I denna uppsats har jag valt att göra en djupdykning in i bandet Gorillaz fiktiva värld. Syftet är att undersöka hur den är uppbyggd samt hur fans kan interagera med den. Jenkins teorier om Worldbuilding och transmedialt berättande har fått ligga som grund för att se hur detta kunnat appliceras på Gorillaz. För att underbygga mitt resonemang kring fansens inverkan i denna fiktiva värld samt vilka underliggande budskap de försökt kommunicera i sitt visuella material har jag använt mig av en semiotisk analysmetod för att exemplifiera hur Gorillaz officiella material och fan-kulturen kan knytas samman. Jag har först gjort en denotativ sammanställning av materialet och sedan en konotativ där jag läser in vissa av tecknen och hur de kan tolkas i syfte att skapa mening. Jag har genom undersökningen kommit fram till att Gorillaz både är mer politiska än vad som framskymtar vid en första anblick samt att deras framgång till stor del berott på fansens engagemang i den fiktiva historien genom olika medier. Jag avslutar med att i en slutdiskussion presentera budskap jag personligen tolkat in i det material jag analyserat och hur väl detta budskap fångats upp men ifrågasätter även faran av fictions kredibilitet. / In this essay, I have chosen to take a deep dive into the fictional world of the band Gorillaz. The purpose is to investigate how it is structured and how fans can interact with it. Jenkin's theories of Worldbuilding and transmedial narrative have been used as a basis for seeing how this could be applied to Gorillaz. To substantiate my reasoning about the fans' impact in this fictional world and what underlying messages they have tried to communicate in their visual material, I have used a semiotic analysis method to exemplify how Gorillaz's official material and fan culture can be linked. Through the investigation, I have come to the conclusion that Gorillaz are both more political than can be seen at first glance and that their success is largely due to the fans' involvement in the fictional story through various media. I finish with my final discussion presenting messages I have personally interpreted into the material I have analyzed and how well this message has been captured, but also questioning the danger of fictions credibility.

Thesis advisor: Jon M. Wargo / Role-playing games (RPGs) are storytelling games that employ character generation, improvisational acting, and rule-based interactions to build worlds and coauthor narratives. Contemporary education research identifies RPGs as robust examples of school-based and extra- academic literacy practices. As sites of narrative possibility and precarity, RPGs are political projects that can resist and reify hegemonic ideologies of race, gender, and power. In this three- paper dissertation, I build upon game studies and literacy scholarship to nuance the ways six youth participants coauthored worlds, negotiated storytelling practices, and (re)produced Whiteness. In Paper 1, I highlight a phenomenon I call “liminal play” – moments of gameplay wherein the boundaries between players, characters, and texts converge. My findings illustrate how liminal moments of play forward social and compositional dimensions of collaborative storytelling. In Paper 2, I leverage conversation analysis to detail how participants’ play-based talk oscillated across two participation frames: the game (i.e., their character roles) and the metagame (i.e., their player roles). My analysis examines the nested and contested processes of narrative negotiation inherent in RPG interactions. Finally, in Paper 3, I interrogate how participants’ worldbuilding practices resisted and reified White racialized ideology. Oriented by critical Whiteness studies, I unmask how participants and I privileged Whiteness despite our efforts to resist hegemonic Dungeons & Dragons lore. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.

How we imagine and the potency of alternative imaginings to socio-political concerns are vital questions for social science, and worldbuilding is a particular and understudied method of doing so. It is the creative making of fictional, imaginative worlds, offering a potential alternative method to imagine otherwise. This paper ethnographically explicates this craft through detailing how creators, known as worldbuilders, make their worlds, demonstrating how it is generative and impactful for them emotionally, intellectually, and politically. It is based of three months of online ethnographic/netnographic fieldwork across the multiple online ‘sites’ worldbuilders are active, particularly a forum and chatroom, as well as digital interviews with sixteen individual worldbuilders. I argue that worldbuilding is a process of toying with ontologies, which I call ontogenous play. I explain this through detailing what is dubbed making the imaginary – the worldbuilding process – going through the particulars of the process and the experiences of interlocutors, demonstrating how one achieves situated transcendence through it, and the generativity of that. In light of these observations, I also argue that worldbuilding is an art, attending to the ramifications of that designation. I draw upon anthropological understandings of making, processes, liminality, and ontologies to advance the argument, as well as the emergent scholarship on worldbuilding from ‘sub-creation studies’, and the erudite hypotheses of my interlocutors.

