Au Québec, 45,1 % des élèves allophones commencent le préscolaire en classe ordinaire sans bénéficier de Services d’accueil et de soutien à l’apprentissage du français (SASAF) ou de Services de soutien linguistique d’appoint en francisation (SLAF). Ils doivent s’intégrer sans pouvoir communiquer dans la langue commune. Les enseignants du préscolaire suivent le Programme- cycle de l'éducation préscolaire de 2021 qui ne propose pas d’outil particulier en milieu plurilingue. Cette recherche vise à confirmer la portée des SASAF et SLAF et à relever les enjeux de communication liés à l’intégration des élèves allophones. Elle cherche à identifier les outils utilisés par le personnel scolaire pour évaluer le potentiel du jeu comme moyen de communication. Une étude de cas est conduite dans 3 écoles de Montréal, au Québec. Suite aux quatorze entretiens avec le personnel scolaire, les enjeux de la pratique de la profession d’enseignant au préscolaire en milieu plurilingue sont présentés. Les résultats confirment l’inégalité des services linguistiques puis les difficultés de communication qui en découlent. Pour y faire face, le personnel scolaire adopte un discours multimodal axé sur la communication gestuelle et vocale et l’aide des supports visuels. Le jeu serait un outil à privilégier pour faciliter les interactions et la communication, puis soutenir l’apprentissage d’une langue seconde. Il y a toutefois un manque d’expertise en design de jeux axé sur la communication pour les enfants en milieu plurilingue. La recherche se conclut par des recommandations sur la création de jeux accessibles promouvant les interactions et la communication entre les enfants. / In Quebec, 45.1% of allophone preschool students enter a regular class without benefiting from Services d’accueil et de soutien à l’apprentissage du français (SASAF) or Services de soutien linguistique d’appoint en francisation (SLAF). They must learn a new language quickly without a support service. Preschool teachers follow the 2021 Programme-cycle de l'éducation préscolaire, which does not offer specific tools in a multilingual environment. This research aims to confirm the SASAF and SLAF's scope and identify the communication issues related to the integration of allophone students. It seeks to identify the tools school staff use to evaluate the game's potential as a communication tool. A case study is conducted in 3 schools in Montreal, Quebec. Following the fourteen interviews conducted with school staff, the challenges of practicing the preschool teaching profession in a multilingual environment are presented. The results confirm the inequality of linguistic services and associated communication difficulties in preschool classes. To overcome the language barrier, school staff adopt a multimodal discourse focused on gestural and vocal communication with the help of visual supports. Play is a key tool for facilitating communication and supporting students in learning a second language. However, there is a noticeable lack of expertise in communication-based game design for preschoolers in multilingual settings. The research concludes with recommendations for creating accessible games that promote interactions and communication between children.

Religion is a broad topic and serves as a great foundation for narratives in severallarge game titles. In this study we investigate how to create game assets with a religiousconnotation to build the feeling of an existing religion within the game. Using our previousproject, Martyr of Carnage (Studio F15, 2024), as a foundation, our goal is to have playersperceive a religion without a clear association to any real-world belief systems. To achievethis, we mainly investigated semiology, ritual theory, diegetic sound, and symbolism andiconography. During the iterative design process of our three prototypes, each tested by acontrol and randomised group of play testers, we focussed on asset creation, visual andauditory communication, and narratively valuable mechanics, while staying within theboundaries of non-verbal communication. We conducted surveys and interviews incombination with playtesting for data gathering. As a result, we found the importance ofconsidering immersion, contextualization and white space when attempting a study of thiskind.

Video games' capacity for player choice makes them an excellent medium for expressing ethical dilemmas and developing the ethical thinking of players. However, translating complex ethical dilemmas to procedural games is challenging, particularly when the game creator intends to convey specific arguments in their work. This paper contains a close reading of ethical dilemmas in Fallout: New Vegas, Disco Elysium, and Frostpunk and applies Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept of stratification as a means of understanding the process of collapsing the semantics of an ethical dilemma into the procedures of a digital game. It introduces the concept of consonance to refer to the consistency between procedural and semantic logic, and argues that the development of mechanics which maintain or enhance consonance is an important factor in creating persuasive procedural rhetoric about ethical topics.

