This report started with the guideline project that revolved around two problems in the game industry, the hypersexualization of female characters and their stereotypical designs in games, and a wish to solve these problems. Fashion was chosen as a new approach to solving them and the question formulation for the guideline project was: how can we incorporate fashion in order to strengthen a female characters personality, role and overall design in games? 

Three methods were used; firstly a systematic literature review to gather knowledge about the fashion industry as well as the game industry’s character design process. Secondly, the creation of the guideline, “The design handbook – how to improve female character design”, which would serve by presenting a solution to the problem. Thirdly, qualitative interviews to test whether or not the guideline could serve as a possible solution against the problems of sexist and stereotypical designs and if it could overall improve female character design in games.   

The results of the qualitative interviews deemed the project a success; nine out of ten interviewees answered that it would serve as a solution against the problem of both hypersexualization and stereotypical designs. The results of the guideline project and the interviews answered the bachelor’s thesis’ question formulation about how to improve female character design through fashion in the following way:  

• Be inclusive. The priority should be to design interesting characters, regardless of gender.
•  Know who your character is. Give the character a complex and interesting personality and design with that personality in mind; it should be strengthened through all the other design choices (be it color, silhouette or outfit details).  
• Make it believable. The outfit needs to work like a second narrator and should not contradict the setting, the personality or the character’s role.  

An introductory undergraduate textbook on the design of computer and video games.

This study investigates the feasibility of enhancing community engagement through gamification, using a prototype third-person 3D adventure game called Harmoni. The research targets international students in Gotland, Sweden, aiming to reduce cultural barriers and promote community involvement. By integrating game elements such as altruistic missions, language learning, and historical exploration, the prototype seeks to motivate real-life participation in community activities. Data collected from pre- and post-surveys and follow-up interviews with a small sample size (n=10) suggest that gamification can positively impact community involvement. Despite the limitations of sample size, the findings indicate that thoughtfully designed gamified experiences can foster a sense of belonging and encourage active participation in community life. The study underscores the potential of gamification in educational and social contexts, offering insights for future applications and improvements in game-based community engagement strategies.

League of Legends (Riot Games, 2009) and Valorant (Riot Games, 2020) are both team-based competitive multiplayer games that do not feature any form of story-based game mode, but both feature a large cast of fleshed-out playable characters, each with their own design, backstory, and set of abilities. This study focuses on comparing both games’ approaches to characterization to understand how they incorporate elements of characterization in theircharacter design. This was done with the hope of informing future developers of multiplayer hero games, as well as identifying similarities in their character design despite how different both games are. This study compared two sets of two characters, one from each game, which featured similarities with each other. These similarities served as this study’s starting point to analyze, and then compare both games’ approach to characterization. Many similarities were found between both games in their approach to characterization, despite their core gameplay differences. But it also found many differences, both gameplay-dependent, and dependent on other factors.

Monetization is now a fundamental aspect of video game creation and currently, all developers are trying to utilize it in the various designs of their games. Contemplating the monetized aspect of video games, this research has seen a gap in the studies pertaining to monetization from the perspective of the consumers, who are also the gamers and the buyers of these monetization designs. This paper approaches monetization from the perspective of consumers to bridge that lacuna. It aims to gain insights into the consumer mind by initiating a conversation between previous theories and present discussions to arrive at a middle ground on monetization in AAA games between consumers and game designers. It achieves this by the use of an online survey and semi-structured interviews with core and casual consumers. Furthermore, this research is supported by a discourse analysis on YouTube by game critics and reviewers. The results of the study showed that monetization is beneficial to independent developers and mobile games, it is also beneficial in AAA games if it is left to the part of the game design that does not affect the quality of the game. For example, cosmetics and DLCs, as long as those DLCs are not gated game lore that consumers are forced to buy. The impact of monetization on AAA games is a fifty-fifty issue on the part of the consumer and developer. The financial impact consumers project to developers justifies the rationale for the continuity of monetization models regardless of the quality of the games design. In the future research is needed to better understand consumer perspectives on monetization, particularly among consumers who have grown up in different gaming eras. Additional studies with larger sample sizes should be conducted in order to make valid generalizations and capture the perspectives of teens. Future studies should also focus on games and game studios that have implemented micro-transactions successfully, considering game design quality, revenue, and customer satisfaction.

This thesis´ aim is to discuss how different levels of details can contribute to creating perceived levels of representation and relatability. This was firstly done through a pilot study, which was made to gather more intel about female opinions on set player characters in games. Then through the creation of six stylized 3D busts, and finally through a main study, serving to find trends in female informants’ opinions about the levels of details, representation and relatability in said busts. Earlier research is presented and discussed, and notable connections between the earlier research and this thesis´s findings are presented.