Procedural content generation is a useful tool to use when generating content for games. An issue with this type of content is often the lack of realism and purpose, especially regarding procedurally generated worlds or levels, aswell as outlier bugs, that can block the players progression, that can be hard to find since they could only show up in a few select seeds of the randomized world. This thesis examines the best use of procedural content generation for a game that features an endless world, as well as evaluating the final product against established definitions of the terms "realistic" and "purposeful", while also taking into account the prevention of outliers. The world is constructed as a series of interconnected sections that are generated incrementally as needed, with each section's landscape using Perlin-noise for its topography and A* pathfinding to build paths that ensure that the player can navigate through the randomized terrain and not get stuck. The topography is also modified by different techniques to generate a realistic coastline and feature different areas of interest within a section. The world was evaluated against the established definitions of realism and purposefulness by eight participants that gave the world a high score on all aspects of both definitions. To ensure the validity of the generated content, iterative evaluations were performed that showed no outlier bugs that prevented progressing through the world. The techniques used in this thesis can serve as a good starting ground for continued development of endless worlds.

How can we as architects interact with external practices, such as video games? Are there relevant aspects to be found, and what are the ways in which they could be approached? This project grounds itself in three different personal interests; architecture, digital design tools and video games, or more specifically: ”What kind of architectural expressions and spaces could be created if we design in the borderland between the real and the virtual game?” This is an experimental project that approaches a few aspects of video game design, as well as potential qualities of virtual worlds. It concerns itself with image based digital massing, level design as basis for program or composition on site, as well as being on the border between the real and the virtual. The result of the investigations is a playful collection of objects, arranged according to a loose, narrative sequence idea. The scene is geographically tied to a real location, but floats in a no-man’s-land between reality and game. In its current state, it is not a proposal for the actual, real world site, and at the same time it is not quite a game either. There is an ambivalence to the scene being at the pivot point of these two definitions. The objects have a structural and aesthetic nature that touches on low-polygon shapes as expression, using images for generating a grid-surface based outcome and exploring a transitioning between reality and virtuality through architectural representation.

The goal of this thesis is to find out how non-playable characters (NPC) in their own peripheral way, contribute to the narrative and worldbuilding of a video game. A prototype of a role-playing video game (RPG) was created for this particular study, in order to investigate and measure the effect of NPCs on worldbuilding and narrative in video games. Participants were recruited for the testing of the prototype followed by semi-structured interviews. The interviews were then analyzed and a conclusion on how NPCs affect the narrative and worldbuilding was reached, that being through multiple fronts such as foreshadowing future events and giving the world life with culture, and personal identities. / Målet med denna studie är att ta reda på hur icke-spelbara karaktärer (NPC) på sitt eget underordnade, sätt bidrar till narrativet och världsbyggandet av ett videospel. En prototyp av ett digitalt rollspel (RPG) skapades för just denna studie, för att undersöka och mäta effekten som NPCer kan ha på världsbyggnaden och narrativet i ett videospel.   Deltagare rekryterades för testning av prototypen följt av semistrukturerade intervjuer. Intervjuerna analyserades sedan och en slutsats om hur NPCer påverkar narrativ och världsbyggnad nåddes, att det påverkas inom områden liksom att förebåda framtida händelser och tillföra liv i världen med kultur och personliga identiteter.

