The role-playing game attracts a growing number of practisers. The aim of this master?s thesis is to examine role-playing literature as phenomenon in libraries through librarians´ attitudes. The paper is based on qualitative interviews with eight librarians: one personal interview with two librarians and six e-mail interviews with six librarians at different libraries. The paper starts with a definition of the term ?role-playing game?, its different categories and genres and a description of its background.

The game industry is growing by every year but for some reason the research surrounding it hasn't caught up with its rapid expansion. This study aims at expanding the knowledge surrounding one of those areas, player motivations. An empirical model has been used to identify which interaction has the highest impact on player motivation in story-driven roleplaying-games. By conducting semi-structured interviews with eight different game developers using the GameFlow model to explore the use of interactions to sustain the motivation of the player a new criteria has been identified. This additional criteria was: Alive, and it was shown to have a high impact on motivation in story-driven roleplaying-games.

The purpose of this essay is to examine the consequences following an adaptation from literature to video game formatby comparing Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass with American McGee's Alice and,primarily, Alice: Madness Returns. In order to answer this, aspects of both game theory and literary critique are takeninto consideration, regarding for example the narrative potential of the game medium and the gameplay's possibleresemblance with Wolfgang Iser's theory of the reading process.The analysis shows in what ways the original narrative has been altered in order to fit its new medium. Some of thebooks' main ingredients are simply retold in the games' so called information spaces, i.e. text and video sequenceswhere the otherwise playable character is not controlled. Others, instead, have undergone a ludolization or ergodizationwhere the story events are experienced as playable elements in the games' action spaces.

In the Korean artist Hyun-Jin Kwak's ongoing project Girls in Uniform she portrays events and moments that transgress the boundaries between the ordinary and the unknown. In her photographs there are frequently ambiguous and cinematic narratives. The pictures are carefully orchestrated and constructed, but they are not spectacular. Kwak's imagery is relatively unexplored. This thesis implements a comparative image analysis of eight of Hyun-Jin Kwak's works, in order to investigate and interpret her imagery.

In the Korean artist Hyun-Jin Kwak's ongoing project Girls in Uniform she portrays events and moments that transgress the boundaries between the ordinary and the unknown. In her photographs there are frequently ambiguous and cinematic narratives. The pictures are carefully orchestrated and constructed, but they are not spectacular. Kwak's imagery is relatively unexplored. This thesis implements a comparative image analysis of eight of Hyun-Jin Kwak's works, in order to investigate and interpret her imagery.

The purpose of this thesis is to attain a deepened understanding concerning views on videogames at four Swedish public libraries, especially in relation to library practice and how videogames fit within this context. It also aims to provide insight as to why these libraries have included videogames in their collections and what thoughts were behind it. To fulfill this aim we conducted a qualitative hermeneutic study, using interviews as the main source of research material, but also written materials and a lecture on the city library of Malmö and how they work with videogames. The theoretical framework of the study is founded on Dorte Skot-Hansen?s and Douglas Raber?s theories on the values, roles and functions of public libraries.

In 2011, I and fellow student at Gotland University created a multimedia game. To fit the time constraints a ?vertical slice? was created. This means a small sample of the game is taken which allows the user to understand how the game works, and at the same time, get a visual demonstration of how the game is designed. The goal of the project was to create a narrative for stadium games in which the backstory is told as players interact with their surroundings.

AimThe aim of this study was to develop and perform a reliability test of a questionnaire regarding side dominance in order to identify the dominant/non-dominant side in students at the Swedish alpine ski high school.MethodA questionnaire of side dominance of the upper and lower extremity was developed, and its reliability was tested according to the test-retest design. A total of 121 subjects answered the questionnaire twice. The questionnaire included five questions about side dominance, i.e. what hand/arm or foot/leg (left /right) that one prefers to use as a first choice when writing, throwing, kicking a ball, jumping over a fence and stair climbing. Furthermore, there was a question whether the responder has a safer/better ski turn to the left or to the right.

