The subject of this diploma thesis is the perception of female characters in various media adaptations of The Witcher from the perspective of audiences that show signs of fan affiliation. The research focuses on the two most recent adaptations, i.e. the third game The Witcher: Wild Hunt and the serie The Witcher on the Netflix platform. The research took the form of in-depth interviews with a total of nine participants and focused on the role, characteristics, relationships and motivations of female characters in order to find out how respondents perceive these areas in adaptations. The first part of the diploma thesis deals with the theoretical basis related to popular culture, audiences, game and film studies and gender in media. It also presents the world of The Witcher, the selected characters and the critique of adaptations. The next section of the thesis deals with the research methodology. The grounded theory was used as a method of work and multiple levels of coding and categorization were conducted. These categories are then presented in the empirical part of the thesis together with a demonstration of the respondents' statements followed by data interpretation and discussion. The main findings include that female characters play an important role in both adaptations from the audience's...

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Multi-agent systems consist of multiple agents that interact and coordinate with each other to work towards to certain goal. Multi-agent systems naturally arise in a variety of domains such as robotics, telecommunications, and economics. The dynamic and complex nature of these systems entails the agents to learn the optimal solutions on their own instead of following a pre-programmed strategy. Reinforcement learning provides a framework in which agents learn optimal behavior based on the response obtained from the environment. In this thesis, we propose various novel de- centralized, learning automaton based algorithms which can be employed by a group of interacting learning automata. We propose a completely decentralized version of the estimator algorithm. As compared to the completely centralized versions proposed before, this completely decentralized version proves to be a great improvement in terms of space complexity and convergence speed. The decentralized learning algorithm was applied; for the first time; to the domains of distributed object tracking and distributed watershed management. The results obtained by these experiments show the usefulness of the decentralized estimator algorithms to solve complex optimization problems. Taking inspiration from the completely decentralized learning algorithm, we propose the novel concept of partial decentralization. The partial decentralization bridges the gap between the completely decentralized and completely centralized algorithms and thus forms a comprehensive and continuous spectrum of multi-agent algorithms for the learning automata. To demonstrate the applicability of the partial decentralization, we employ a partially decentralized team of learning automata to control multi-agent Markov chains. More flexibility, expressiveness and flavor can be added to the partially decentralized framework by allowing different decentralized modules to engage in different types of games. We propose the novel framework of heterogeneous games of learning automata which allows the learning automata to engage in disparate games under the same formalism. We propose an algorithm to control the dynamic zero-sum games using heterogeneous games of learning automata.

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In the last few years educational computer games have gained attention as a tool for facilitating learning in different sectors of society including but not limited to military, health, and education. However, advances in computer game technology continue to outpace research on its effectiveness. Few empirical studies have investigated the effects of educational games in the context of formal K-12 settings. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a series of mathematics computer games on mathematics achievement and motivation of high school students. In addition, the role of prior mathematics knowledge, computer skill, and English language skill of the participants on their mathematics achievement and motivation when they played the games were investigated. A total of 193 students and 10 teachers from an urban high school in the southeast of the United States of the America participated in this study. The teachers were randomly assigned to treatment and control groups. Students' mathematics achievement was measured using school district benchmark exams and a game performance test generated by the developers of the mathematics games. A mathematics motivation questionnaire based on Keller's (1987a) ARCS model of motivational design measured students' mathematics motivation. Multivariate Analysis of Co-Variance (MANCOVA) was conducted to analyze the data. In addition, interviews were conducted to cross validate the results of the quantitative data. The MANCOVA results indicated significant improvement of the mathematics achievement of the experimental versus control group. No significant improvement was found in the motivation of the experimental versus control group. However, a significant improvement was found on the motivation scores of the students who played the games in their school lab and classrooms compared to the ones who played the games only in the school labs. In addition, the findings indicated that prior mathematics knowledge, computer skill and English language skill did not play significant roles in achievement and motivation of the experimental group. Teachers' interviews revealed that these individual differences had indeed played significant roles in game-playing at the beginning of using the games, but the impacts gradually diminished as the students gained the required game-playing skills. The overall results indicated that the mathematics games used in this study were effective teaching and learning tools to improve the mathematics skills of the students. Using the games in mathematics education was suggested by the teachers as an appropriate alternative way of teaching, as one of the teachers stated: "This is definitely the way that we have to go to teach mathematics in the future." Mathematics games should be integrated with classroom activities if teachers want to increase mathematics class motivation. Teachers' helps and supports are vital in using the games effectively in a population with different prior mathematics knowledge, computer skills, and English language skills.

