that drew the attention of the participants, with the help of heatmaps placed in the game world. Our results include observations of several behavior patterns and participant evaluations of the Worldspace Heatmap System. We observed multiple indications in the data we gathered, that such a system can be useful for obtaining player behavior insights and for enhancing user testing processes, especially if some of the limitations are overcome.