Games can be used to convey meaning and communicate messages. While there is ample research on games' expressive capacities, how players' backgrounds impact game interpretation has thus far been under-explored.  This study explores this gap by way of testing an expressive game and discerns if there is a relationship between how people experience a game and their personal background and current state of mind. To engage this question, we conducted a player study. We developed the abstract, metaphorical game “Lorn” intended for this purpose. The game together with an online survey, intended to assess players' background and state of mind, was distributed to potential participants. After having played the game, the participants shared their interpretation of the message in the game and their experiences and feelings they experienced while playing. 15 people participated in the player study. The result indicates there are differences in how people interpret a message depending on their personal background and their current state of mind. / Spel kan användas för att förmedla både budskap och mening. Trots att det finns omfattande forskning på hur man kan uttrycka sig med spel, så är forskning kring hur spelares bakgrund påverkar deras tolkning bristfällig. Den här studien utforskar detta genom att testa ett “expressivt spel” och urskilja om det finns någon koppling mellan hur människor upplever ett spel och deras personliga bakgrund och sinnesstämning. Vi utförde en spelarstudie för att undersöka den här frågan. För detta ändamål utvecklade vi det abstrakta, metaforiska spelet “Lorn”. Tillsammans med en online enkät, som ämnade att ta reda på spelarnas bakgrund och sinnesstämning, distribuerade vi spelet till potentiella deltagare. Efter att ha spelat spelet delgav deltagarna sina tolkningar av betydelsen, sina upplevelser av Lorn, och vilka känslor de kände när de spelade spelet. 15 personer deltog i studien. Våra resultat indikerar att det finns skillnader i hur människor tolkar budskap beroende på deras personliga bakgrund och sinnesstämning.

The aim of this essay is to investigate the function and development of non-player characters (NPC) in the TV/computer game Dragon Age: Origins. The NPCs are analysed in order to see if their development is affected by the player character’s (PC) background and interactions. The game’s ethics is also investigated by studying how the NPCs treat the PC and what significance they give to his background and actions. The results show that the NPCs are affected by the PC’s interactions, and furthermore, that they are round characters, which is unusual in TV/computer games. The NPC Alistair and the PC are vital for the game’s story, while the NPCs Leliana and Morrigan have a moral and psychological function. The NPCs are moral indicators and by either opposing or accepting the PC’s actions they show their own personality. The game’s norm is created by the player/PC. Also, the game sheds light on the player’s moral actions and gives the player a chance to reflect over his/her choices and the consequences thereof. The results give way to a discussion on how games like Dragon Age: Origins can be used in learning. Through interactions and by letting the player project his/her own identity onto the PC, TV/computer games can show the consequences of actions. Since the player is not only told the story, but ‘lives’ it, the moral choices faced in the game make the player practice being responsible and facing moral dilemmas as if in real life, hence enriched by new experiences.

Diploma work „Multimedia player for iOS“ deals with the description of the video formats such as HLS, MP4, MPEG Transport Stream, and Dash. Next, it continues with protected content DRM, VAST advertisements and analytics tool called Google Analytics. During compilation of this diploma work was created a framework in programming language Swift. This framework is basically a player, that besides playing Interactive videos is able to show ads, subtitles, can change the video quality, AirPlay and download the content for offline playing. A feature to play a protected content could not be done as a developer's request for a product deployment SDK Fairplay was refused from an SDK owner. A testing app was also created that implements developed a framework and prove the functionality of the developed functions.

The thesis is focused on solving the Sokoban game using artificial intelligence algorithms. The first part of the thesis describes the Sokoban game, state space and selected state space search methods. In the second part selected methods were implemented and graphic user interface was created in the Python environment. Comparative experiments were executed in the final part.

A narrative paradox occurs when the suspension of disbelief falters due to tension betweenthe urgency of the narrative and agency used by the player to pursue non-narrative activities.In this paper, we do a close reading on the video game Persona 5 to examine which elementsare utilised to limit or avoid narrative paradoxes. The analysis consisted of categorising thegame’s events, whereafter a few non-obligatory events from the game were chosen for anin-depth analysis. This served to find out which desire: agency, urgency, or both, the eventsmotivate through its narrative. We introduce the concept of the Plot Bubble as a tool withwhich to create narrative structures that are less prone to causing narrative paradoxes whencombined with relevant narrative elements. The narrative structure and elements of Persona 5are used as practical examples of how such design choices can motivate the player to act inaccordance with the narrative context, as well as to support this desire through the actionsavailable in the game world. / En narrativ paradox inträffar när ens upphävande av misstro fallerar på grund av en spänningmellan narrativets brådskande karaktär och behörigheten som spelaren har för att utövaicke-narrativa aktiviteter. I denna text gör vi en närläsning av TV-spelet Persona 5 för attundersöka vilka element som används för att begränsa eller undvika narrativa paradoxer.Analysen bestod utav en kategorisering av spelets händelser och därefter valdes några fåicke-obligatoriska händelser från spelet till en djupgående analys. Detta tjänade till att ta redapå vilken begäran: spelarens behörighet, narrativets brådskande karaktär, eller båda,händelserna motiverar genom dess narrativ. Vi introducerar konceptet intrigbubbla som ettverktyg till att skapa narrativa strukturer som är mindre benägna att orsaka narrativaparadoxer i kombination med relevanta narrativa element. Den narrativa strukturen ochverktygen i Persona 5 används som praktiska exempel för hur sådana designval kan motiveraspelaren att agera i enlighet med den narrativa kontexten, samt att stödja denna begärangenom handlingarna som finns tillgängliga i spelvärlden.

