Tese de mestrado. Tecnologia Multimédia, perfil Engenharia. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto, Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto.Instituto Politécnico do Porto. 2008

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.

The suspension of disbelief is integral to the performing arts. We ask our actors to see couches made of three chairs, designers to create cities in empty spaces, and most of all; we ask audiences to believe the stories and relationships that are figurative and often abstract. This level of critical and creative engagement is assumed to develop in spaces of higher education. However, with an ever-changing world and increasing conversions and integrations of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in spaces of higher education, it has become even more apparent that students need to develop their creative and critical thinking skills earlier on in their development. By recontextualizing learning through imaginative immersive game systems, such as Dungeons & Dragons and similar tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs), I have found that students experience categories of significant learning synergistically through experiential gameplay. This immersive storytelling relies entirely on the player-performers to spend their disbelief and immerse themselves in their imagination, termed theatre of the mind. The gamification of role-play acts as a means of challenging students to activate their development of collaborative improv, storytelling/playwriting, and dramaturgy skills. Through research and play testing, I have developed a gamified drama-focused role-play educational tool utilizing many of the core gameplay mechanics in the world's most popular TTRPGs. In this thesis, I present the game structure and reflect upon my experiences implementing this work. Additionally, I explore the cross sections between game design and immersive theatre practice and consider how this intersection is utilized in gamified performance and pedagogy. Finally, I consider how a theatre-of-the-mind-based pedagogy can be utilized in subjects outside of the theatre classroom.

Communication of the European Parliament with the public takes place within various means and on different levels. This thesis offers an analysis of the European Parliament's communication strategy through the role-play game in the Brussels Parlamentarium. A role- play game simulating the legislative procedure of the European Union is available in all the EU official languages and it is targeted primarily at the youth between 15 and 18 years. The analysis is based on the political communication and political marketing theory, as well as on the concept of the role-play game as an educational tool. The methodological background of the analysis is embedded in the ethnographic research and its constituent methods, especially a participant observation and questionnaires survey, further completed by qualitative analysis of the visual and textual materials of the game. First, the advertising tools of the RPG are presented. Second, the course of the game is described and its transcript analysed. Third, the ways of reception of the activity by the participants are illustrated. The goal of the thesis is to show whether the role- play game is a successful communication tool of the European Parliament with the youth.

This diploma thesis focuses on the issue of human game, from several points of view, namely philosophical, pedagogical and didactic. The work is structured into three parts. The theoretical part deals with the philosophical considerations concerning the game phenomenon, where the game is based mainly on the ontological principle and the game theory, which is analyzed by selected authors. The second part then deals with the game used in the pedagogical processes, or the game as a teaching method in the field of social science and its importance in teaching at primary and secondary schools. The practical part is focused on simulation games implementation within the social science - education.

Taming is an experiment and a written assignment about the development of ProjectMorpheo, which was my degree project at Stockholm University of the Arts. ProjectMorpheo is a participatory experience designed to explore the fragile connections between the content of our dreams and the physical materials that surround us. To give a chance for contemplation the project uses meditation and an experimental form of a contemporary puppetry technique: material animation. Taming Amorphalia is a fictional documentation of the intrapersonal happenings, the experiments and experiences that influenced me during the development of ProjectMorpheo. The aim is to introduce the intuitive process behind the project through the form of a text based RPG.