In this essay a mediated video game reception of the game Life Is Strange is made, with the purpose of examining the players' meaning-making processes from a gender perspective. The materials of this essay consist of videos from six different YouTube channels where each player film themselves whilst playing through Life Is Strange as a way to review and share the gaming experience. The results show how the meaning-making processes are littered with gender discourses and affects. The affects offset discourses by amplification or by revealing discord between available cultural narratives and the simulated reality of the game. Even though the game highlights themes like female-centric relationships, suicide, euthanasia, lesbianism, socio-economic circumstances, social accountability and men's violence against women, it successfully delivers highly involving, enjoyable and appreciated gameplay experience. The game is shown to provide players with a platform around which they can connect and continue to discuss, raise awareness and produce knowledge around these important topics. The fan generated culture will in turn, reach a much larger audience than the game sales numbers reflect. / <p>Treated in seminar at Stockholm University</p>

The studies of digital games is a young scientific field notable for its interdisciplinary nature that seeks to unite several epistemological positions in order to properly encompass the wide array of questions raised by the subject matter. During the last two decades strides have been made towards the introduction of a unified game theory, with several of the more recently suggested methods coalescing towards a similar end. This paper posits a phenomenological game theory which circumvents the usual aesthetic arguments for a focus on game as space, and analyses what it means to be in that space. The result of the initial reading of mainly three well-known and critically acclaimed digital games strongly indicates that using Heideggerian phenomenological thought reveals things about games as art that a) reinforces the validity of commonly held beliefs in current game theory, and b) suggests new ways forward for game design to improve games through enhancing the player’s comportment into their spaces by means of phenomenological game theory.

The master thesis deals with the monetization of big-budget video game titles. For this purpose the attention is paid to the three basic areas, namely business models, specific video game marketing and piracy. The theoretical part of the thesis analyzes and describes these aspects and looks for their strengths and weaknesses. It creates a possible ways to monetize the big-budget video game titles as well as the theoretical framework which is necessary for the research. In our research the attention is paid to the results of the questionnaire investigation, which is focused on gamers opinions about the aspects of monetization described in theoretical part. Thanks to the research and theoretical part of the thesis the optimal way of the monetization of the big-budget video game title was created

The proliferation of the Internet and online-based social interactions has become an increasingly popular topic with communication scholars. The goal of this study was to explore how massively multi-player online role playing game (MMORPG) players make sense of and negotiate their online social interactions. This study (N = 292) examined how players of SecondLife and World of Warcraft evaluated their online relationships compared to their offline relationships and investigated how different levels of realism within different MMORPGs effected player's online experiences. The results indicated that players of SecondLife placed higher values of emotional closeness to their online relationships when compared to players of World of Warcraft and SecondLife was rated more real by its players than World of Warcraft. Results further indicated that players of SecondLife had higher levels of perceived online emotional closeness when compared to perceived offline emotional closeness. Implications of this study focus on developing a bottom up holistic profile of online game players as opposed to the current top down research model.

The challenges found in three-dimensional platformer games heavily rely on the player’s ability to perceive depth and it is therefore crucial for them to feature shadows as they are an important depth cue for the human visual system. In this paper, we compare two different kinds of shadowing solutions, blob shadows and shadow-maps. Subjects split into two groups each played a differently shadowed version of a 3D platformer game prototype as well as a common, unshadowed version. The first group’s prototype featured blob shadows while the second group’s used shadowmaps. The players were asked to input their own proficiency level from one to five into the program. The data collected through in-prototype logging to a file hinted at shadowmaps being more desirable as the shadowmap group’s delta from shadowed to unshadowed playthrough was lower than the blob shadow group’s. However, this data featured a number of problems, such as low sample size, subjective evaluation of player proficiency in 3D platformer games and different distribution of proficiency in and across groups. / Utmaningarna funna i tredimensionella platformsspel beror starkt på spelarens förmåga att uppfatta djup och det är därför avgörande för spelaren att ha skuggor eftersom de är en viktig antydan till djup för det mänskliga visuella systemet. I detta examensarbete jämför vi två olika typer av skuggningslösningar, “blob shadows” och “shadowmaps”. Försökspersonerna delades upp i två grupper, var och en spelade en annorlunda skuggad version av en prototyp för ett 3D-plattformsspel samt en ordinär, version utan skugga. Den första gruppens skuggor gjordes med “blob shadows” medan för den andra gruppen användes “shadowmaps”. Spelarna ombads att mata in sin egen kompetensnivå från ett till fem i programmet. Uppgifterna som samlats in via loggning i prototypen skrevs till en fil som antydde att “shadowmaps” var mer önskvärda eftersom “shadowmap”-gruppens delta från skuggad till icke-skuggad igenomspelning var lägre än skugga-gruppens. Dessa data innehöll emellertid ett antal problem, såsom låg provstorlek, subjektiv utvärdering av spelarens kunskaper i 3D-plattformsspel och olika spridning av kunskaper i och över grupper. Insikter för framtida forskning inkluderar skapandet av en objektiv ram för utvärdering för kunskaperna för spelarna såväl som förminskningen av prototypens omfattning.