Vehicular Cloud Computing (VCC) is a contemporary paradigm that includes the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, and vehicular networking technologies. VCC offers vehicle-to-device, vehicle-to-infrastructure, and vehicle-to-vehicle communication in which the vehicles can communicate using sensing abilities. VCC is exploiting the IoT environment, cloud architecture, and vehicle resources. However, the energy-efficient privacy of communicators and security of communication are assertive problems in VCC. To accomplish this goal, we present an identity-based authentication scheme for VCC which also uses radio frequency identification (RFID). The security and robustness of the devised scheme are evaluated using informal and formal analysis. The informal analysis shows that our scheme is vigorous to resist various attacks. The formal analysis is done through Random Oracle Model (ROM) which shows that the scheme is secure and efficient. The performance of our scheme is also determined and compared with various related schemes which clearly illustrate the efficiency of the proposed scheme. Thus, our scheme is very efficient for employment in the VCC environment.

Learning to read body language is something we do throughout our whole life. It is a complex non-verbal language that can express more than words. In this study we investigate the possibility to use only body language to portray emotions to the viewer. In a background of a game project we have used a character that has his face covered, therefore, facial expression is not visible during the online survey, which we used as a method for our investigation. As a foundation we have created four character animations to portray anger, frustration, exhaustion and hurt. To find the answer if it is possible to recognize those five emotions in the character animations survey, participants were obligated to name the emotion expressed on each of the video clips. The results of this study show that the characters body language could be sufficient to portray those five emotions. However, it was concluded that body language could be enough to represent the character's emotional state to the viewer; but by including facial expressions we could help to portray the emotion even further.

Designing games around complex emotions and experiences can be seen as quite difficult for game designers. Therefore, this paper sought to research how to convey the emotional state of an individual through design based on a chosen experience. The chosen experience was the feeling of loneliness with connection to the fear of rejection. This paper will be using Rusch’s (2017) method of designing deep games as a way of modeling an experience of loneliness as perceived by one of the authors. This model will be based on a conversation between the two authors with one acting as an experience expert and the other one as a listener. The results from this method seek to gain a catalog of experiences and thoughts about the experience expert’s feelings of loneliness that can be used to construct metaphors. These metaphors are then used to create game mechanics that combined hope to achieve a sincere recreation of the experience expert feelings of loneliness. This paper will go into depth on the design decisions made during the production of the deep game modeling the emotion loneliness.

An exploratory discourse analysis was performed on a community of practice based on Discord, an instant messaging platform. The community of practice is a group of gamers (people who play video games), dedicated to the cross-platform free-to-play game Genshin Impact. A corpus of messages was gathered from the community’s public message logs, which spanned a period of three days during the release of Genshin Impact’s most financially lucrative character banner. From the corpus, numerous themes in players’ discussions have been observed; such as reactions to the gacha’s probability system, displays of problem gaming, sexualization of female characters, and opinions regarding monetization & the game’s developers. This study would be beneficial for future studies that pertain to player behavior and gamer culture that can also use communities of practice on platforms such as Discord, in order to gain insight into niche communities of engaged users.

Lootboxes currently cause a frequent debate in the games industry where the discussion is often focused on the connection to gambling. In this thesis an addition to this debate is made by taking a closer look at Gacha design – a way to design games around monetization – through theory and player opinions. Conclusions point to that if Gacha is viewed as a spectrum of strength the discussion can benefit from an increased understanding of all monetization systems within games regardless of their abstract definitions. The data was collected through focus groups and analyzed based on current research of the common topics that surfaced during the focus group discussions. The thesis found that overall knowledge surrounding Gacha was lacking and by looking at Gacha as a design method opened up for a broader discussion with connections to Lootboxes.

This paper features a study about cooperation and how it can be encouraged via level layout.The research team developed a game with a research intent focused on cooperation driven bythe question: How can player cooperation be encouraged through the placement of incentivesand challenges in the level layout of a local cooperative game? To be able to answer thequestion, the research team looked into papers about cooperation, level design, nudge theory,Cooperative Performance Metrics, and design patterns. The research was conducted by usingiterative design, where three iterations were tested with two groups of four players and thedesign was iterated upon after each test. After all playtests were conducted and all data hadbeen analyzed, evidence was found that the placement of the challenges and incentives in alevel can have an effect on cooperation. This paper makes a contribution to the subject of thecorrelation between cooperation and level design.

This thesis investigates the level of focus a player is displaying while playing a role-playing game. The thesis tries to answer the questions if the level of focus is different while a player is watching an event scene versus during gameplay and if there is a difference in the level of focus displayed by new players versus experience ones. To answer this question a playtest was performed in the role-playing game Final Fantasy XIII and the player’s reaction was recorded and documented. The result suggests that the level of focus a player is displaying is lower during event scenes than during gameplay.

