No / Mobile language learning games usually only focus on spelling or out of context meaning for the entire dictionary, ignoring the role of an authentic environment. ‘Detective Alavi’ is an educational mobile game that provides a shared space for students to work collaboratively towards language learning in a narrative rich environment. This game motivates and preserves a conversation between learners and their teachers, and also between learners and learners, whilst being immersed in the story of the game. A seamless self-assessment scoring system in the game structure provides a less dominating environment for students to expose their weaknesses, and at the same time assists students to judge what skills they have learned and how much. This game has produced improvement in different cognitive processes and a deeper level of learning during the collaborative game play.

Mobile Gaming entwickelte sich innerhalb des letzten Jahrzehnts rasant, was vor allem mit der Verbreitung und Weiterentwicklung des Smartphones und des drahtlosen Internetzugangs zusammenhängt. 85% der Gamer geben mittlerweile an, dass sie mit dem Smartphone Videospiele spielen. Das Smartphone hat sich demnach als primäres Endgerät für Mobile Gaming etabliert und bietet mit seiner Sensorik und Performance neue Möglichkeiten des Spielens. ... Diese Arbeit untersucht im Rahmen einer quantitativ explorativen Studie den Einfluss des Spiels auf die physische Aktivität der Nutzer sowie deren soziale Zugehörigkeit über das Spiel. Dazu werden nach einer Einordnung des Spiels über Spielmechaniken und ortsbezogene Elemente die Ergebnisse der deutschlandweiten Onlineumfrage dargestellt. [... aus dem Text]

The last ten years, online multiplayer games have become very popular. During the same time period mobile terminals and cellular networks have undergone a tremendous technical evolution. Therefore it is natural to wonder why we have not seen an online mobile multiplayer gaming revolution yet. The answer to this question is of great value for companies selling mobile systems. This answer is important in order to understand how to fill up today’s empty networks with traffic and what kind of traffic these games will generate. This thesis is a continuation of Mattias Åkervik’s thesis. It gives the reader an understanding of what kind of wireless technologies are on the market today and how they perform. Given this performance background, some suitable games were chosen to examine how they perform over a particular cellular network and to determine the perceived gaming quality that a user experience. The thesis also examines the particular packet traffic characteristics generated by these games to gain a better understanding of how to better adapt cellular networks towards gaming. Finally the market will be analyzed. Not only how large this potential market is, but to examine if there are some market issues preventing the revolution in network cellular on-line multiplayer games. / De senaste tio åren har multiplayer gaming blivit väldigt populärt. Under samma tidsperiod har cellulära terminaler och de mobile nätverken genomgått en stor teknisk evolution. Därför kan man undra varför inte mobile multiplayer gaming har slagit igenom än. Svaret på denna fåga är värdefullt för föreatag som säljer mobila system, men även mobiloperatörerna, dådet kan ge en hint hur man bättre kan fylla ut dagens tomma 3G system med trafik. Detta examensarbete är en fortsättning på Mattias Åkerviks arbete. Det ger läsaren en förståelse i dagens trådlösa teknologier och vad de kan prestera. Med detta i bagaget kommer ett antal spel undersökas och hur deras spelupplevelse influeras av begräsningarna som de mobila nätverken har. Arbetet kommer också att behandla vilken trafik dessa spel genererar, då detta kan ge en bättre förståelse i hur man kan anpassa nätverken i ett gamingsyfte. Slutligen kommer marknaden att analyseras. Inte bara det potentiella värdet av gamingmarknaden, men även om det finns några marknadsstrukturella orsaker som bromsar utvecklingen av mobila multiplayer spel.