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This study explores the musical practice of designing a soundscape with the theoretical and methodological starting points of world building and soundscape ecology. Artistically, this exploration consists of the creation of three recordings each one portraying different narratives within the imagined and designed environment with theme of Human impact on the Swedish forest’s biodiversity. Methods and theories of world building elements are used to conceptualize the environment, while the approaches of soundscape ecology are used to portray this conceptualization during the recording process and when analyzing the results. The music was co-created in the studio through improvisation and the use of what I call multi- sensory material. The improvisational and material practice stemmed from my focus on the interrelationship between the conceptualized environment and the physical studio environment. A collaborative effort was made to portray and explore the sonic possibilities of the environment by evoking associations and reflections on the ecological interaction, meaning that between organisms and their environment. The purpose of this study is to examine the experience and value of designing a soundscape with world building and soundscape ecology as theoretical and methodological starting points. I believe many music creators hear their music as soundscapes and I want to contribute with knowledge to this phenomenon by theorizing the elements that compose a dynamic soundscape. The name of the thesis “Hearing the Forest for the Trees” is a reference to the idiomatic expression “seeing the forest for the trees”, meaning missing the greater picture by focusing too much on details. The expression relates to the knowledge gained in this project regarding the importance of conceptualizing the soundscape’s environment in order to create sound interaction with intention, and getting a wider perspective on how to design a rich sounding soundscape. / Denna uppsats utforskar den musikaliska praktiken i att designa ett ljudlandskap med teoretiska och metodologiska utgångspunkter från världsbyggande och ljudlandskapsekologi. Konstnärligt består detta utforskande av skapandet av tre inspelningar som var och en porträtterar olika berättelser inom den tänkta och designade miljön med temat: mänsklig påverkan på den svenska skogens biologiska mångfald. Metoder och teorier för världsbyggande används för att konceptualisera miljön, medan ljudlandskapsekologi används för att skildra denna konceptualisering under inspelning och senare analys. Musiken skapades tillsammans med musikerna genom improvisation och användandet av multisensoriskt material i studion. Improvisations- och materialpraktiken grundades ur mitt fokus på förhållandet mellan den konceptualiserade miljön och den fysiska studiomiljön. Genom samarbete skildrades och utforskades miljöns ljudmöjligheter genom att väcka associationer och reflektioner kring den ekologiska interaktionen, dvs den mellan organismer och deras miljö. Mitt huvudsakliga syfte i detta projekt är att utforska upplevelsen av och värdet i att designa ett ljudlandskap med världsbyggande och ljudlandskapsekologiska teorier och metoder som utgångspunkter. Jag tror att många musiker och producenter ser på sin musik som ljudlandskap och jag vill bidra med kunskap till detta fenomen genom att teoretisera de element som utgör ett ljudlandskap. Namnet på uppsatsen "Höra skogen för alla träd" är en referens till det idiomatiska uttrycket ”inte se skogen för alla träd”, vilket betyder att missa helhetsbilden genom att fokusera för mycket på detaljer. Uttrycket relaterar till den kunskap som erhållits i detta projekt om vikten av att konceptualisera ett ljudlandskaps miljö för att skapa ljudinteraktion med intention, och få ett bredare perspektiv på att designa ett rikt ljudlandskap.

Tv-spel har nästan alltid lagt fokus på berättande och spelmekanik, men det finns ytterligare en aspekt som i vissa fall saknar samma grad av fokus. Miljön, eller ytan spelarna interagerar och rör sig inom omfattar en stor del av spelupplevelsen. En uppslukande och rik spelvärld kan engagera en spelarbas och behålla deras intresse för spelet, men det spelutvecklare fokuserar på i sin utveckling kan skilja sig från vad spelare faktiskt tycker är tilltalande. Genom intervjuer och en enkät undersöker denna studie processen och fokusområden hos spelutvecklare vid designen av tv-spel. Därefter jämförs det med vad spelare tycker är tilltalande i de spel de spelar. Resultaten visar att de intervjuade utvecklarna föredrar att arbeta med spel med en öppen värld, och majoriteten av spelarna från enkäten spelar spel med en öppen värld på grund av spelens olika valmöjligheter. Ett betydande antal spelare föredrar däremot linjära spel eftersom miljöerna tenderar att kännas mer genomtänkta och målmedvetna. Slutsatsen, som baserades på analysen av resultaten, identifierade fyra faktorer utifrån de data som samlats in från intervjuerna och enkäten. Dessa faktorer var känslor, atmosfär, tolkning och associationer. De fyra faktorerna kombinerat förbinder varandra och spelar enligt studieresultatet störst roll i skapandet av en tilltalande värld för tv-spel. Vi hoppas att dessa upptäckter kan assistera i det framtida skapandet av tv-spelsmiljöer och den fortsatta forskningen inom ämnet.

This Master’s thesis in Media, Aesthetics, and Narration can be viewed as a pilot study which examines the intricacies of worldbuilding in dystopian settings, emphasizing the impact of different starting points—micro and macro perspectives—on the creation process. Given the vast scope of worldbuilding, the thesis narrows its focus to these two approaches: the micro perspective, which delves into detailed elements like character and setting specifics, and the macro perspective, which considers broader societal structures and overarching narratives. To evaluate these approaches, a visual model was developed and tested by a narrative student and a senior UX designer, and applied to two distinct dystopian video game settings. Through analysis and evaluation, the thesis aims to provide insights into the worldbuilding process, fostering understanding and discussion about micro and macro approaches in dystopian fiction and contributing to ongoing research in narratology and world crafting.