The purpose of this study is to establish whether or not there is a connection between a highincidence of computer gaming and English proficiency in Swedish 9th-graders. The study also takescomputer game genres into account, attempting to see if there is a link between frequent playing ofcertain genres and high English grades.According to this study, there is a clear correlation between the gaming habits of Swedish 9thgradersand the grades they receive in English, with a higher frequency of gaming corresponding toa higher grade. The study also suggests that the Strategy, MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) andCRPG (Computer Role-Playing Game) genres have a higher representation amongst students withgood grades in English..

Det är uppenbart att narrativ används i spel, inte minst i offline-RPG:n (ORPG:n), där berättelserna är vad som står i centrum. Samtidigt som dessa är ett välkomnatfenomen har de också en tendens att passivisera spelaren och påverka känslan avfrihet. I hur hög grad de gör detta är till viss del subjektivt och därför är det av viktvad som motiverar ORPG-spelaren till spelandet. Denna studie har utvecklat tvåspelprototyper som baseras på motivationerna immersion respektive prestation föratt påvisa motivationsgruppernas preferenser. Studien har fokuserat på att ta reda påhur stor vikt de båda grupperna lägger på känslan av frihet, och haft som hypotes attkravet är högre hos prestationsmotiverade spelare.

This thesis was developed as an assignment from Ludosity Interactive where the goal was to develop a copy of the Xbox Live Indie Games-marketplace from the Xbox 360. Ludosity Interactive had a necessity to easily test a game's attractiveness to potential customers using testing people from outside the company in a simulated Xbox Live Indie Games test environment; excluding this developed system there is no other way to do such an analysis without actually releasing the game on the Xbox Live Indie Games marketplace and then analyze the resulting sales from the product.The finished system had to be similar to the original system to the degree that a user could see past the interface itself and use the system just as he/she would have used the real marketplace. It also had to be easy to change and add games to the system so that Ludosity Interactive easily could show the games and the data that they deemed interesting for their tests. The final product was developed using C#, XNA and XML together with an Agileinspired development method in combination with Pivotal Tracker. This report describes how this product was developed..

Social games have become a digital phenomenon over the last few years, affecting a lot of peoples everyday life. This paper focuses on how social games can affect workplace relationships. Through qualitative interviews I investigate how people who play with their colleagues experience the social games and their influence on the social interaction in the workplace. 10 interviews were carried out with people from four different organizations. The findings from these interviews were then put in relation to previous research and existing theories concerning workplace relationships and social games.

This essay examines the narrative aspect of interactive fiction. The study uses Janet H. Murrays analysis of the digital environment and the properties of it as procedural, participatory, spatial and encyclopedic. From this, her three characteristic pleasures in digital narratives - immersion, agency and transformation - are examined from the perspective of interactive fiction. The study also examines Nick Montforts analysis of interactive fiction as a potential narrative and a simulated world or environment.

The eighth of august the Olympic games in Beijing started. The chinese regime promised to improve the human rights situation in the country if awarded the Olympic games 2008. The decision to place the games in Beijing arouse severe critique and many questioned how the International Olympic Committe could place the games in a country that so obviously violate basic human rights.The main purpose of this essay has been to analyse what consequences the Olympic Games has given the human rights situation in China. In order to accomplish this I have studied some specific human rights, which I consider to be directly linked to the games. I found that the situation for these human rights has infact worsened since 2001 when China was awarded the games.

In this thesis, the four types of math problems that occur in the digital educational math game Zcooly Affären 2 have been analyzed. Focus has been aimed at how the problems mediate instructions and mathematical concepts to players, and how the mathematical content is supported by the context within the game. The result shows both positive and negative aspects of the math problems, based on the theories for math education used in this thesis. Apart from the analysis of the game, this thesis also presents earlier research regarding what possibilities digital games possess as tools for learning. Researchers have partly different views on how digital games should be designed to enhance learning, and whether or not games are efficient to use for learning purposes..

This report is about finding the cooperative elements in games and making a boardgame based on them. I tested different Computer games and boardgames to try and get the cooperative elements and then I make a boardgame based on what I found.What I found during testing is that to be a fully cooperative game all players on the same team must win or lose together and one player should not be able to finish the game by herself. There are of course some things that can change this for example what kind of players are playing.My best advice is that you should decide that the game is fully cooperative from the beginning and build the game from that..

