The video game is, as we know, one of the most popular and quickly growing mediums in the United States and the world in whole. Because of its success, the video game industry has been able to use their resources to advance technology of many kinds. Two very important technologies which have been advanced by the game industry are artificial intelligence and graphic design. With advances in the videogame industry constantly increasing the realism of gaming, those who game are finding themselves rapidly transported into new worlds. The Combination of the elements of narrative transportation, character identification, a videogames ability to enable mediated experience create a situation in which players may be able to rapidly learn very complex concepts. This project begins with a classification of videogame moral systems, both on a theoretical and logistic level. Given this understanding of how videogames themselves define moral involvement, the project then seeks to answer how the players understand their own moral involvement in the game by directly involving player/participants in the conversation. The data produced strongly suggests that videogames have great potential to teach even the most complex concepts of right and wrong to players.

This project examines the articulation of Mexican identities in digital narratives through a variety of genres, bringing into conversation various disciplines to present more comprehensive studies on the construction of representational paradigms, their consumption and social impact and their association with other cultural and literary texts. Deploying a multidisciplinary approach, this work articulates a theoretical framework that incorporates the fields of semiology, postcolonial theory, visual culture, urban studies, ludology, linguistic anthropology and border studies. This project analyzes the processes through which the identities of Mexican subjects and the depiction of Mexican spaces are articulated in new digital narratives in the form video games as mass culture objects, which are conceived from hegemonic loci of production, are globally consumed and have the potential to transmit deeply rooted social knowledge. Furthermore, the lack of spaces in which represented minorities may counter the stereotypical images projected forecloses dialogic processes. Through the agglomeration of different representational modules (visual units, narrative elements and linguistic portrayals) different genres impose predisposed rhetorical framework and found that the vast majority share a predetermined collection of elements that create a representational mosaic of how "Mexicanness" should be depicted and perceived. Furthermore, said digital subject representations enact cultural ideological frameworks that are imposed onto the audience, influencing meaning-formation processes. This work also analyzes the dynamics between the production, representation and consumption of videogames and traces tangents with the social and historical contexts of earlier visual media in Latin America.

Players of an open-world video game are more than merely audience members watching a narrative play out--they actively participate and perform in the world. Drawing from scholars like Edmund Husserl, Konstantin Stanislavski, Ossy Wulansari, and PJ Manney, this paper explores principles of performance, phenomenology, and empathy to examine how open-world role-playing games, specifically Red Dead Redemption II, help players experience empathy. Constructing this experience through character attachment, length of play, and identification in a safe experimental space, these games become a bridge leading to greater empathy for people who are different from the player. The immersive nature of these games provides a suitable area for studying the effects of this media on a player's development of empathy for the character they play, others in the game world, and beyond. This paper focuses on this phenomenon through the player's performance of the main character, Arthur Morgan, and attempts to connect how this experience applies to the real-world building of player empathy.

In this paper we analyze the existing methods for exploring and evaluating the characteristics of the jump mechanic in video games by comparing qualitative research done in the field of game studies. For this study we are using the jump as a centerpiece, starting with an analysis of different methodologies that break down game mechanics and assessing their functionality and possible effects on players. Primarily this focus will be on how mechanics are broken down from different perspectives and how these methodologies compare. The intent behind the review of these methodologies is to objectively simplify the process of collecting and comparing relevant research in order to familiarize the reader with the concept of game mechanics and their parts from an assortment of perspectives while also retaining knowledge on their similarities and differences. This paper comes to the conclusion that one could argue for the discovery of three thematic similarities between the methodologies.These similarities are then presented to shape an understanding of how a resonating or “Harmonic”(Swink, 2008, p.297) systems could be developed.

Video game researchers have recently begun to explore qualitative techniques to understand video games and their audiences. Yet many questions remain concerning the significance of gaming media and how video game research should be conducted. This research addresses the changing focus of video game researchers from the "producers," or sender of the video game, to the "audience" or receiver. This is accomplished in the following ways: by exploring meanings created by individuals while "role-playing" in an electronic world as an on-screen video game avatar; by using the Zaltman metaphor elicitation technique (ZMET), to gather a deeper understanding of how players are interpreting the video game creators intended message, and focusing on the relationships formed between a player and their onscreen character. Using the ZMET method the author conducts ten in-depth interviews looking at the interviewees' relation with the Super Mario Bros avatar to gain an understanding of player-avatar relationships. Interviews are then discussed to describe how these individuals understand the video game message and avatar relationship.