This thesis investigates how the color red can potentially affect the player’s perception of horror game environments. The test was conducted by asking participants to play through a horror level made in Unreal Engine 4 which used realistic-looking assets. The study was performed using a mixed methodology of A/B/C testing with surveys and interviews to gather the data. The A, B, and C versions of the test used the same game-level in all versions however the color of the lighting was different in all of them. Version A used white lights, version B used red lights, and version C used red flickering lights. The results revealed that the players found the version with the white lights to be the scariest and the version with the flickering lights to be the second scariest. This was most likely due to the order in which the players played the levels, the version with white being the first that the players played. The players indicated that the realistic colors in version A added to the sense of immersion, whereas the continuous red lights in version B were perceived by some players as overdone or unnatural and would have been better suited for localized areas associated with supernatural elements. The flickering lights were well received by players and associated with a higher potential for danger and jump scares

Puzzles have always been a central part of games. One of the simplest manifestations of a puzzle in games is an obstruction that prevents the player from progressing and an object that removes the obstruction. The system of unlocking new areas with keys is used in order to provide interesting level design and help build narrative in games. This examination intends to provide knowledge and insight into how this type of system is commonly portrayed visually and thus provide a basis for designers to build upon when creating similar challenges, providing a greater awareness of the design norms that are commonly applied. In the majority of the cases that have been examined during this study, text-based information is used to convey the majority of the essential information given to the players regarding the relationship of the key and the lock. In many cases the graphics serve only to highlight important features of the objects and help the player to quickly tell the different items apart in the inventory.

In the field of Game Design, multiple frameworks have emerged to give an ontological understanding of iterative Game Design and game creation. However, following critique of the MDA framework in regards to how it treats narratives, our group in this paper utilized the alternative DDE framework, as a tool to investigate any of deeper detail in player-game interactions within the game Cities: Skylines II as compared to the MDA framework. The study was done as an inductive narrative analysis of recorded gameplay found on video-hosting websites, such as YouTube where we would discuss the ways the two frameworks operate in terms of narratives.

In recent years, there has been an increased popularity in games with permanent death. This thesis investigates what mechanics makes the player return after continuously losing in permanent death games. The mechanics of four bestselling games featuring permanent death, which implies the complete restart of the game each time the player avatar dies, are played for six hours and analysed. The games analysed are Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, Spelunky, Rogue Legacy and Don‟t Starve.  

Based on the mechanics found in the games and using Raph Kosters definition of fun, “if games stop teaching us they become boring”, it is established that a number of different reasons exist to bring a player back, not just necessarily only the mechanics themselves.

This paper covers the subject of abstract art in video games. The main purpose is to find out if abstract graphics are enough to evoke feelings among players. A study is conducted where players of the game Thomas was Alone answer a survey about the game and their thoughts about it, as well as an analysis of the games graphics. The results indicate that it is the narrative in the game that makes the distinct impact on the players, rather that the graphics. It is concluded that the survey should be revised and future studies are proposed. 

This is the result of a 10 week long study about if player behaviors and choices are affectedby the surrounding colors in their environment. A number of players are asked to movethrough a virtual environment, while being clocked, where they have to make left and rightdecisions based on different colors (red, green, blue and gray). While most choices consist oftwo different colors, some use the same color. The result shows that the players most likelyprefer one color over another, and that they most likely prefer a non-neutral color over aneutral color. With these results and the interviews that are conducted the conclusion is madethat it is very likely the players choices are affected by the colors in the environment, but it isnot clear to say how they are affected.

Dystopian literature has been gaining popularity during the last decade in accordance with thesocial and political changes around the world. On the same parallel there has also been anincrease in games with dystopian worlds and themes. Dystopias have been serving as tools forsocial criticism since their conception; and with their introduction to games, the question of ifgames serve as a medium for criticism rises. This paper looks at how dystopian games elicitcritical thinking through design and narrative by studying the game BioShock (2007)’s influenceon players by using it as a case study with a qualitative interview method. The discussionscrutinizes the game’s emotional and intellectual impact on players under the umbrella ofnarrative and game design.

This paper seeks to answer the question “How does the tactical layer affect the strategic layer in Master of Orion II.” The goal is to identify the differences in the game when played with the tactical layer and without. This paper seeks to fill a gap in the literature about the relationship between tactics and strategy in video games. The research is performed by playing the game with the tactical layer turned on and off and analyzing the differences. The auto-resolve system is tested to acquire more information regarding the strategy layer without the tactical layer. The main findings of this research were the narrowing of player choice, the inability to design/edit ships, automatic ship upgrades, fewer technologies available, the inability to capture enemy ships, and considerable changes in approach despite similar playstyle, in the absence of a tactical layer.

The aim of the study was to determine if interactivity would affect how immersed and aroused the participants would become when exposed to horror media with different levels of interactivity. Two groups of participants were asked to either play or watch a virtual scenario. The participants had their heart rate measured using an activity bracelet and eyes tracked using a Tobii 4C eye tracker. The study found that as interactivity increased, so did arousal, whilst immersion did not. The results indicated that cutscenes may result in significantly lower levels of arousal, compared to interactive gameplay.