Detta examensarbete är en undersökning i hur riktlinjer anpassade för Serious Games-genren kan användas i utvecklingen av träningsmoment till ett simpelt kooperativt plattformspusselspel. Undersökningen baserades på en analysmodell vid namn RETAIN (Relevance, Embedding, Transfer, Adaptation, Immersion, Naturalization) vilken utvecklats specifikt för att analysera och hjälpa till vid utvecklingen av inlärningsspel. Denna modell har använts för att analysera plattformspusselspelet Braid, varefter analysen har använts som riktlinjer under utvecklingen av ett eget verk. RETAIN-modellen har även använts för att analysera det egna verket.Efter undersökningen har jag kommit fram till att RETAIN-modellen i sitt originalutförande ej lämpar sig för utveckling av träningsmoment i underhållningsspel då kraven på spel i Serious Games-genren och underhållningsspel är alltför olika..

This essay aims to investigate how Swedish Public Libraries market their activities in video games for youths. It also highlights how the library, on the basis of the unique opportunities of the video game medium, can develop this marketing to build a relationship with youths. The empiric evidence is based on a survey of answers given by 30 librarians responsible for video game collections, and qualitative telephone interviews with three of them. The essay?s theoretical framework is based on Philip Kotler and his co-authors? marketing theory which consists of five stages: Marketing research, segmentation, marketing mix, implementation and development.

Earlier research has shown that combining education with entertainment can improve students motivation in school. With this study we aim to learn more about interactive digital learning resources and how they should be designed to entertain and thereby contribute to motivation. We have identified aspects of educational games that also could be considered when developing interactive digital learning resources, to make them more entertaining and motivating. We have chosen to study and evaluate an interactive digital learning resource called ?Grasp the Disaster?, a fictional online adventure created for students in the ages between 13-15.

The purpose of this thesis is to, based on interviews and document studies, critically discuss how the introduction of kickboxing in Physical Education (PE) could affect gender equality in society. Based on a queer feminist and norm critical perspective on the prevailing teaching of PE, which, despite official efforts to challenge and modernize PE, persists in reproducing gender norms by e.g. spending 75% of class time on Ball games. The hypothesis is that girls accessing violence (empowerment) through a bodily awareness in the form of kickboxing, positively would challenge the power imbalance that gender norms create. Girls are brought up, even today, in accordance with gender norms arguing against girls/women wanting to use their bodies as powerful tools to set limits.

This paper considers the roles of critics, newspapers and magazines, in the process ofdescribing computer games and video games as either technical objects or products intendedfor entertainment.The making and ?using? of computer games and videogames originates in small groups ofpeople possessing a lot of knowledge in computers, during a time when these kinds of deviceswere very expensive. But now, the gaming culture has grown and almost anyone in oursociety can own and play a video game. For that reason, one could ask the questions ?are thegames and the people who plays them still parts of a ?technical culture??? and ?do we needsome kind of prior knowledge to fully understand the videogame critics??The critics represent ?the official idea? of what a videogame is, how it works and if it is worthplaying.

Hur kan svårighetsprogression användas i skapandet av Puzzlehunts med syfte att uppnå en ökad upplevd känsla av flow hos spelaren? Denna frågeställning behandlas i uppsatsen och problemet som måste lösas är hur man kan bygga upp en ackumulerad kunskap om något vars syfte är att hela tiden tvinga dig att hitta nya lösningar på problem. I mer traditionella spel kan upprepning lära spelaren hur spelmekaniken fungerar. I puzzlehunts kan upprepning av spelmekanik inte användas eftersom målet för varje pussel är att hitta mekaniken som löser problemet. Uppsatsen visar att man genom inlärning av hur man skall tänka för att hitta lösningarna till pusslen kan bygga upp en ackumulerad kunskap hos spelaren och därmed även ha en svårighetsprogression och öka upplevd nivå av flow hos spelaren..

This thesis presents a qualitative, comparative study of the violence in the adaptations of Hunger Games (Tony Ross, 2012) and Battle Royale (Kinji Fukusaku, 2000). By analyzing the function of violence in a single scene in each of the movies, and comparing it to the literary original, the study aims to explore if there are any differences in the representation of the violence in the two media. The study also briefly discusses whether the violence has any function in bringing the story forward in both the literary sources and in the films and what the motivation for the violence is. "The study also includes a brief analysis of the narratives in relation to the monomyth established by Jospeh Campbell. Specifically, I discuss the similarities between Hunger Games and Battle Royale, which are two stories that have been created in two different cultural traditions, and whether or not we can say that the stories derive from this monomyth." The result concludes that the monomyth can be found in both stories, but that the scenes which is analyzed has to be put into the context and furhter story of the film to be of any relvance to the theory.