For this essay we used pattern theory from interface design and applied it in an analysis of touch games. In order to make full use of the patterns, we selected five of them and adapted these slightly with the help of game related patterns to be useful for the framework of this essay. The selection of games were the top eight games on the App Store?s ?What?s Hot?. The results showed, among other things, that the games had a clear focus on getting a pleasant apperance, and they did it relatively well.

ABSTRACTTitle: Violence and women representation in video games (Vålds? och kvinnoskildringar i TV?spel)Number of pages: 42Author: Karolin BodlingTutor: Göran SvenssonCourse: Media and Communication Studies DPeriod: Autumn 2005University: Division of Media and Communication, Department of Information Science, Uppsala University.Purpose/Aim: The aim is to investigate how violence and women are presented in video games and in game reviews.Material/Method: The study includes theories that consider violence and gender in media and video games. The material of the essay exists of two games and five reviews. The method that is being used is a content analysis. The games that are being analysed are Jade Empire and Grand Theft Auto ? San Andreas.Main results: The video games are often connected to brutal violence but the analysis of the game Jade Empire shows that it is possible to hve control of the violence in the games and that the player has a possibility to choose the outcome of violence.

AbstractPurpose/Aim: The aim of this essay is to examine the democratic potential of Forum Games.The main focus of the essay is if working with forum games can help the participators to better communicate their thoughts and ideas and through this take better part in a democratic society.Material/Method: The material to the study has been gathered through three interviews with persons using forum games in their work and one enquiry with 21 students in Teacher education at Uppsala University, who had recently tried the method for the first time.Main results: The conclusion of the study is that forum game has a democratic potential. Ability to communicate is important for a democratic society and participating in forum games can improve the participators communication abilities. Furthermore forum games seem to have other positive effects on a democratic society, apart from helping the participators to improve their communication skills.Keywords: Forum Games, Forum Theatre, Communication, Democracy, Drama.

The visual complexity in real-time applications, like Computer games, is increasing with customer demands on vissual apperance. This trend is supported by even better graphics cards from the hardvare industry. This must be taken into consideration when the architecture of a new graphics engine is to be designed. The engines renderer is responsible of generating a picture of scene data. The renderer must cope with increasingly more complex scenes, and must be able to render them depending on available hardvare capasity.

The aim of this thesis is to study the views of public librarians on the subject of controversial video games and how they work with them at the library. The purpose of the study is to answer these questions: What content is controversial in video games according to the librarians? How do the librarians handle the controversial games at the library? Does it exist a conflict between the users and the librarians about the controversial video games? Is it possible to see any underlying reasons or tendencies in the librarians answers? Five qualitative interviews were performed to answer these questions and the collected data was analyzed using the terms, value rationality and instrumental rationality which were collected from a theory by Geir Vestheim. The results showed that the librarians see violence, sexism and racism as controversial content in video games. They handle the games at the library by limiting the access for children with age limits and by not buying the most controversial games in some cases.

Abstrakt Produkten som jag har utvecklat är en mjukvarubaserad 3D-renderare. För att göra en sådan produkt är man tvungen att gå djupt in i området 3D och utföra alla beräkningar på egen hand. Dessa tar annars grafikkortet hand om. Denna rapport förklarar varför jag har valt att göra en egen mjukvarubaserad 3D- renderare och vad den är för något och i vilka områden den används. Här förklaras även min syn på programmering, digitala spel, vad programmering innebär för mig och hur min syn på spel har påverkat mig med tiden. Jag tar även upp mina tankar om spelindustrin och samhällets misstolkade värderingar av spel samt vad för sorts spel jag anser skulle gynna mänskligheten i framtiden. Vad jag tycker om utbildningen Digitala spel nämns också samt hur jag tror att den skulle kunna förbättras. Slutligen följer en kortfattad beskrivning av hur mitt projekt har genomförts. Abstract The product I have been developing is a software based 3D renderer.

This is an empirical study mapping out different citation practices to games in the fieldof game studies. From an analysis of 7 journals, 3 conferences and 22 canonical bookswithin game studies, 5 different strategies for game referencing have been identified.Games scholars can either totally refrain from referring to the games they discuss, onlyreference some specific games, cite them as something special and deviant from othersources, refer to them in accordance with other sources or refer to games with regard totheir unique properties as a reference. For the reference librarian working with issuesrelating to game studies the diverse reference practices among game scholars pose aspecific challenge. A challenge that partly can be overcome by knowing how gamescholars frame games and how these frameworks are in conflict with the ways librariansframe and classify sources due their physical properties..