This research study looks at the online game Final Fantasy XIV and the players who have participated in the Ceremony of Eternal Bonding, to gain further understanding behind motives for partaking in an online matrimonial service with another player. This study can be relevant for researchers looking into how players interact with events meant to generate intimacy between players. A qualitative semi-structured interview approach was conducted with five couples total to gauge how the event was viewed by each of the pair and its significance to their relationship. The findings of the study could not identify a singular ritualistic effect as part of the ceremony, concluding that its effect stayed within the confines of the game world and did not transfer over to the players real life relationship. The significance of the ceremony was highly dependent on the players’ own engagement with the game and their partner, and while not as transformational as a traditional real-life wedding, it served to solidify social bonds between players and encourage further play within the game.  Further research would be required to assess the details regarding religious symbology present and how gender is performed through the ceremony.

In this thesis I investigated empathy field in games and I explored how to create a game fostering empathy. In a first part I defined empathy, game and game mechanics and I analyzed four games fostering empathy through the prism of these definitions. I noticed these games used role-playing so then I focused my research on role-play games. In a second part I proposed an interactive story based on game mechanics fostering empathy. This interactive story is a mix of LARP and escape room. The player embodies a role and follows a goal. This game tries to foster empathy for the main character, a young woman who just found out that her mother had passed away. Through the iterations of testing I could improve the game and highlight some issues. Empathy is difficult to evaluate and puzzle solving prevents the player from being empathic. This thesis intends to contribute to the research areas in different ways. It outlines game mechanics fostering empathy and it suggests a new kind of game, the interactive story using these game mechanics.

Research has shown that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) lack the skills to develop meaningful friendships. One procedure that has been demonstrated to have positive effects for teaching social skills among individuals with ASD is the Teaching Interaction procedure. Yet, there is minimal research evaluating the effects of the Teaching Interaction procedure on adults diagnosed with ASD. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of the Teaching Interaction procedure on increasing targeted social skills of young adults diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder utilizing a multiple baseline design across participants and replicated across behaviors. Prior to intervention, the participants displayed low levels of the three targeted social skills. Targeted social skills were sharing, eye contact, and initiating a greeting. A multiple probe design across participants and replicated across behaviors resulted in all participants acquiring all three targeted social skills. The data indicated that each participant maintained the targeted social skills across settings over time. Social validity questionnaires completed by the participants’ teachers indicated that the Teaching Interaction procedure was age appropriate, helped the participants engage with others more independently, and that outcomes were satisfactory. Keywords: Teaching Interaction, Autism, Social Skills, Modeling, Role Play / Applied Behavioral Analysis

In the postmodern, contemporary Western world of late capitalism, we dream of the Middle Ages. Medieval Fantasy, as an entertainment genre, supplements historical images of the Middle Ages with elements of myth in adventure stories featuring magicians, knights and ladies, castles, dragons, swords, and sorcery that are routinely consumed and absorbed. In some activities they are also played out physically. People dress up, utilise props, and affect their speech and mannerisms like actors in a theatre, conducting pseudo-ritualistic games of mimicry to make these images speak and move in the real world: live role-play. This thesis examines several organised examples of live role-play: Southron Gaard, a branch of the Society for Creative Anachronism based in Christchurch, New Zealand; larping, as represented by two documentary films, Darkon and Monster Camp, that document the activities of larping organisations in the USA; and 'Lord of the Rings Tour', a tourism trip from Christchurch to 'Edoras', a fictional location from Middle-earth, the fantasy world of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings Novels and Peter Jackson's filmic adaptations thereof. These organised leisure activities provide platforms for the pursuit of active, physical involvement with the images and ideas of medieval fantasy. In them, participants find ways to bring these fantastic images and ideas onto their bodies in reality and, perhaps as a result, closer to their everyday lives in ways that have more significant social implications than may at first be apparent.

This study follows students from two Swedish elite upper secondary schools with different profiles when they participate in a parliamentarian role-play game. The game lacks a teacher authority and is not a graded activity, putting the students in a position where they must negotiate what constitutes winning and losing. The game is used as an ethnographic site to investigate what it means to be a ‘successful’ elite school student and how it is embodied. The aim is to explore concrete processes of habitus formation, extending the knowledge regarding elite socialization in the Swedish case. The findings suggest that the game puts notions of what it means to be a ‘successful’ student to its head, giving rise to conflicts between students from the two differently profiled schools. The conflicts articulate differences between schools within the elite school category with regard to student formation. Further, the game singles out a few students and make them feel entitled to become leaders. The study shows that the intersection of students’ school affiliation, gender and social class background is important in order to understand whether they feel entitled or not, as well to understand their more encompassing experiences in this elite school game.