Museums provide not only audio guides but also video guides. But the video guide production needs a lot of manpower. We have developed a museum guide creation system that facilitates the video guide production for the museums. The video guide creator uploads the script to the server, and the visitor accesses the script with a smartphone application and views it as a CG animation. We use an existing Content Management System - "Wordpress" for the script input. With this system, museum guide creators simply access the blog site by Wordpress and post an article which is in this case a scenario of a museum guide. As for the next step, we plan to make our museum guide creation system open to the public, and will allow many people to create and register movie guide scripts voluntarily just like the Wikipedia. 

We have been studying and developing the real-time Computer Graphics (CG) based virtual museum where a user can walk through to appreciate artworks digitized in high-resolution. Our virtual museum also has a function to automatically create TV program-like CG animations using 3D CG models in the virtual space as it is so that the user can learn about individual works by watching the art shows. The CG animation is produced with TVML (TV program Making Language) engine implemented on the virtual museum. However, the current problem is that it requires a lot of work for a developer to write the complicated TVML scripts manually Therefore, this time we have developed a special tool to help the developer to prepare the TVML scripts easily. With this tool, the developer can produce the TVML-based art program simply by writing out a simple scenario on an ordinary text editor. In order to design this tool, TV art programs actually broadcasted are analyzed to determine the syntax of the simple scenario. Based on the analysis, we have developed the tool with TVML engine working on the Unity game Engine. We have also used this tool to imitate the broadcasted TV program to validate its usability.

We assessed whether the negative association between maternal postpartum depression (PPD) and infants’ development of joint attention (gaze following) generalizes from WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) to Majority World contexts. The study was conducted in Bhutan (N = 105, M = 278 days, 52% males) but also draws from publicly available Swedish data (N = 113, M = 302 days, 49% males). We demonstrate that Bhutanese and Swedish infants’ development follows the same trajectory. However, Bhutanese infants’ gaze following were not related to maternal PPD, which the Swedish infants’ were. The results support the notion that there are protecting factors built into the interdependent family model. Despite all the benefits of being raised in a modern welfare state, it seems like Swedish infants, to an extent, are more vulnerable to maternal mental health than Bhutanese infants.

This thesis asks how unique and different communities are formed and facilitated on the live-streaming platform Twitch.tv. Twitch was chosen for its relevance to gaming culture as well as its higher number of users comparatively to its contemporaries. This was done by applying the Social Contract Theory, a philosophy based on the individual’s relationship with a governing state and why a person would choose to give up their freedom for safety. The philosophers Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean Rousseau form the theoretical background, as well as influence the end results. The application of The Social Contract as an ideology by David Gauthier was also used as a tool to categorize and understand the complex relationships at play. For the study, a nethnographical approach was chosen, where we as researchers took a passive, observatory role by viewing four different variety gaming communities on Twitch, those being the streams of users xQcOW, CohhCarnage, 39daph and Forsen. While doing so we did not engage in chat, nor did we let our participants know of their participation in the study. An ethical evaluation was made around this fact and it was deemed ethical through a netnographic framework, produced by Robert V Kozinets. We immersed ourselves in the listed streams for two hours each during the month of May, while taking notes of the different interactions between the streamer and their community. This was done to give us the necessary data to determine the stream's explicit and implicit rules and how they are enforced, so that in the end we could categorize each community's unique Social Contract. This method was deemed a success after an analysis of the recorded data made it possible for us to define the Social Contracts at play in each of the communities, by viewing them through the philosophers’ different lenses as well as comparing them to one another. By doing so, it could be seen that all four of our streamers could be connected to Lockian theory, with their varying focus on cooperation and protection of property. Each community would also have differing relationships with their explicit and implicit rules, like CohhCarnage’s Hobbesian perspective on authority being valued highly comparatively to Forsen’s disregard for it. We believe that this method of research can be easily replicated by others, and that this research can support future endeavors in the fields of netnography, live-streaming communities and Social Contract Theory on Social Media platforms.

This study is about audio design in horror games, by looking at the horror game Darkwood. Its goal is to answer the questions on how the soundscape of Darkwood affects player experience, what sounds Darkwood utilizes, and what emotional registers it evokes. This study’s goal is to figure out the methods of horror soundscapes to be useful for followingattempts at making horror-themed soundscapes by future game developers. The research wasconducted by having five participants play the introductory section of Darkwood, theparticipants would be interviewed afterward with questions regarding the game and horror ingeneral. The gathered data would be analyzed mainly by using the Two Factor Theory of Emotion by Schachter and Singer. The study found that the audio of Darkwood had an impacton the participants’ experience, with players visibly growing uncomfortable by the tense ambiance, but it also discovered that visuals played a large part in it too, thus it recommends future experiments with greater scale and more precise tools for measuring emotional reactions derived from sound.