[pt] A presente dissertação parte de um estudo realizado no Instituto Nacional de Educação dos Surdos que pensa as questões das mensagens visuais de jogos de computador destinados à aquisição da fala de crianças surdas. Os jogos, conhecidos como Jogos de Voz e desenvolvidos no Laboratório de Processamento Digital da Fala, da Faculdade de Engenharia Elétrica e de Computação da UNICAMP, na tese de doutorado de Antônio Marcos de Lima Araújo, consistem na retroalimentação visual da fala do jogador. Isto é, enquanto a criança exercita o controle dos órgãos de fonação em um microfone ligado ao computador, ela compreende e assimila o exercício através de uma resposta gráfica e ilustrativa gerada em tempo real na tela do computador. A criança vê o que está falando. Dos quatorze módulos dos Jogos de Voz que foram jogados por crianças com idade entre 6 e 12 anos, em seções regulares, durante um ano, na Divisão de Fonoaudiologia, DIFON, do INES, foram selecionados para análise os dois mais jogados nesse período. A avaliação dos jogos de retroalimentação visual para crianças surdas, que buscam representar visualmente o que ocorre no instante da fala, indica que o design exerce papel determinante na aquisição dos resultados a que se propõem. / [en] This thesis begins with a study at the Instituto Nacional de Educação dos Surdos (Brazilian Institute of Deaf Education) examining the visual messages of computer-based game of speech training for deaf children. The game, known as Jogos de Voz, developed by DS Antonio Marcos de Lima Araújo, as his thesis at the Laboratory of Digital Processing Speech, of the College of Electric Engineering and Computation of UNICAMP, consists of the visual feedback of the player`s speech. That is, while the children exercise their articulatory coordination on the computer microphone, they run through a graphical and illustrative reply in real time on the computer screen. The child sees what he or she is speaking. Of the fourteen modules of the Games of Voice that have been played by children aged 6 to 12 years, in regular sessions, during one year, in the Division of Fonoaudiologia (DIFON) of the INES the two most played modules in this period were selected for analysis. Evaluation of games of visual feedback for deaf children, that they seek to represent visually what occurs at the moment when speech is being produced, indicates that design exerts determinative role in reaching the game`s proposed objectives.

This project explores opportunities in designing hybrid digital/physical smell rehabilitation video games using no unique game peripherals. During a 13-week process, three major iterations were created and externally tested on a small user group. The first two iterations contained five simple minigames that served to explore different types of game concepts. For the final iteration, two minigames were fully developed, a slow- and fast-paced game. The main findings were that slow-paced better-facilitated smell training than fast-paced games; aesthetics increased the player’s focus on small training; not utilising unique game peripherals limited the design opportunities and implementation of smell mechanics.

Electronic sports (esports) is an activity in which players compete against each other in video games. It could be beneficial for the esports industry if players were to perform more consistently. The user interface in the game is one aspect that could impact player performance. In this study, the six user interface element types defined by Fagerholt and Lorentzon in 2009 were used as the context for comparing player performance. The purpose of this thesis was to discover how the graphical user interface of competitive first-person shooter (FPS) games affect the player’s ability to perform mechanically and comprehend information, as well as determining what players value in such user interfaces. This was achieved through the use of experiments and interviews in the context of a game that was developed for this study. In the game, the participants played through levels with different user interfaces in which player performance was tracked. This study discovered that the diegetic user interface performed the best in mechanical performance and information comprehension. Meta-perception resulted in some of the worst mechanical performance. More cluttered user interfaces appeared to worsen reaction times. There was also a vague indication suggesting that more cluttered user interfaces worsen information comprehension. In terms of user preferences, the non-diegetic user interface was the most preferred. In contrast, the participants preferred the geometric user interface the least. Through the thematic analysis, it was discovered that various factors may be beneficial to consider when designing user interfaces using different types of elements. The factors are beneficial to consider because they may affect player performance. The factors are concerned with the following: information balance, contrast, clutteredness, use of numbers, position of elements, use of health bars, element sizes and presentation of ammunition stacks. However, further studies generating statistically significant results would be required to confirm these insights.

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Under de senaste decennierna har datorspel etablerats som ett legitimt forskningsområde. Inom denna forskning har den artificiella intelligensen (AI) varit av stort intresse framförallt i relation till de karaktärer inom spel som kallas för non-playable characters (NPC). Fokus har legat på att göra dessa karaktärer mer trovärdiga och på så sätt göra spel mer engagerande och potentiellt främja immersion. I och med detta bör alla aspekter av NPC:er utforskas för att säkerställa att alla bidragande faktorer har identifierats och kan därefter användas för att ytterligare utveckla dessa. Då social interaktion inom datorspel har tidigare kopplats till en spelares immersion är det viktigt att förstå alla komponenter som uppgör denna. Den mänskliga kommunikationen är grundad i både verbala och icke-verbala uttryck vilket tillsammans skapar den sociala interaktionen. Därför undersöker denna studie de aspekter av en karaktärs beteende som kan kategoriseras som icke-verbala uttryck. Detta utförs med hjälp av en kvalitativ observationsmetod för att identifiera vilka variationer som existerar, hur de uppfattas, samt om de påverkar karaktärers trovärdighet och därefter spelarens känsla av immersion. / In recent decades, computer games have been established as a legitimate area of research. In this research, artificial intelligence (AI) has been of great interest especially in relation to the characters in games called non-playable characters (NPCs). The focus has been on making these characters more believable and thus making games more engaging and potentially more immersive. In doing so, all aspects of NPCs should be explored to ensure that all contributing factors have been identified and can then be used to further develop them. As social interaction in computer games have previously been linked to a player's immersion, it is important to understand all the contributing components. Human communication is based on both verbal and non-verbal behaviors, which together create social interaction. Therefore, this study examines the aspects of NPC behavior that can be categorized as non-verbal expressions. This is achieved using a qualitative observation method to identify what variations exist, how they are perceived, and whether they affect the believability of characters and the player's immersion.