Mobile Gaming entwickelte sich innerhalb des letzten Jahrzehnts rasant, was vor allem mit der Verbreitung und Weiterentwicklung des Smartphones und des drahtlosen Internetzugangs zusammenhängt. 85% der Gamer geben mittlerweile an, dass sie mit dem Smartphone Videospiele spielen. Das Smartphone hat sich demnach als primäres Endgerät für Mobile Gaming etabliert und bietet mit seiner Sensorik und Performance neue Möglichkeiten des Spielens. ... Diese Arbeit untersucht im Rahmen einer quantitativ explorativen Studie den Einfluss des Spiels auf die physische Aktivität der Nutzer sowie deren soziale Zugehörigkeit über das Spiel. Dazu werden nach einer Einordnung des Spiels über Spielmechaniken und ortsbezogene Elemente die Ergebnisse der deutschlandweiten Onlineumfrage dargestellt. [... aus dem Text]

Anwendungen auf dem Smartphone gewinnen in der heutigen Zeit immer mehr an Relevanz. Besonders das Mobile Gaming, das in Deutschland die beliebteste Videospielkategorie ist (Brandt, 2016) unterliegt einem stetigen Wachstum. Das Smartphone bietet mit seiner Sensorik und Performance zudem neue Möglichkeiten des Spielens (Leaver & Willson, 2016). Eine der erfolgreichsten Anwendungen ist das Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) Pokémon GO1, welches im Juli 2016 veröffentlicht wurde und einen regelrechten globalen Hype auslöste. Mit über 800 Millionen Downloads und weiterhin über 65 Millionen aktiven Spielern2 ist es das weltweit erfolgreichste Mobile Game (Lanier, 2018). Das Spielprinzip basiert darauf virtuelle Monster, sogenannte Pokémon, zu fangen, zu entwickeln und kämpfen zu lassen. Das Spiel basiert auf dem klassischen Pokémon-Spiel für den Gameboy aus dem Jahr 1996 (Tobin, Sefton-Green, Allison, & Buckingham, 2004). Um sich von anderen Spielen abzuheben, macht sich die Applikation unter anderem die innovative Technologie Augmented Reality (AR) zunutze und projiziert die Pokémon in die direkte Umgebung des Nutzers. Darüber hinaus ist Pokémon Go ein Location-Based Game (LBG), sodass die aktuelle Positionsinformation des Spielers benutzt wird, um die Position des virtuellen Avatars in der Spiellandschaft zu steuern. Angesichts der Aspekte, dass Pokémon Go ein MMORPG sowie ein positionsbezogenes Spiel ist, lässt es sich in die Klasse der Social-Local-Mobile-Anwendungen (SoLoMo) einordnen (Hsieh, 2018). [Aus der Einleitung.]

Background: The widespread use of social media has offered brands a great opportunity to engage with their customers and promote sales. In China’s mobile gaming market, the huge user base of social media marketing provides companies with an excellent opportunity to develop their brand image and cultivate further awareness. However, the research regarding social media marketing’s influence on mobile game’s brand equity is still limited from a literary perspective. Purpose: Firstly, the research aims to identify the factors of social media marketing that influencing mobile game companies’ brand equity. Secondly, this research will evaluate the importance of identified impact factors. Method: In order to investigate the research subjects and answer research question properly, the positivism research paradigm has been implemented in this research. In addition, the deductive reasoning approach is applied to formulate and test hypotheses to generate reliable results with a high level of generalization and prediction. The theoretical foundation of this research has been formulated through the frame of reference. Then, the quantitative research methods were applied to the collection and analysis of the data. The primary data has been collected through a survey and the samples have been randomly selected. The main method for the data analysis was regression analysis. Conclusion: In general, the research has demonstrated that social media marketing is a useful tool to develop brand equity for mobile game companies in the Chinese consumer market. Brand popularity and information quality are considered the most important influential factors of social media marketing on mobile game company’s brand equity in China.

The main objective of this diploma thesis is to design and develop a cloud hosted service that allows developers of games for Windows Phone 7 platform to extend their products with social and competitive aspect using Platform as a Service solution Windows Azure for hosting the backend of this system. The first part of the thesis analyses systems that are available on the market and that are providing similar services for the target platform. Based on this analysis, functional and general requirements for the future application are specified in the second part. Based on these requirements, use case analysis is made. The third part of the thesis is dedicated to description of the most important features, APIs and specifics of the Windows Phone 7 software platform. The fourth part is dedicated to Windows Azure as a Cloud platform both in terms of most important services, their characteristics and APIs used to utilise them and in terms of their business and pricing conditions. The fifth part addresses the architecture and the most important implementation details of the application. The final part contains the user guide for both the Windows Phone 7 application and for developers interested in using the library containing the API during the development of their game. The output of this thesis is the designed and implemented application with client-server architecture ready to have its backend deployed in Windows Azure environment and to have its frontend deployed on Windows Phone 7 devices. The client part of the system is comprised of a library intended for developers of games, which encapsulates the API needed to access the backend on the Internet, and a graphic frontend intended for end users. The server part, which contains most of the application logic, has REST interface. The applications architecture allows future development in terms of new functionality and expansion on more client platforms.

