The study aims to investigate therapists and school counselors' views on gaming disorder as a future diagnosis and how gaming problems affects the Swedish secondary school from an intersectional perspective. The qualitative study involves three therapists and two school counselors who have come into contact with problematic gaming. The theories used are social constructivism, intersectionality and social learning. The results showed a positive attitude regarding the launching of gaming disorder as a diagnosis, such as an increase accessibility to treatment and more demands on research regarding gaming disorder. However, they expressed concern that the diagnosis could contribute to stigmatization. Further, the result showed an awareness that some groups such as people with functional variation, lower socioeconomic position and people who are of male gender, could be more exposed for and effected by gaming disorders. Finally, the study provides a knowledge base for the possible upcoming diagnosis and how the Swedish school and therapist could work with it. / <p>2019-01-17</p>

Cette recherche traite du jeu de rôle sur table comme moyen oral et collectif de création fictionnelle et littéraire. Elle montre que les JdR mettent en place des dispositifs ludiques qui obligent les joueurs à co-générer un contenu fictionnel diégétique et narratif, selon le principe qui est nommé l’intercréativité. L’intercréativité propre aux JdR fusionne les actes de création et de réception de la fiction et met en crise le rapport de la littérature à l’écrit. Dans un premier temps, nous étudions la manière dont s’est élaboré le concept d’intercréativité tout au long de l’histoire des JdR. Ensuite, nous les intégrons à un ensemble dont ils sont un élément fondateur, la culture geek. Nous montrons que le JdR est un héritier des littératures de l’imaginaire et qu’il fait la jonction entre ces deux sphères. Les JdR y sont également envisagés comme des mondes fictionnels intercréés, précurseurs d’une part des univers partagés et des jeux vidéo RPG, et d’autre part de la systématisation des mondes fictionnels qui induisent une réception interactive. Dans notre troisième partie, nous expliquons en quoi l’intercréativité fictionnelle mise en place par le JdR est un processus narratif et littéraire, une expérience collective et immédiate de la création de la fiction par le langage oral. Nous nous penchons sur les spécificités narratives de ce médium. Nous montrons également comment ces outils de création fictionnelle dépassent, pour certains écrivains, le cadre des JdR pour déboucher sur une création littéraire classique. Enfin, nous abordons le ludique comme un ensemble de dispositifs qui obligent les joueuses à créer un contenu fictionnel ensemble, ce que nous nommons l’intercréativité. Le JdR accomplit une disruption et une systématisation du matériau fictionnel, dont la réorganisation narrative est la création des joueurs. Avec l’intercréativité, c’est un rapport dionysiaque à la littérature qui ressurgit, alors qu’il avait été annihilé par l’industrialisation. / This work deals with pen & paper role-playing games as an oral and collective way to create fiction. It shows RPGs set up game procedures to oblige players to co-create narrative and diegetic contents, according to what we call intercreativity. Intercreativity,which is specific to RPGs, blends fictional creation and reader-response together. It reconsiders the definition of literature as a written text. First, we study how intercreativity has been built during the RPGs’ history. Then we show RPG is a link between fantasy literature and geek culture. RPGs are considered as co-created worlds, pioneers of shared worlds, RPG video games and systematization of imaginary worlds, which sets the base of interactivity. Finally, we explain that intercreativity is a narrative process, a collective and immediate experience of creating fiction with oral language. We show how these tools for creation inspire writers to produce classic literary works. We broach these games as tools to create fiction. RPGs smash and systematize fiction, and the narrative reorganization is the players’ creation. Intercreativity makes reappear a Dionysian way to consider literature, which has been annihilated during the Industrialization.

One aspect of leadership strategy is the need to account for the core values of the organization. The purpose of this case study was to explore the perceptions of tribal gaming leader strategies toward sustainability, an action that leads to tribal economic development and stability. The conceptual framework of situational leadership theory was used to guide the scope and analysis of this study. Six tribal gaming leaders from Oklahoma participated in a focus group session; 7 additional tribal gaming leaders from the same gaming organization participated in individual interview sessions. Member checking was used to strengthen the credibility and trustworthiness of the interpretation of the participants' responses. Additionally, company documents were reviewed to triangulate the data. Four emergent themes were identified after data analysis: business value, which was attributed to tribal leaders' alignment to their mission; strategic vision, which included their marketing and overall business environment; collaboration, which was evident wherein the tribal gaming leaders utilized internal and external partnerships to improve local communities and maintain competitive advantage; and communication, which was emphasized for its importance as a daily skill for information sharing. This research explored the strategies necessary for tribal gaming leader choices that could have a significant influence on social progress between the organization and society, environmental protection for the surrounding community, and economic growth for the local economy. The findings from this study may contribute to social change by aiding in the organizational strategy to forecasting; these findings may also aid in the overall business value, prosperity of employees, and the local economy.