This report outlines the development efforts towards a digital serious game system called MONITOR ECOTECH and presents the game features, components, and architecture, including the game engine, graphics and visualisations, user testing, game structure, as well as game mechanics and functions. The digital prototype featured in this report is a functional “alpha” version that utilises data generated from the playing of the board game version to create a digitised interface. This interface allows for the monitoring and assessment of the performance of different constellations of ecotechnologies when they are exposed to social and biophysical shocks that amplify nutrient emissions in the BSR.

During this project we created two prototypes comprised of three short puzzles with the goal to see how players react when they encounter broken color norms. We gathered eight test players who considered themselves to have several years of experience playing computer games and watched them as they played to record the amount of time they required to solve each puzzle. We then interviewed the test players with the goal to clarify if they recognized the color norms and why they made the choices they made in each puzzle.

According to the results from the play sessions and interviews, we noticed that most of our play testers identified the color norms we chose to test. "Red potion restores health" and "A colored key opens a door of the same color" were the most recognized color norms while the color norm "Green button leads to a positive effect while a red button leads to a negative effect" was only identified by just over half of our players. The rest of the players told us they identified a fourth color norm, "Red button is an action button".

The play sessions also show that confusion caused by color norms may increase the play time as long as the player can identify the norm and make decisions based on colors. The reason to this confusion may depend on a pattern the player recognized as the solution to the puzzle. When this solution does not work, the player gets confused and must rethink the situation. In the interviews the players told us that they act on the objects' color and they consider themselves to become confused when the color norm is broken.

Accounts of trans people using role-playing games (RPGs) as a safer space to “try out” another way to be gendered can be found in numerous sites – from the memetic, to the anecdotal, to the academic. Using autoethnography andpost-structuralist queer theory of performativity in combination with scholarly perspectives of RPGs as sites for potentially transformative experiences, I consider the ways in which live-action role-playing games (larps) might help trans people express, explore, and embody their subjectivity. I argue that despite there being a relatively small (though growing)number of larps designed to encourage players to consider gender and sexuality norms in society, there remains no larpthat intentionally allows trans people (or those questioning their gender) to consider their gender subjectivity therein. Scholarly perspectives on larps suggest that they might provide a site for the simulation of complex socio-cultural dynamics, a space to adopt different social roles, and the alibi and scaffolding to do so in a way that is validating with a communityof like-minded role-players (Deterding 2018; Bowman and Hugaas 2021). I present examples of larps that, either by design ornot, seem to have provided opportunities for gender role-play and transformative experiences for some trans players. I considerthe possible limitations the embodied experience of larps -- as opposed to digital and table-top RPGs (TRPGs) -- might havein allowing such exploration for some trans players, particularly in potentially transphobic play environments. I argue however, that the embodied nature of larps might also provide an opportunity to explore gender role-play in such a way that allowsfor the validation of more diverse physical and social gender presentations, as well as the rehearsal thereof in a safer space. Ipresent accounts of trans people -- including my own autoethnography -- using role-playing games, larps, and other activities/environments not necessarily consciously designed for the purpose of gender exploration as the basis for how this might bedesigned for intentionally in larps. I conclude by proposing to design a larp that could provide an opportunity to express, explore, and embody non-normative gender, and I pose a series of questions that I believe such a design should seek to answer.

Hidetaka Suehiro’s (SWERY) game, The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories (The Missing) (2018) presents an LGBTQ narrative by initially misdirecting the player with an implied, and quite different, LGBTQ narrative. The game is designed to suggest that the player character’s narrative goal is to seek out another (non-player) character who, it is implied by careful use of metaphor and mechanics, is the player-character’s lesbian romantic partner. This careful construction of game design obscures an eventual reveal that the narrative was rather the dreamlike experience of a transgender (trans) woman’s near-death exploration of her own identity, experience, and trauma. I present an autoethnographic close-reading of the game’s intersectional design features in order to demonstrate how it does this, to consider why, and to examine its potential to achieve the designer’s stated goal; which is to teach the player empathy for trans people (SWERY, 2019). I show how the game’s design demonstrates an awareness of its wider sociocultural context – a context that the game designer is in turn trying to impact with the game. I will show how this context is leveraged, which tropes and conventions the game deploys and subverts, and what presumptions of the player the game relies on to make this misdirect function. I present my analysis of The Missing’s (2018) design misdirect as an “assemblage” (Taylor, 2009) of game elements combined with recognisable LGBTQ narrative conventions (Shaw & Friesem, 2016); all with the goal to provide a specific pedagogical moment, performed partially through this misdirect. I compare my findings to commentaries and reviews by others, presentations and interviews with the designer himself and to some of his other game designs that feature LGBTQ references and representations. I position this reading as an introduction to my wider research into how games might provide an opportunity for the exploration, expression and embodiment of trans subjectivities through videogame-based-learning.