This master thesis deals with interconnection of language teaching and drama. It presents a set of supplementary drama activities to the textbook Maturita Solutions-Intermediate. The concern is the use of drama activities in second language teaching at secondary school; for this purpose the set of drama activities and role-plays was carried out in several classes at two secondary schools in Prague. The theoretical part presents the methods, which emphasize the importance of communicative abilities, and provides a background to the idea that drama is one of the ways of teaching a second language. The practical part introduces the created activities and their pilotage at schools and the work is concluded with a feedback from the students and the teachers who participated. The author of the thesis encloses all the supplementary activities, which can be found in the appendix. Key words: communication, drama in education, techniques, coursebook, role-play

Among researchers within the design area, role play is often spoken about in a positive manner. This study aims to discover the limitations with role play as a tool for experiential learning. This is done by evaluating a prototype of an early-stage concept of a role play-tool. The tool is aimed for Swedish SMEs to raise awareness and create curiosity of guanxi, which is a vital part of Chinese business culture. The tool is compared to another experiential-based tool, Experience Map, with the same purpose but based on real scenarios rather than simulated scenarios. Prototype testing with intended users identified the difficulty of giving instructions on cultural behaviour as one limitation. This limitation is especially difficult in settings where the participants have no previous knowledge within the area, which is the case for this study. Another limitation is the challenge of giving enough instructions for the players to act on, without interrupting the exploration aspect of the tool. Besides, the target group seem to prefer more hands-on tools that are more relevant for their specific business and less time-consuming. The main difference between the tools is that the experience map which is based on real scenarios, creates a greater interest among participants and a higher level of the participants’ willingness to use it.

China’s economy is growing. It has been said that “the question like ‘how to do business with Chinese people’ have occupied the minds of international business people who are planning to enter China.” (Fan & Zigang, 2004). Sweden as a country which listed China as its largest trading partner in Asia and a priority country in Sweden's export strategy, has a need to gain understanding about guanxi –an important concept in Chinese business culture. In this thesis, the author will present the development of three exercises inspired by design methods (role play, visualization and customer journey map) which aim to help Swedish business managers to learn guanxi in an experiential way. It includes the challenges the design team went through, how did they solve it and what are the latest version of the exercises looks like. The main challenges presented in this thesis are: how to embed specific knowledge smoothly into exercise; how to set up the role of facilitator(s); and how to increase the level of satisfaction for the users. Those challenges are not only specific to our project, but also could be inspirational for other people (e.g. designers, business culture scholars and so on) who want to create similar exercises or looking for new ways to deliver the knowledge about cross-cultural business communication.

Video games have suffered a negative reputation regarding their influence on children and adolescents, in comparison to its “well-behaved” counterpart, books. Nevertheless, the world of video games is much more diverse than imaginable – from fantasy to reality – and it is possible that different types of video games have different effects on human cognition and behavior. To fill a gap in research, fantasy and non-fantasy genres were the focal point of the correlational study. In this study, we analyze how video game playing habits, video game genre preference, book reading habits and book reading preferences are correlated with creative thinking. Construal level theory explains the importance of psychological distances in enhancing creativity. Fantasy and fiction content, as well as role play, are theorized to be part of creativity due to generation of distance and abstract thinking. Creativity was measured by insight problems and a categorization task. Abstract thinking was also measured by the Behavioral Identification Form. The questionnaire was given out to 154 students during lunch hours at a university in Sweden, throughout the period of March 2019. The results indicated that preference in a genre, whether gaming or literature, did not indicate significant differences in creative thinking. However, the consumption and habit of playing role-play games showed a significant correlation to creativity in comparison to its “rival” – action games. Results showed the same effects for fiction literature versus non-fiction. Theoretical and practical implications for organizations and the workplace are discussed, as well as limitations of the study.

<p>Denna uppsats är en undersökning av barns aktiva deltagande i rollek. Syftet är att försöka förstå vilka strategier barn i förskolan kan använda sig av för att nå ett aktivt deltagande i rolleken samt hur rollfördelningen sker i rolleken. Vi vill dessutom undersöka vilken syn förskolepersonal har angående barns samspel och deltagande i leken. Frågeställningarna för uppsatsen lyder; Vilka strategier kan barn använda sig av för att få en aktivt deltagande roll i rolleken? Vilka faktorer styr och ligger bakom rollfördelningen i leken? På vilka sätt fördelas rollerna i rolleken? Vi använde oss av två kvalitativa metoder för att genomföra vår undersökning. Dessa var skriftliga intervjuer via e-post och observationer med löpande protokoll. Resultatet visar att barn använder sig av olika strategier för att nå ett aktivt deltagande i leken. Vilka strategier barn använder kan bero på deras ålder, språkutveckling, social förmåga samt lekfärdigheter. Exempel på strategier som barn använder kan vara övertalning, självinvitation, kommunikation, hot/muta och säga till personalen. Rollfördelningen kan ske på olika sätt, till exempel genom förhandling, delegering samt att barn tar den roll de vill ha. Det finns flera faktorer som styr och ligger bakom rollfördelningen. Några av faktorerna är lekfärdigheter, fantasi, förmåga till socialt samspel och aktuell utvecklingsnivå. Vad gäller informanternas syn på barns samspel och deltagande i leken, är de medvetna om sin egen betydelse när det gäller att stödja barns samspel och deltagande samt att de besitter en hel del kunskap om rollek.</p>