AbstractTitle: Onlinegaming – A qualitative study of young people's attitudes about online gaming(Onlinespel – En Kvalitativ undersökning av Ungdomars attityder om onlinespel)Number of pages: 34 (35 including enclosures)Author: Armin MoradiTutor: Else NygrenCourse: Media and Communication Studies CPeriod: Autumn 2009University: Division of Media and Communication, Department of Information Science,Uppsala UniversityPurpose/Aim: The purpose of my thesis is that from a social perspective to examine and discussyoung people aged 16-18 vision of online gaming. Why online games are so popular and to see ifthe stereotype is a reality among young people in their late teens ..I also have a secondary purpose where I want to explore the social function of online games have,and what or what needs it fills in young people's everyday lives.Material/Method: The main method used in this essay has been qualitative group interviewswith 17 high school students. The result from these interviews has then been analysed usingseveral theories, Uses and gratification theory, Socialinteraction theory, Interactivity theory andmedium theory.Main results: The compilation of collected my results have shown that young people makeextensive use of online gaming pastime and to socialize with each other both virtually andphysically. Online gambling has on young people an entirely different meaning than it does forolder generations.For young people online is as natural as watching TV is for the oldergenerations.There are gender differences in perception of online games but it is not at all in the same highdegree as can be expected, the differences were minimal. The participants in my interviews havealso made an association exercise in which I presented as the words of 15-20 seconds to describeother words. Most replied to the word "Homework" that it was "boring" and the word "computergames" was the most frequently used word "fun".Keywords: Uses and gratification theory, Socialinteraction theory, Interactivity theory , Mediumtheory, Online gaming,

Despite the vast research on the effects of gaming, little is know how the phenomenon of e-sports and it’s followers is portrayed. While media can have significant impact on what and how e-sport is portrayed, no studies have been done in a Swedish context. This thesis aims at filling that gap with investigations of the two major Swedish newspapers. Six articles was analyzed with critical discourse analysis with a theoretical base of journalism.The result of which indicated that between the period of 2005 and 2012 e-sport and players was considered to be professional, committed and more in a sense that reminded much of the view on more traditional sport such as soccer and hockey. However the players was often treated as minor kids or teenagers, for e-sports seems only to be held by these groups according to the journalist’s. The implications of this finding should be viewed as a socially critical perspective on a phenomenon that is more than often the subject of leisure.

The purpose of our study is to describe and understand whether, and if so, how social workers in school and in social services construct computer gaming adolescents as a social problem. We chose social workers who encounter adolescents with different problems. We have conducted qualitative interviews with vignettes to capture the social workers' reasoning about computer gaming adolescents and how they handle this in their work. The study shows that all social workers we interviewed had encountered adolescents with troubling computer gaming habits. In the study, all agree that computer gaming becomes a problem when it leads to deviant behaviour such as not going to school, staying up all night and so on. Social workers have adapted their work with computer gaming adolescents after their workplace policies, resources and make efforts to make it manageable to work with. One example of how they make it manageable is that they look at the problem in a context and focus on other factors than the excessive computer gaming such as poor family relationships. In the process of being established as a social problem computer gaming addiction is weak.

Holding educators more accountable for the academic achievement of their students has been a central feature of recent education reforms. In several prominent instances, accountability schemes have set pecuniary performance targets that condition on prior scores as a means of controlling for student heterogeneity. Yet doing so introduces a potential dynamic distortion in incentives: teachers may be less responsive to the reform today in an effort to avoid more onerous targets in future — an instance of the so-called `ratchet effect.' The main chapters of this thesis consider possible dynamic distortions from three distinct but related vantage points. Chapter 2 builds a theoretical foundation for understanding the origin of ratchet effects in an educational context. Given an environment where school-level targets depend on student prior scores, I show that such dynamic gaming behaviour depends crucially on variation in the grade horizon of students, with teachers distorting their effort less when their decision affects fewer future scores within the same school. Chapter 3 analyzes the ratchet effect from an empirical perspective. Making use of rich educational panel data from North Carolina, I exploit variation in the grade span of schools to identify ratchet effects, finding compelling evidence of dynamic distortions using a difference-in-differences approach. I then directly estimate the structural parameters of the corresponding model, allowing for complementarities in production between teacher effort and student ability. Using these estimates, the grade five score in K-5 schools would be about 1.25 standard deviations lower under a counterfactual setting without any accountability scheme and 4.6% of a standard deviation higher if ratchet effects were eliminated via a prescribed reduction in each school's incentive target. Chapter 4 explores a potentially important class of mechanisms through which the identified dynamic effects might arise. In particular, school principals may re-allocate teachers across classrooms differentially by grade. By examining the yearly change in teacher assignments to tested subjects, I find evidence that principals re-sort higher quality teachers to higher grades and focus more costly re-sorting on lower grades in response to the reform, which is consistent with the overarching dynamic objective and results of the prior chapter.

