Glitch is becoming an important topic both in popular culture and academia. In 2012, Disney cast a glitch as a major character in its movie homage to arcade video games Wreck-It Ralph. More and more studies about glitch are emerging across various disciplines, from media studies to aesthetics. So far, researchers were focusing mostly on theoretical and technological aspects of the glitch. This Master's thesis aims to analyze the "everyday" glitch and the roles it plays in the video game culture, conducting a qualitative content analysis of online discussion forums of three recent hit video games: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Mass Effect 3 and Star Wars: The Old Republic. The first part of the thesis reviews the literature connected to the glitch and explains its connection to similar scientific concepts: error, noise and emergence. It also introduces different aspects and roles of the glitch, ranging from cheating and metagaming to humor and aberrant use. The second part consists of the analysis of online discussion forums concerning the player definition of the glitch, the process of finding and sharing the glitch and about the main aspects of the glitch from the viewpoint of active participants in online discussions: glitch as an error or a feature, patching the glitch, cheating, metagaming and humor. As...

This essay analyzes Death Stranding, the 2019 release from contemporary game auteur Hideo Kojima. Here, I discuss the unique potentialities of this game world, detailing the ways in which Death Stranding expresses ecological perspectives. Asynchronous multiplayer serves as a unique metagame, helping to prove that play is a process of action which facilitates ecological thinking. The world of Death Stranding is filled with strange objects. The nonhuman entities that the player encounters throughout the game, for example, seem entirely alien. And yet, when these entities are properly understood, we realize that their inclusion is necessary--and natural. Your "job" in the game is to deliver packages. The player is made aware that here, in this digital world, objects have an unusual weight. What can we learn when we play this game? As the player becomes increasingly immersed in this digital world, Death Stranding motivates deeper thinking about the world outside of the game. Although this is a work of fiction, play helps us to consider our impact on the world at large. Death Stranding affords things their proper power and considers human existence in context with a larger, ecological whole.