Det här arbetet beskriver implementationen av en rytmbaserad algoritm för att procedurellt generera plattformsbanor och hur den anpassats för att passa nedåtgående spel, i syfte att undersöka vilken kapacitet det resulterande programmet har för att skapa banor som skiljer sig från varandra. Undersökningen utfördes genom att låta artefakten generera ett större antal banor och jämföra värden mellan olika rytmer. Mätvärdena som iakttogs baserades på hur mycket banorna avvek från en mittlinje och på frekvensen av banelement som innebar konsekvenser för spelaren. Resultatet av undersökningen tyder på att rytmbaserad bangenerering har förmågan att generera vitt skilda banor för nedåtgående plattformsspel och att det därför finns ett värde i fortsatt utveckling och undersökningar i form av användarstudier av hur utmanande eller underhållande banorna upplevs, samt för att utveckla algoritmen till att ha parametrar för att låta bandesigners styra hur olika rytmer kan kombineras till banor. / <p>Det finns övrigt digitalt material (t.ex. film-, bild- eller ljudfiler) eller modeller/artefakter tillhörande examensarbetet som ska skickas till arkivet.</p><p>There are other digital material (eg film, image or audio files) or models/artifacts that belongs to the thesis and need to be archived.</p>

"Sitting is the new smoking" and is one of the major causes of human health problems today. Swedes train the most in the world but are also among those who work  mostsedentary. Proper movement while taking 1 minute of active short breaks helps to preventfurther health problems. Cameras can detect body movements and this information can beused to do motion analysis and skeletal estimation. Furthermore, this can be used to create games that can use this detected movement and force the user to be more active whiledoing something fun.This thesis is about designing and implementing two mini-games in Godot for particular body movements using MediaPipe. Game designers for the mini-games use heuristicsfor motion-based control in games presented by Hara and Ovaska. This thesis focuses ondeveloping game control using motion control for the mini-games. The game controls areevaluated by calculating the sensitivity of how well the controls work for the games.

As AI develops, grows, and expands, the more benefits we can have from it. AI is used in multiple fields to assist humans, such as object recognition, self-driving cars, or design tools. However, AI could be used for more than assisting humans in their tasks. It could be employed to collaborate with humans as colleagues in shared tasks, which is usually described as Mixed-Initiative (MI) paradigm. This paradigm creates an interactive scenario that leverage on AI and human strengths with an alternating and proactive initiative to approach a task. However, this paradigm introduces several challenges. For instance, there must be an understanding between humans and AI, where autonomy and initiative become negotiation tokens. In addition, control and expressiveness need to be taken into account to reach some goals. Moreover, although this paradigm has a broader application, it is especially interesting for creative tasks such as games, which are mainly created in collaboration. Creating games and their content is a hard and complex task, since games are content-intensive, multi-faceted, and interacted by external users.  Therefore, this thesis explores MI collaboration between human game designers and AI for the co-creation of games, where the AI's role is that of a colleague with the designer. The main hypothesis is that AI can be incorporated in systems as a collaborator, enhancing design tools, fostering human creativity, reducing their workload, and creating adaptive experiences. Furthermore, This collaboration arises several dynamic properties such as control, expressiveness, and initiative, which are all central to this thesis. Quality-Diversity algorithms combined with control mechanisms and interactions for the designer are proposed to investigate this collaboration and properties. Designer and Player modeling is also explored, and several approaches are proposed to create a better workflow, establish adaptive experiences, and enhance the interaction. Through this, it is demonstrated the potential and benefits of these algorithms and models in the MI paradigm.