This thesis research explores the patterns of player-character relationships and player-character attachment in Animal Crossing: New Horizons (2020) and Genshin Impact (2020). The purpose of the paper is to fill in the existing gap in the literature concerning the psychological and social mechanisms of attachment that players form with non-customizable game characters. The research explores the nature of player-character attachment in its relation to game mechanics and broader social context, as well as its transformative potential.   The research relies on interdisciplinary mixed-methods methodology, drawing from the fields of psychology and anthropology. The first part of the research employs auto-ethnographic data on the authors' personal relationships with game characters. The second part involves a series of qualitative in-depth interviews with players of Animal Crossing and Genshin Impact. Thematic analysis with the elements of case-study methodology is applied to the interview data. The results of the interview analysis are compared between the two player groups, as well as to the findings of the auto-ethnographic inquiry. The main results of the comparative analysis suggest that players’ perceptions of characters in the studied games can be categorized as character-as-object and character-as-other. Further on, a distinction can be made between two types of attachment that players form with characters-as-others. The first one is player-for-character, focused primarily on a player’s relatedness and empathy towards a character. The second one is character-for-player, where a game character is perceived as a supporting and caring figure that transcends the boundaries of the game. The relationship types are not mutually exclusive, and both of them have been found to have transformative potential.

In the field of Game Design, multiple frameworks have emerged to give an ontological understanding of iterative Game Design and game creation. However, following critique of the MDA framework in regards to how it treats narratives, our group in this paper utilized the alternative DDE framework, as a tool to investigate any of deeper detail in player-game interactions within the game Cities: Skylines II as compared to the MDA framework. The study was done as an inductive narrative analysis of recorded gameplay found on video-hosting websites, such as YouTube where we would discuss the ways the two frameworks operate in terms of narratives.

The thesis portrays the process of adaptation and transition of analog games to digital formats. In a practical manner, the game The Last Vampire, which is a social deduction board game custom-developed and designed by the team, was used as a proof of concept to convey the challenges and possibilities that may arise from such transitions. On a theoretical level, a review of the current state of the field was done, exploring the intersection between analog and digital environments and how in such a hybrid context the landscape of play can be potentially reshaped offering new degrees of freedom to designers when crafting games. Whereas, also illustrating the delicate balance needed when integrating novel digital functionalities and traditional analog elements in hybrid play.

[pt] Essa dissertação procurou refletir a deficiência sensorial no universo dos jogos eletrônicos, balizando-se nos conceitos da fenomenologia, sinestesia, interface, virtualidade do corpo e comunicação procurando contextualizá-los com exemplos, citando reportagens, estudos acadêmicos, bem como algumas possibilidades advindas da tecnologia de substituição sensorial eletrotátil. Trabalhou-se o conceito de game sinestésico, tipo de jogo eletrônico que permite ao jogador perceber os elementos virtuais, sejam eles visuais, auditivos, táteis, gustativos ou olfativos, por meio de um canal sensorial não tradicional. Essa ocorrência insere-se no âmbito da sinestesia constitutiva, que compreende a integração dos mecanismos cerebrais e cognitivos, onde o indivíduo pode realmente enxergar cores ao escutar um determinado som, pode sentir um sabor ao encostar numa determinada superfície. Vale ressaltar a natureza filosófica de tal tecnologia, ou seja, abrange o maior número possível de pessoas, sejam deficientes sensoriais (em todos seus níveis) ou pessoas que não possuem nenhuma deficiência sensorial significativa. O desdobramento do estudo resultou no desenvolvimento de uma classificação perceptiva para os jogos eletrônicos. / [en] This dissertation sought to reflect the sensory disability in the world of video games, it marks on the concepts of phenomenology, synesthesia, interface, virtual communication and the body looking for contextualizing them with examples, citing media reports, academic studies, as well as some possibilities that come from technology electrotactile sensory substitution. Worked up the concept of kinesthetic game, kind of electronic game that allows players to realize the virtual elements, be they visual, auditory, tactile, taste or smell, through a sensory channel non-traditional. This occurrence is within the scope of the constitutive synesthesia, which includes the integration of brain and cognitive mechanisms, where the individual can actually see colors when listening to a particular sound, you can feel a taste for touching a surface. It is worth mentioning the philosophical nature of such technology, in other words, covering the largest possible number of people with disabilities are sensory (all levels) or people who have no significant sensory impairment. The unfolding of the study resulted in the development of a perceptual classification for games.