Role-playing games provide the ability to slip out of established social frames and explore identity, whether digital or analog. Thus, these role-playing groups can provide a transformational container: a space for growth within which players feel safe to explore new aspects of their identities within a liminal environment. If the group of players is supportive outside the game, players can feel validated in portraying a new social identity in their daily life and shape a more empowering narrative of their life story. Furthermore, role-playing games open new relationship frames connected to these identities and the fictions surrounding them. Previous work has addressed how players may experience such dynamics as erotic, confusing, or potentially detrimental to existing relationships, particularly as a result of bleed, when aspects spill over from character to player. Through co-creation, players can experience unprecedented intimacy, vulnerability, and connection,which can shake the foundations of players' self-concepts and understanding of relationships. Applying theoretical principles from object relations, psychodynamics, transactional analysis, and attachment theory to role-playing games, this paper explores intimacy within role-playing environments. These theories can help explain how role-playing games can hold space for players to catalyze new relationships, practice interpersonal skills such as flirting and sharing, and experience the magic of limerence through connection. Furthermore, players can transform intimacy in daily life, whether with specific people or within their understanding of their sexual and/or romantic identities, such as queer and polyamorous identities. This paper concludes with recommendations for exploring intimacy with an emphasis on integration, safety, consent, calibration, transparency, and trust.

Game design processes, just like games themselves, are infused with unconscious values which need to be made transparent to ensure a successful outcome. Building on previous studies in educational and queer game design, this paper critically reflects on the values of our game design process with Allied Forces, a game which aims to teach trans allyship to cisgender players. Using a personal account routed in reflective design and standpoint methodology, we describe our involvement as queer subject matter experts assisting in the development of a game focusing on cis education. Our discussion reflects on two dimensions of critical game design which we believe are suited to generate a better understanding of unconscious interpersonal dynamics in politically engaged, social justice-oriented game design. These are (1) external assumptions related to our expertise as queer designers, and (2) the internal labor and hidden costs of working as marginalized creators with and for cis players. Our observations regarding these emergent themes allow us to interrogate and make visible the hidden power dimensions which tend to drive social change-oriented educational game design more generally. Our contribution thus seeks to help marginalized creators identify and calculate the costs and benefits of participating in politically engaged game design, and to develop their own feasible strategies and voices as trans and nonbinary creators in collaborative game design spaces.

Respiration rate is an important healthcare indicator, and it has become a popular research topic in remote healthcare applications with Internet of Things. Existing respiration monitoring systems have limitations in terms of convenience, comfort, and privacy, etc. This paper presents a contactless and real-time respiration monitoring system, the so-called Wi-Breath, based on off-the-shelf WiFi devices. The system monitors respiration with both the amplitude and phase difference of the WiFi channel state information (CSI), which is sensitive to human body micro movement. The phase information of the CSI signal is considered and both the amplitude and phase difference are used. For better respiration detection accuracy, a signal selection method is proposed to select an appropriate signal from the amplitude and phase difference based on a support vector machine (SVM) algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate that the Wi-Breath achieves an accuracy of 91.2% for respiration detection, and has a 17.0% reduction in average error in comparison with state-of-the-art counterparts.

Game companies are always looking for more ways to increase consumers and their revenue as well as how consumers purchase games. Several business models have been introduced that this thesis will look at, free-to-play, adding downloadable content to existing games, freemium and premium games.

This thesis attempts to provide answers to what business models there are available for game developers and how that would influence the development of the single-player games to lower the point of entry for the consumers.  It will focus on narrative single-player games and will use the business models to try and answer the question.

A survey was handed out that investigated the respondent’s reaction to changes for BioShock Infinite developer by Irrational Games. The models were presented and compared to how the respondents reacted to the questions.

Together with how companies are releasing games now this thesis came to the conclusion that in order to lower the entry point, the games need to be split and released episodically, together with increased downloadable content that added further playability to the game.

The workshop program at the 11th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment was held November 14-15, 2015, at the University of California, Santa Cruz, USA. The program included four workshops (one of which was a joint workshop): Artificial Intelligence in Adversarial Real-Time Games, Experimental AI in Games, Intelligent Narrative Technologies and Social Believability in Games, and Player Modeling. This article contains the reports of three of the four workshops.

This thesis addresses the gender-specific game access inequalities that exist between male and non-male children. To do this, it proposes a conceptual workshop design named SpielRaum, which aims to offer teens of marginalized genders a safe space to access games. By curating games for free play and combining it with guided discussions and self-reflection exercises, the workshop hopes to facilitate game literacy in a play-centric way. This sets it apart from other game-related workshops for non-male teens, which are also examined. It is found that they tend to be development-centric.

Leading up to the workshop design, the game access disparities are put into context. It is found that implicit and explicit exclusion of non-male people in the games domain leads to a vicious circle of non-participation and non-representation. This in turn contributes to the socialized perception of games as a male medium and disadvantages non-male players in the context of gaming. Further, game literacy is determined as an important game access condition and way of self-defense against marginalizing game content. This is why SpielRaum aims to raise non-male participants’ awareness for their own marginalization and show them that they can unapologetically claim gaming for themselves.