Molnbaserat spelande är spelande som sker över nätverket. Spelet streamas från servrar till användarens enhet. Detta ger möjligheten att spela på enheter som inte skulle vara tillräckligt kraftfulla för att spela vissa spel på annat sätt. Mobiltelefonen är den nuvarande primära enheten för spel och fortsätter att öka i popularitet. I tidigare forskningsstudier och litteratur finns det ett uttalat behov för mätning av upplevelsekvalitet, även känt som Quality of Experience (QoE) för nylanserade molntjänster. QoE är ett sätt att undersöka användarnöjdhet och nöje för en specifik applikation eller tjänst. Denna studie redogör upplevd QoE för den molnbaserade speltjänsten Google Stadia på mobila enheter. Studien använder en kvalitativ forskningsansats med semistrukturerade intervjuer som metod för datainsamling. Resultatet analyseras med hjälp av ramverket CCA och kvalitativ innehållsanalys. Resultatet visar att upplevd QoE är bra överlag men att det finns förbättringsområden för spelupplevelsen. Denna studie utvecklar kunskapen om hur väl molnbaserade speltjänster fungerar på en mobiltelefon i dagsläget och resultatet visar behovet att liknande forskningsstudier utförs för att fördjupa denna kunskap. / Cloud gaming provides a way to play games over the network. This presents the possibility to play on devices that would not be powerful enough to play certain games otherwise. The mobile phone is the current primary device for gaming and continues to rise in popularity. In previous research studies and literature, there is an expressed necessity for measuring the Quality of Experience (QoE) of the cloud gaming services. QoE is a way to examine user satisfaction and entertainment for a specific application or service. This paper presents a study of perceived QoE for the cloud-based gaming service Google Stadia on mobile devices. The study is using a qualitative research approach with semi-structured interviews as a data collection method. The result is analyzed using the framework CCA and qualitative content analysis. The result shows that the perceived QoE is good overall but that the gaming experience has some minor inconveniences. This study expands the knowledge of how well cloud gaming services work on a mobile phone at this time and the result shows the need for similar research studies to deepen this knowledge.

Cloud gaming over mobile networks enables players to play high-resource consuming games on low-end devices with various intrinsic restrictions such as limited battery lifetime and computational capacity. For mobile cloud gaming(MCG), the remaining battery level on the device is one of the critical factors that affect the sensitivity of user satisfaction. Thus, an android application is developed to measure the energy consumption of mobile devices that measure the power consumption of the device such that the obtained values correspond with the specific network conditions and users. The collected values are studied to identify if the energy consumption of the device is impacted by the network degradation that might occur during MCG in cellular networks. Results demonstrate that the energy consumption is at its highest when packet loss is 45% at 2ms RoundTrip Time (RTT) delay. Moreover, a qualitative study on the perceived Quality of Experience (QoE) of MCG over mobile networks is conducted and its impact on the energy consumption of the device is investigated where 31 users play a cloud-based First Person Shooter (FPS) for approximately 2 hours each. The results demonstrate the existence of the relationship between energy consumption and perceived QoE whereas negates the hypothesis of the existence of the relationship between QoE and CPU resources. In addition, to make comparisons of energy consumption of MCG with online mobile gaming (OMG), another test is carried out where each user plays another non-cloud-based FPS game and it is found that MCG is more efficient than OMG under the least energy-consuming network condition (2ms RTT delay) by 33.3% and the most energy consuming network condition (45% packet loss at 2ms RTT) by 32.7% in 4G cellular network.

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.