Цель командной работы – создание игры «Симулятор Владельца Продукта». Цель личной работы – разработка игры «Симулятор Владельца Продукта» с использованием современных инструментов разработки. Объект исследования – компьютерные игры. Методы исследования: анализ современных инструментов разработки игр, генерация идей для лучшей реализации игры, программная реализация игры, её тестирование на наличие ошибок, проведение апробации игры на 30 пользователях, сбор и систематизация обратной связи. В результате командной работы создан продукт «‎Симулятор Владельца Продукта» – это компьютерная игра, доступная в браузере. Результатом личной работы является разработанная игра, доступная в браузере, описание реализованных сцен и скриптов. Выпускная квалификационная работа выполнена в текстовом редакторе Microsoft Word. / The goal of teamwork is to create the game “Product Owner Simulator”. The goal of my personal work is to develop the game “Product Owner Simulator” using modern development tools. The object of research is computer games. Research methods: analysis of modern tools, game development, generating ideas for better implementation of games, software implementation of games, testing them for errors, testing the game on 30 users, assembling and systematizing feedback. As a result of the team’s work, the product “Product Owner Simulator” was created - this is a computer game available in the browser. The result of individual work is a developed game, available in the browser, a description of the implemented scenes and scripts. The final qualifying work was completed in the text editor Microsoft Word.

Была выявлена проблема высокого порога вхождения в роль владельца продукта. Поставлена гипотеза, что если разработать механику игры, приближенную к задачам Владельца Продукта в реальной жизни, то в игре можно будет пройти практику в роли Владельца Продукта для приобретения опыта. Общей командной целью было создание игры «Симулятор Владельца Продукта», а цель личной работы – определение направления развития игры как продукта. Результатом личной работы является описание механики игры в виде схем, бэклог продукта в виде пользовательских историй и требований, и статистика обратной связи от пользователей по результатам проведенных опросов. По статистике всего было порядка тысячи игровых сессий и положительная обратная связь от игроков. / The problem of a high threshold for entering the role of product owner was identified. It is hypothesized that if we develop game mechanics that are close to the tasks of a Product Owner in real life, then in the game it will be possible to practice as a Product Owner to gain experience. The overall team goal was to create the “Product Owner Simulator” game, and the goal of personal work was to determine the direction of development of the game as a product. The result of personal work is a description of the game mechanics in the form of diagrams, a product backlog in the form of user stories and requirements, and statistics of feedback from users based on the results of surveys. According to statistics, there were about a thousand gaming sessions and positive feedback from players.

I denna rapport vill vi lyfta fram de möjligheter och begränsningar som finns för att skapa nya engagerande läromiljöer genom att implementera ett mobilt lärospel i ett svenskt skolsammanhang. För att exemplifiera detta har vi i vårt projekt skapat ett mobilt lärospel kallat Agent O, som två högstadieskolor med ungdomar mellan 15-16 år gamla fått testspela. / This essay is a product of our bachelor of science in interactiondesign. Our focus in this project was to evaluate the mobile learning game from MIT and transform it so it would fit into Swedish schools and to redesign the interface from an interactiondesigners perspective and make it more goal-orientated for teenagers at the age of 13 to 16 years old. This resulted in the mobile learning game called Agent O. A learning game with the main purpose to evolve an interaction between the pupils and the pedagogical material through a handheld computer. Taking the learning procedure to a level where the learning part differs as when reading a textbook or solving a mathematic equation. Learning by doing may encourage the teenager to be active in the lecture in a progressive way.In this essay we present the theoretical basis by giving a background and context description of technology where it has been used as an educational complement. We will describe the limitations when designing an interface for mobile games, and look upon the possibilities for this kind of mobile learning game in Swedish schools. We have performed two main usertests at two schools in Malmö and the results of these tests are presented in the report.