In today?s modern society with high-speed connections covering the globe people are more than ever finding themselves gazing into the cold lights of the computer screen. On the other side a strange and exciting world yet to be explored awaits. Many are those who spend hour after hour running over green hills swimming in vast blue oceans in the lands of Azeroth, the playfield in the MMORPG game World of Warcraft. In media we often read and hear alarming reports on players stuck in this virtual world, ceasing to play a part in the real world.

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.

Today we have more game species than ever before in our landscape, both regarding number of species and number of individuals. The increasing number of wild species is an increase in game recourse for the countryside. The increase of game species, however, has negative effects on forests and agriculture land. The negative effects for forestry are damages on economic important trees, due to losses in production and quality. However there are ways to decrease the damage on valuable and important trees.

The purpose of this essay is to investigate and discuss the current state of game research and its potential usage in didactic situations. The essay is divided in two parts. Part one consists of an attempt to comment preceding contemporary game research and address possible myths that have been established. Part two aims to discuss games narrative capacity and function in education using the theories and terms laid down by Wolfgang Iser and Gérard Genette.Contemporary game research tends to focus on classic retro games, trying to form theories for a general understanding of the media. This is a useful method as long as the purpose of the study is to define how game mechanics and layout are formed.

This thesis is focusing on how global and local search engines retrieve information from the local domain. The three search engines tested are the global search engines Yahoo, Ask.com and the local search engine Web Wombat. The questions we examined were: which search engine has the best retrieval effectiveness? Could there be other reasons than retrieval effectiveness, to choosing a local search engine?For our test we constructed 20 questions related to Australia.We chose to divide the questions into topics like nature, sports and culture. For all questions we evaluated the relevance of the first 20 hits.

Abstrakt För att utveckla och förändra spelmediet behandlar detta arbete impressionism och digitala spel. Båda ämnena diskuteras och belyses från olika vinklar för att undersöka hur de två ämnena kan sammanföras i en spelproduktion. Spelproduktionen har testats av spelstudenter för att få deras åsikter om hur spelet fungerar och deras syn på kopplingen mellan impressionism och digitala spel. Arbetet avslutas med en diskussion och slutsats där alla fakta som tagits in under kandidat-arbetet analyserats. I diskussionen lyfts följande ämnen fram: impressionism, konst, hur spelmediet ser ut idag, tv- och dataspelsgestaltning, interaktion och hur dessa två ämnen, impressionism och digitala spel kan föras samman.

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.

Digital games are today avaliable on all kinds of different platform. Games and game thinking is also increasingly being applied within non-traditional contexts. This thesis explores the term "gamifiation" which can be defined as "the use of game design elements in non-game contexts". The purpose of the study was to identify and give perspective on the discourse surrounding the use and applicability of the term today. More specifically, it explores the possibilities of the potentially value creating ability in the context of work, and focused on the application of gamified software in the context of project work.

Den här uppsatsen handlar om hur pussel och skr äck kan kombineras i ett och samma digitala spel. Hur man som utvecklare kan f å en j ämn balans mellan skr äcken och pusslen som presenteras f ör spelaren i spelet. Den typ av skr äck som den h ar uppsatsen har fokus på är genren 'Survival-Horror' och anv änder sig av den typ av skr äck som i digital spel kategoriserats som 'Survival-Horror'-spel. Den här uppsatsen visar en analys av 'Survival-Horror', samlar information om pussel och skr äck f or att utforma en hypotes hur dessa kan kombineras. F ör att kontrollera om hypotesen st ämmer utf ördes en intervju innan pussel- och skr äckmomenten implementerades i ett digitalt spel. Efter implementationerna genomf ördes det speltester i tv å omg ångar f ör att analysera resultatet mellan de tv å omg ångarna..

The web has made an incredible amount of unorganized information available to anyone. There are search engines that help us structuring the information, but it is still difficult to find what you search for on the web. The purpose of this master's thesis is to investigate whether the already existing techniques for automatic indexing are suited for the new information retrieval context on the web and how the choice to support these techniques, or not, affects the search results. This is examined through a literature study on automatic indexing and other related concepts, such as information retrieval and information searching on the web in order to get a theoretical frame to the work and by an observation of the search engine HotBot to approach the purpose of the thesis. The observation is carried out by searching HotBot's database and investigating the search results in order to try to identify patterns that can reveal something about how HotBot's automatic indexing is done.

This rapport aims to examine the difficulties in presenting a complex game in a way that will invite new players by making the game more accessible. We discuss and present our process on how to create an application named ?Digi?-war that is easy and fast to, both, learn and use. Our solution to this issue includes RFID-tags and readers together with four buttons, as input devices. This simple input device, placed in a gun-type control unit, aims to provide an intuitive interaction..

The goal of this master thesis is to show the benefit of using computer games of the type First Person Shooter, FPS in the field of military simulations. The main focus in this is around a couple of topics. Creating the AI that controls the behaviour of the computer-controlled characters, the bots. Create an environment where it is possible to supervise the bots and also design a framework that enables cooperation between a group of bots, a squad. The result is Total Unreal Studio, TUS, a program where it is possible to add bots to a squad, connect them to a game server and inspect what the bots are doing.

The aim of this thesis is to assess the strategic importance of Central Asia as a whole and interests of great powers in the region in particular within the theoretical framework chosen. The work shows Central Asia as an area of the New Great Game, analogue of the original Great Game which was played out between the British Empire and Tsarist Russia in XIX century. The parallels between the original Great Game and the New Great Game are drawn in order to understand the scope and the true intentions of the players of the latter one. Also, the security issues in the contemporary Central Asia are explored and analyzed to provide with the background for future predictions. Furthermore, the indirect purpose of the thesis is to examine whether the international system has changed from that of two centuries ago by comparing the structure of the international systems at the time of two Games.

The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the design and function of an engine production management?s control system and its intended function, and to contrast it with the present management control systems in use on an operational level. Interviews conducted with employees from all levels of the engine production are the main source of this study?s empirical foundation. Information has also been gathered from relevant written material such as annual reports, internal documents etc.

This master thesis examines commercial video games and their relation to the concept of immersion and realism. Games as a communicative medium is quite a new area of interest within rhetorical research in Sweden. Most of the research conducted has, however, been focused on gaming and formation on opinion ? games that explicitly tries to persuade the player, unlike commercial games that focus on entertainment, that is. But that does not mean that commercial games cannot influence us.