Procedural content generation for video games (PCGG) has seen a steep increase in the past decade, aiming to foster emergent gameplay as well as to address the challenge of producing large amounts of engaging content quickly. Most work in PCGG has been focused on generating art and assets such as levels, textures, and models, or on narrative design to generate storylines and progression paths. Given the difficulty of generating harmonically pleasing and interesting music, procedural music generation for games (PMGG) has not seen as much attention during this time. Music in video games is essential for establishing developers' intended mood and environment. Given the deficit of PMGG content, this paper aims to address the demand for high-quality PMGG. This paper describes the system developed to solve this problem, which generates thematic music for non-player characters (NPCs) based on developer-defined attributes in real time and responds to the dynamic relationship between the player and target NPC. The system was evaluated by means of user study: participants confront four NPC bosses each with their own uniquely generated dynamic track based on their varying attributes in relation to the player's. The survey gathered information on the perceived quality, dynamism, and helpfulness to gameplay of the generated music. Results showed that the generated music was generally pleasing and harmonious, and that while players could not detect the details of how, they were able to detect a general relationship between themselves and the NPCs as reflected by the music.

This diploma thesis focus on transmiting multimedia over computer network. There are detailed informations about protocols RTP and RTPC in a first part because a transmition over a network is realized by using these protocols. Some basic multimedia terms, FFmpeg codecs and SDL library are described in next chapters. A multimedia player using FFmpeg and SDL is implemented in a second part of thesis. The player is console application and it has basic user interface. The player reproduces video and audio from a given file. RTP communication is described in next chapters of the second part. RTP server and client are implemented there too. They are console aplications and they use data coded by Theora or Vorbis. There are summarized results in a conclusion.

The diploma thesis focuses on two different sports media ČT sport and Deník Sport. Based on the broadcasting program, respectively the content of individual copies, examines two selected periods of one year. The aim is to find out the content coverage of football, volleyball and floorball sports in individual media. The data is recorded in the coding sheet according to individual sports and media. Results are sorted by content type, content length and other selected criteria. The results bringing a very strong dominance of football topics in the printed media and a high share of content on ČT sport. Volleyball and floorball are considerably limited in the press, while on television they get their space, which, however, could be higher due to the player base of the two sports.

Matchmaking is an essential part of many modern online multiplayer games and is used by game developers to give the players the best possible online gaming experience. However, since video games have become more complex, traditional matchmaking systems like TrueSkill have reached their limits in predicting match outcomes. An extensive literature survey on engagement and balance in video games as well as an analysis of Battlefield 4 player data showed that balance can have a significant impact on player engagement. This lays the basis for the new matchmaking approach that is presented in this thesis. It is developed for the online First Person Shooter game Battlefield 4, with the goal of increasing player engagement by balancing online multiplayer matches. The developed matchmaking system is based on regression models, which use player performance metrics to predict the balance of online multiplayer matches. The experimental evaluations of the developed models show that the quality of the prediction results are influenced by the complexity of the different game modes available in Battlefield 4. Furthermore the historical Battlefield 4 game report data, which is used for building the predictive models, shows that this complexity as well as imbalances in the game design add significant noise to balance predictions. Both evaluated regression models – Linear Regression and Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines – showed similar prediction errors within statistically expected deviation. Additionally it is shown that both methods have significantly smaller errors than the TrueSkill system, when predicting the outcome of games in Team Death Match or Conquest mode. The features that resulted in the lowest errors are commonly used in online First Person Shooter games. Hence the findings of this thesis can not only improve the matchmaking of Battlefield 4, but also benefit other video games of the same genre. / Matchmaking är en viktig del av många onlinespel och används av spelutvecklare för att ge spelare en bättre spelupplevelse. På senare tid har spelen blivit mer komplexa och traditionella matchmakingsystem som TrueSkill klarar inte längre förutse utfall av matcher. Andra studier som avhandlar spelaktivitet och balans i matcher visar att spelare har ökad aktivitet om deras matcher har varit jämna. Det går även att dra samma slutsatser från speldata i Battlefield 4. Syftet med denna uppsats är att utveckla och utvärdera en ny modell för matchmaking i spelet Battlefield 4 som medför bättre balans i matcher och därmed ökar spelaktiviteten. Den utvecklade matchmaking-modellen baseras på regressionmodeller som använder historiska speldata för enskilda spelare för att förutse jämnheten i matcher. Utvärderingen av den utvecklade modellen visar att förmågan att förutse matcher beror på hur hur komplext spelläget i Battlefield 4 är. Det framgår också efter att ha tittat på historiska spelrapporter att förutom komplexiteten i spelläget så påverkar också obalans i speldesignen förmågan att förutse matcher. Båda utvärderade regressionsmodeller – linjär regression och Multivariate Adaptive Regression Splines – har liknande förmåga att förutse utfallet av matcher där ingen är signifikant bättre än den andra. Dessutom visas att båda modellerna förutser matchresultaten för spellägena Team Death Match och Conquest signifikant bättre än TrueSkill. De här spellägena är vanliga i denna typen av spel så resultaten i denna uppsats är inte isolerade till Battlefield 4 utan går att applicera på många spel i samma genre.

A recent study using reinforcement learning with a Q-functions to quantify the impact of individual player actions in ice hockey has shown promising results. The model takes into account the context of the actions and captures internal dynamic features of the play which simple common metrics e.g., counting goals or assists, do not. It also performs look ahead which is important in a low scoring game like ice hockey. However, it does not capture the chemistry between the players i.e., how well the players play together which is important in a team sport like ice hockey. In this paper, we, therefore, extend this earlier work on individual player performance with new metrics on player pairs impact when on ice together. Our resulting top pairings are compared to NHL’s official statistics and extended analysis is performed that investigate the relationship with time on ice which provides insights that could be of relevance to coaches.