[pt] A atualidade nos presenteia com novas e curiosas maneiras de expressar conhecimento e cultura. Dentre as mídias que avançam rumo ao futuro, percebemos os jogos eletrônicos como arautos de uma nova dialogia, calcada no uso tecnológico, transgeracional, interativo, dinâmico e principalmente divertido de nossa produção de imagens. A presente dissertação analisa o fenômeno cultural dos jogos eletrônicos em função de sua visualidade interativa, construções simbólicas que guardam estreita relação com as novas tendências da comunicação in absentia, da hipermidiação e da transmidiação. O texto define conceitos intrínsecos ao entendimento dos jogos eletrônicos como reflexo de um momento histórico, celebrante da nossa participação e envolvimento com processos lúdicos. Analisados alguns exemplos publicados e comercializados, os designers são apontados como indivíduos responsáveis pela conceituação e produção de projetos que não terminam no uso da opus, mas sim no valor agregado que trazem consigo para a materialidade do mundo. Jogos eletrônicos habitam na compreensão mútua: de sua materialidade objetiva e de sua imaterialidade participada. São objeto e processo em simultâneo, catalisadores de expectativas e vivências simuladas e emuladas. Da trajetória condicionada pela velocidade de avanços técnicos ao entendimento de um multiverso simbólico colecionados como experiências durante sua fruição, traçaremos vínculos entre o enlevo envolvente e a conscientização de uma linguagem visual emergente, baseada na ereção conceitual de componentes visuais que se relacionam para evidenciar a mensagem. Uma fundamentação imagética, que sugere o princípio de uma gramática visual a partir de um discurso para perfeita integração entre aquele que projeta, aquele que joga e seu jogo. / [en] Modernity provides us with new and curious ways to express knowledge and culture. Amongst the media that advance into the future, we perceive electronic games as heralds of a new dialogic process, based on technological, transgenerational, interactive, dynamic and mainly entertaining use of our image production system. This dissertation analyzes the electronic game as a cultural phenomemon through its interactive visuality, as well as the symbolic constructions, which keep a close relationship with the new trends of in- absentia communication, hypermidiation and trans-mediation. Electronic games intrinsic concepts are presented as reflection of a historical moment; a moment that celebrates our participation and involvement with playful processes. Designers are also presented as responsible for conceptualizing and producing projects that do not end at the use of the opus, but in the embedded value in the world materiality. Electronic games exist in the mutual understanding of its objective materiality and its participative nonmateriality. Together, object and process become catalysts of simulated and emulated expectations. We will show the links between the viewer`s involvement and his awareness of an emerging visual language through its path influenced by the speed of techcnical improvements and the understanding of a symbolic multiverse, which happens during reception. Such language is based on the conceptual erection of visual intermingling components showing the message. An image-based explanation suggesting the beginning of a visual grammar stemmed from a discourse that integrates creator, player and game.

In 2K Games’ Bioshock (2007) the player, as the protagonist Jack, is thrown into a dystopian, futuristic alternate history of America. Rapture is an underwater city saturated in music: popular songs from the mid twentieth century; classical-style soundtrack pieces composed by Garry Schyman; characters humming, singing, whistling or playing instruments; musical vending machines; and even the sounds of whales and other creatures all participate in forming a textured soundscape. The songs from the 1930s - 50s used throughout Bioshock recall a real-world cultural environment—a popular music culture that is both comfortably recognizable yet strangely unfamiliar. They occur within the game world and are heard by the player and game characters, and thus the songs are diegetic or “screen music.” In Bioshock, such music is an explicit component of narrative production, game environment creation, and player immersion. Significantly, diegetic music participates in the construction of narrative through a constant interplay or negotiation with the video game’s other elements—visual, textual, ludic—and ultimately functions as a distinct discourse able to mediate for Jack/the player between contesting factors, via established conventional codes of musical, cultural, film, and now video game signification. Bioshock’s use of music initiates a pre-game discourse during installation and prior to every game session in the disc-loading scenes, and this musical discourse is continued throughout the narrative. The story’s opening and descent into Rapture further establishes and “naturalizes” the presence of diegetic music as part of the story being told, and as a vital component of the audio-visual environment enhances player immersion. At the same time, these opening instances and subsequent occurrences of diegetic music at significant points in the story demonstrate that music’s culturally encoded emotive potential produces ironic and poignant effects, while its lyrical intertextuality generates narratological and ludic commentary in various song/scene pairings.

This dissertation concerns live action role-playing (larp). Larp may be described as improvised theater without an audience, as participants simultaneously embody both audience and actor in their constant interaction with one another.  Hence, larp can be seen as a participatory culture.  The study is based on participant observation, interviews and online ethnography in Denmark, Latvia, Sweden and Norway. The aim of the thesis is to analyze how bodies materialize, take and are given space in larps. At the heart of the study lie questions on how processes of embodiment are enacted before, during and after the game. Two central concepts - larp chronotope and matrix of interpretation – shape the analysis. The first denotes the specific timespace in which a larp takes place, e.g a Soviet military camp or a fantasy world. The second concept stands for a general matrix of norms that informs participants on how to enact their characters in the larp chronotope. The thesis shows that participants strive to act in ways that are intelligible according to the matrix of interpretation that reigns during the game days. In addition, although game and everyday matrixes of interpretations are always inseparable, while attending a larp the participant’s ordinary lives are temporarily allowed to fade into the background. Thus, larps are complex combinations of objects, spaces and bodies that are given new relations and new meanings. Furthermore, the thesis shows that larp embodiment is conditioned by normative ideas of what it means to be an intelligible live action role player. White male bodies are more likely to access the sphere of larp intelligibility than others, which is evident in many of the stories and made up worlds portrayed in the study. Yet, the collaborative narration of game worlds that take place before larps can include all sorts of bodies. Consequently, larps provide an opportunity for alternative forms of embodiment and experiences.

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