The rise of digital technology has transformed nearly every part of our daily lives, including the way we learn and memorize. Such transformations raise interesting questions for one of the most long-standing and demanding memorization tasks in the world: the memorization of the Islamic holy book, The Qur’an. For Muslims, The Qur’an is a timeless, sacred text, cradling within its covers many profound images, stories, and parables. Despite rigorous research in the fields of game design and memorization techniques, very little work has been done in combining these two areas of research to create a game-based memorization experience of The Quran. This thesis synthesizes game design elements with existing memorization techniques to foster a more engaging, enriching, and inspiring Qur’an memorization experience.

The work deals with the relationship between game mechanics and user experience. Identifies the basic gameplay mechanics and elements that have the most important influence on the quality of user experience. Research is realized on the example of a specific game using the concept of game design patterns. Part of the work deals with the introduction of this concept. Furthermore, the work deals with the general theories of games, models of classification and history of computer games. Part of the work is a description of the author's practical experience in creating games as a school project.

Le jeu casual est un phénomène majeur de l’industrie vidéoludique, pourtant il reste peu étudié et mal considéré. Les quelques définitions scientifiques recensées présentent des divergences importantes, ainsi qu’un décalage par rapport aux jeux produits. Les modèles théoriques en design de jeu, centrés sur le gameplay, semblent inadéquats face à ce phénomène. En utilisant le modèle du praticien réflexif de Donald Schön, l’objectif de notre recherche est d’apporter un nouvel éclairage sur le jeu casual grâce au savoir professionnel des designers de jeux. Notre approche est qualitative, d’inspiration phénoménologique : nous avons recueilli l’expérience de huit designers de jeux par l’intermédiaire d’entretiens semi-dirigés proches du récit de pratique. Nos résultats montrent que les concepts utilisés dans les modèles vidéoludiques traditionnels restent pertinents pour définir le jeu casual, mais demandent à être retravaillés afin de rendre compte des mutations de l’expérience de jeu. Ainsi, un challenge dans un jeu casual n’est pas un obstacle mais une opportunité d’action pour le joueur. De plus, la progression se fait par la variation des challenges plutôt que par l’augmentation de la difficulté. Ensuite, certains concepts qui semblaient pertinents pour définir les jeux casual, tels que la fiction positive, ont été rejetés par nos participants. Enfin, notre étude a permis de rassembler des informations sur le rôle du designer de jeu casual et le contexte dans lequel il exerce, ce qui permet d’expliquer certaines causes de la vision péjorative du jeu casual. / Casual games are one of the main phenomena in the video game industry, but remain under-explored and are not highly regarded. Scientific definitions are scarce, inconsistent, and often disconnected from actual games. Further, theoretical models for game design, centered on gameplay, often fall short in defining casual games. The objective of this study is to use Donald Schön's model of the reflective practitioner to shed a new light on casual games through the collection of professional knowledge of game designers. This study follows a qualitative approach with phenomenological inspiration. Eight one-on-one semi-structured interviews were conducted with casual game designers who were asked to provide a narrative of their professional practice. Results show that traditional game design concepts remain relevant for understanding and defining casual games, but need to be reworked in the light of new experiences and contexts in gaming. Namely, challenge is no longer synonymous with obstacle, but should be considered as an opportunity of a player’s action. Progression should be based on the variation of challenges instead of increasing difficulty. In addition, participants rejected some concepts that were previously considered appropriate for defining casual games, like positive fiction. Finally, this study provides insight into the role of casual game designers and the context of their work, which can help explain the often negative perception of casual games.