This essay is about side health indicator in FPS, why they look like they do and what function they provide in FPS and their existence in modern FPS. The essay also contains information about traditional health indicators, psychology in colors, the crosshair focus area and research about FPS in modern times. The author research of 44 FPS games is find out the amount of side health indicators against the more traditional types and the reasons a developer would include a side health indicator instead of the others. In his research he found out that in the selected games, a fair amount of them did include only a side health indicator but a far larger amount of the combination type, using a traditional type as a primary health indicator and a side health indicator when an avatar takes too much damage or nearing death. The author also found out a type he had not thought of, called full screen health indicators, which affects the whole screen to indicate the avatars state of health.

In this thesis we explore the various challenges of conveying environmental narratives in a fast-paced first-person game. The study is set within the context of our game Project Chaser, a fast-paced first-person 3D platforming game in which the player is constantly chased by an artificial creature, leaving little room for slowing down. Through this game, we aim to investigate the use of visual attention frameworks and environmental storytelling techniques, such as indexical storytelling and semiotics of architecture, to tell a story without disrupting the fast-paced nature of the game. Using iterative design and qualitative research methods we aim to identify effective techniques for capturing the players' attention and facilitating good narrative comprehension. In this study, we discuss the use of contrasting colors, lighting, and architectural connotations to direct the players' attention with the goal of implicitly telling a narrative without the use of text or cut scenes. Our findings suggest that careful design choices can have a meaningful impact on the player’s comprehension of the narrative while not compromising the pacing of the game. However, if the narrative elements are poorly placed or do not communicate the intended narrative, the fast-paced nature of the game can prevent the player from arriving at the correct conclusion, should the narrative elements be misunderstood at the beginning of the game.

This theoretical thesis employs critical discourse analysis to scrutinise the construction of video game addiction in Swedish press from 1991 to 2017, and examines its potential contribution to a moral panic. Our research is based on the assumption that media discourse influences societal norms, which in turn, can profoundly affect individuals and groups.

Our primary results suggest that a small group of moral entrepreneurs, mainly treatment providers for gambling disorders, were given an ideological near-monopoly over the conceptualization of video game addiction in the Swedish press. They popularised diagnostic criteria and screening tools by paraphrasing those developed for substance addiction, thus implying that this new disorder was just like substance addiction and therefore warranted similarly aggressive interventions and possibly clinical treatment.

Additionally, we found that the often alarmist concerns over players' health, education, social life and other presumed harms of video game addiction were not primarily rooted in the games themselves. Our sample shows that the discourse seamlessly expanded to incorporate new sources of addiction, treating video games, the Internet, computers, social media, smart phones, and, most recently, screens as functional synonyms. 

Our analysis suggests that the moral panic might be a manifestation of deeper societal factors, including traditional patriarchal family values, prejudice against youth, expectations of neuro-normativity, and conservative views on digital media. Recognizing the influence of these underlying factors may help parents, teachers, social workers and gamers themselves navigate the still-ongoing media trend of using pop psychology and amateur neuroscience to justify patriarchal and capitalist morality tales.

Communicating design is in many aspects a difficult process. Game design is not only directives on look and feel, but also carries intentionality. To properly convey intentionality, a common abstract vocabulary is a well-established method for expressing design. Game design patterns are an attempt to formalize and establish such a vocabulary. Game design patterns are a debated tool and this paper aims to examine the practical application of a pattern through a quantitative study in order to strengthen the potential for a more cohesive definition of the term. This is done by first establishing a game design pattern through observation of RTS games. The pattern is then studied through implementation in three commercial RTS games. The results focus on quantitative data gathered from AI vs AI matches related to game pacing. Through testing and analysis of the AI matches it can be stated that game design patterns in a contextualized setting supports the idea of using game design patterns as a formal tool. It was further concluded that the AI also came with limitations in how the collected data is applicable to the overall design of the games. Additional studies using quantitative data in conjunction with qualitative observations could lend further support to game design patterns as a useful tool for both researchers and developers.

The connection that players can feel toward their characters in pen-and-paper roleplaying games is a known phenomenon that has been previously studied and is recognized among roleplaying enthusiasts. Pen-and-paper roleplaying games are a complex form of games, with three distinct frames which are ludological, social, and diegetic (also called narrative). The frames are different aspects of the game as well as the base of different motivations for players, who value the frames in a varied degree. The goal of this thesis is to examine if in-game choices based on the diegetic frame in contrast to the ludological frame are correlated with the player/character connection.

The method used for data collection is distribution of a quantitative questionnaire on the internet, spread to Swedish roleplayers through social media and associations tied to SVEROK. With their answers, the analysis identifies correlations between the player/character connection and the three frames of pen-and-paper roleplaying games, as well as other correlations noted in the data analysis. The literature revolves around the two core concepts; the player/character connection and the three frames of roleplaying games. The result shows that diegetic choices in contrast to ludological are weakly correlated with the player/character connection.