Holding educators more accountable for the academic achievement of their students has been a central feature of recent education reforms. In several prominent instances, accountability schemes have set pecuniary performance targets that condition on prior scores as a means of controlling for student heterogeneity. Yet doing so introduces a potential dynamic distortion in incentives: teachers may be less responsive to the reform today in an effort to avoid more onerous targets in future — an instance of the so-called `ratchet effect.' The main chapters of this thesis consider possible dynamic distortions from three distinct but related vantage points. Chapter 2 builds a theoretical foundation for understanding the origin of ratchet effects in an educational context. Given an environment where school-level targets depend on student prior scores, I show that such dynamic gaming behaviour depends crucially on variation in the grade horizon of students, with teachers distorting their effort less when their decision affects fewer future scores within the same school. Chapter 3 analyzes the ratchet effect from an empirical perspective. Making use of rich educational panel data from North Carolina, I exploit variation in the grade span of schools to identify ratchet effects, finding compelling evidence of dynamic distortions using a difference-in-differences approach. I then directly estimate the structural parameters of the corresponding model, allowing for complementarities in production between teacher effort and student ability. Using these estimates, the grade five score in K-5 schools would be about 1.25 standard deviations lower under a counterfactual setting without any accountability scheme and 4.6% of a standard deviation higher if ratchet effects were eliminated via a prescribed reduction in each school's incentive target. Chapter 4 explores a potentially important class of mechanisms through which the identified dynamic effects might arise. In particular, school principals may re-allocate teachers across classrooms differentially by grade. By examining the yearly change in teacher assignments to tested subjects, I find evidence that principals re-sort higher quality teachers to higher grades and focus more costly re-sorting on lower grades in response to the reform, which is consistent with the overarching dynamic objective and results of the prior chapter.

This dissertation examines rhetorics of heroism and immortality as they are negotiated through a variety of (new) media contexts. The dissertation demonstrates that media technologies in general, and videogames in particular, serve an existential or “death denying” function, which insulates individuals from the terror of mortality. The dissertation also discusses the hero as a rhetorical trope, and suggests that its relationship with immortality makes it a particularly powerful persuasive device. Chapter one provides a historical overview of the hero figure and its relationship with immortality, particularly within the context of ancient Greece. Chapter two examines the material means by which media technologies serve a death denying function, via “symbolic immortality” (inscription), and the McLuhanian concept of extension. Chapter three examines the prevalence of the hero and villain figures in propaganda, with particular attention paid to the use of visual propaganda in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Chapter four situates the videogame as an inherently heroic, death denying medium; videogames can extend the player’s sense of self, provide quantifiable victory criteria, and allow players to participate in “heroic” events. Chapter five examines the soldier-as-hero motif as it appears in two popular genres, the First Person Shooter, and Role-Playing Game. Particular attention is paid to the Call of Duty series and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Chapter six outlines an “epistemological exercise,” which attempts to empirically test the claims made in the previous chapters via Terror Management Theory, an experimental paradigm which examines the relationship between mortality, self-esteem, and ideology. The conclusion discusses how videogames can contest prevailing views of the heroic, and calls for a departure from contemporary game design practices.

Ad-hoc wireless networking has recently become a standard feature of handheld video gaming systems. This capability, along with the portability of the devices, increases the number of places where people can easily engage in multiplayer games. The Nintendo DS, a handheld gaming system with ad-hoc wireless networking, has sold 64 million units worldwide. Its feature set, combined with its ubiquity, enable new forms of multiplayer gaming to emerge. Understanding how people adopt this technology is important for proposing how future handheld gaming systems could be better designed. This thesis reports findings from a qualitative study investigating the collocated multiplayer gaming practices of Nintendo DS users. Through interviews with fifteen DS owners and observations of seven organized public gaming events we examined why, where, and who participants played with, as well as the details of how games were formed, carried out, and experienced as social activities. With this data it is possible to describe how the DS's unique characteristics impact multiplayer gaming practices and the social gaming experience. From our data, we identified three major themes surrounding the social, multiplayer gaming practices of DS users: renegade gaming, or the notion that users reappropriate locations and contexts for multiplayer gaming, and social boundaries on multiplayer gaming contexts; practical and social barriers to the formation of pick-up games; and private gaming spheres, or the individualized gaming contexts that the handheld device's form factor creates within larger social contexts. These findings lead us to propose a set of design implications for future handheld gaming systems in order to better support pick-up gaming and sharing experiences with groups and crowds.