Virtual reality tech is new, exciting and full of opportunities.Despite this the gaming section of virtual reality does not grow asfast as it was predicted it would be. Headsets and games areexpensive and perhaps a market model similar to the mobile gamingmarket would do the new tech good. A model that is heavily reliant onadvertisements and low prices.The purpose of this thesis is to show that virtual reality games areas viable an advertising target as mobile games that are a popularadvertisement medium. The study uses 2D billboard advertisements asthey are a non-intrusive advertisement format that can be implementedin a similar fashion on a mobile game and VR game.For this study two games were developed, one that runs on a OculusQuest VR headset and one for mobile Android devices. The games are asclose to each other as possible in terms of objective and settingwith the same advertisements implemented in them, each game featurestwo levels, one level contains advertisements and one does not.Surveys are used to find data regarding how the advertisementsaffected the game experience on both platforms. Interviews were thenconducted to find more qualitative information and to explain theresults as well as to find out what makes an advertisement good ortolerable.

GAYME is a transmedia story-telling world that I have created to conceptually explore the dynamics of queering game design through the development of varying game prototypes. The final iteration of GAYME is @deadquarewalking'. It is a documentary game and a performance art installation that documents a carless, gay/queer/quare man's journey on Halloween to get to and from one of Orlando's most well-known gay clubs - the Parliament House Resort. "The art of cruising" city streets to seek out queer/quare companionship particularly amongst gay, male culture(s) is well-documented in densely, populated cities like New York, San Francisco and London, but not so much in car-centric, urban environments like Orlando that are less oriented towards pedestrians. Cruising has been and continues to be risky even in pedestrian-friendly cities but in Orlando cruising takes on a whole other dimension of danger. In 2011-2012, The Advocate magazine named Orlando one of the gayest cities in America (Breen, 2012). Transportation for America (2011) also named the Orlando metropolitan region the most dangerous city in the country for pedestrians. Living in Orlando without a car can be deadly as well as a significant barrier to connecting with other people, especially queer/quare people, because of Orlando's car-centric design. In Orlando, cars are sexy. At the same time, the increasing prevalence in gay, male culture(s) of geo-social, mobile phone applications using Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and location aware services, such as Grindr (Grindr, LLC., 2009) and even FourSquare (Crowley and Selvadurai, 2009) and Instagram (Systrom and Krieger, 2010), is shifting the way gay/queer/quare Orlandoans co-create social and sexual networks both online and offline. Urban and sub-urban landscapes have transformed into hybrid "techno-scapes" overlaying "the electronic, the emotional and the social with the geographic and the physical" (Hjorth, 2011). With or without a car, gay men can still geo-socially cruise Orlando's car-centric, street life with mobile devices. As such emerging media has become more pervasive, it has created new opportunities to quarely visualize Orlando's "technoscape" through phone photography and hashtag metadata while also blurring lines between the artist and the curator, the player and the game designer. This project particularly has evolved to employ game design as an exhibition tool for the visualization of geo-social photography through hashtag play. Using hashtags as a game mechanic generates metadata that potentially identifies patterns of play and "ways of seeing" across player experiences as they attempt to make meaning of the images they encounter in the game. @deadquarewalking also demonstrates the potential of game design and geo-social, photo-sharing applications to illuminate new ways of documenting and witnessing the urban landscapes that we both collectively and uniquely inhabit. 'In Irish culture, "quare" can mean "very" or "extremely" or it can be a spelling of the rural or Southern pronunciation of the word "queer." Living in the American Southeast, I personally relate more to the term "quare" versus "queer." Cultural theorist E. Patrick Johnson (2001) also argues for "quareness" as a way to question the subjective bias of whiteness in queer studies that risks discounting the lived experiences and material realities of people of color. Though I do not identify as a person of color and would be categorized as white or European American, "quareness" has an important critical application for considering how Orlando's urban design is intersectionally racialized, gendered and classed.