Understanding what a game puts in front of players and how the players apply their abilities to proceed in the game is integral to the players’ progress and engagement within the game. This study examines whether or not there are discrepancies between players understand and what they perceive that they understand. Discrepancies between a player’s understanding of the game world and their perceived understanding of the same could impact how the player experiences the game, and if the player perceives that they have learned less than they in fact know, it could result in a loss of interest by the player. The thematic analysis of differences between gameplay and interview answers suggest that there is no major difference between the players’ understanding and their perception of their understanding. However, a recognizable pattern concerning how easily the players solved the problems in the gameplay and how well they were able to recollect what they had learned was identified. This pattern indicates that players who had an easier time solving the problems in the game had a much harder time recollecting what they learned, whereas those who struggled with the gameplay could describe the gameplay in detail.

Keywords: human perception, knowledge perception, learning, Portal, SDT, self determination theory, video games, working memory.

Denna uppsats undersöker vad för olika faktorer det finns som skulle kunna motivera en spelare att återvända till ett spel eller inte. Metoden som uppsatsen använder sig utav är tematisk analys. Genom att hålla semistrukturerade intervjuer med nio olika respondenter. För att sedan transkribera och koda innehållet i intervjuerna till någonting applicerbart i  uppsatsens forskning. Med hjälp av dessa metoder och föregående forskning. Framkom det först och främst att motivationen för att återvända är väldigt personligt. Precis som våra respondenter visade. Dras de till olika aspekter i spel. Men det vi kunde utläsa från vårt  resultat var att en av det större anledningarna till att spelare återvände var på grund utav utmaningen i sammanband med flow. Men också till en viss del för att vinna över andra och för att bevisa att de också kan klara en svår utmaning.    

This paper presents an autoethnography of the MOBA game DOTA 2, then performs speculative design based on that data to approach resolving online race-based toxicity within the game. Drawing from personal experiences and existing theories, this paper examines the game features which may exacerbate race-based toxicity in player interactions and proposes potential solutions to mitigate them. The optimal suggested strategies include the implementation of an auto-mute function, alterations to the commendation system, and the acceleration of gameplay pace. While the outcomes of these proposals remain speculative, they hold promise based on theoretical frameworks and the results from the author’s autoethnography. The paper highlights the need for further research to test and evaluate these ideas and suggests conducting comparative analyses with other MOBAs to gain insights into effective strategies for combating toxicity. Ultimately, the aim is to create a more positive and enjoyable gaming experience through mechanical changes to DOTA 2 while considering the deep complexities of the game’s culture and community.

Literature and teaching books about how to make art for games have been accessible but thearea lacked covering of genre-specific game art. Game genres require different solutions forthe art in order to aid playability of the final product.

My game project, called DOMAINS was made with an outside team. The project together withmy first art guide about the cinematic platformer genre provided materials for the writing ofthe next game art guide. The old art guide was used as a template for the new guide, whichfocused on the strategy game genre.

This report contains the description of the process of making my second art guide, and thewhole The Strategy Game Art Guide itself.

It reviews both the successful and less successful implements in the game and will walk thereader through how the prior decisions were made and the consequences. It targets beginnersin the game development world.

This Bachelor's thesis explores the impact of a fast-forwarding mechanic on player experience within Liberty Land, an in-house developed casual farming game. The research question is: How do changes in the passage of time, facilitated by the time-altering mechanic in our developed game, Liberty Land, impact the player's experience? The authors researched the question through the creation of their game and then playtesting with two distinct groups. The authors used game-feel (Swink, 2009) and the MDA framework (Hunicke et al., 2004) to do the research.  Group A experienced the game with the time-accelerating mechanic, while Group B acted as the control group and did not have access to the mechanic. Players would then answer a survey that corresponded with which group they had. After the playtests, the authors reviewed the data and analyzed the results. Group A had the time-altering mechanic and did report finding it helpful in reducing waiting times. They believed it aided game progression, even though core balancing issues made some actively use the mechanic less than expected. The group found it enjoyable and easy to use, although some did express concerns about potential stress from optimizing time usage. The insights from Group B, who experienced the game without the time-altering mechanic, underscore the importance of game content and loop variations for immersion and engagement. The emotional responses from both groups analyzed through the MDA framework revealed notable themes of sensation, discovery, and submission. The study also identified challenges such as low survey participation rates, ongoing refinement in the game loop, and the state of the game. While there is evidence of a positive impact on the player’s experience, the heavy limitations and problems make the research largely inconclusive as a whole.

Ancient humans attribute the phenomenon of thunder and lightning to divine power. The power of Thor that can lift Thor's Hammer, the body not be hurt by thunder and lightning. It's not impossible for us to control thunder and lightning like Thor. The Digital Twins system of the robotic arm designed in this paper integrates the physical device of the robotic arm, the digital model of robotic arm, the body sense interaction, and the virtual-reality mapping module. It can digitally control the robotic arm. With this system, we can all lift Thor's hammer in the future.