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.

This essay aims to examine how the synthetic non-human subjects, EDI and Legion, are constituted in terms of their bodies, gender, desire and emotion, in the gaming series Mass Effect. In a close-gaming method I also want to explore in which way the gamer can effect or even change the expressions of the body, gen­der, desire, and emotion made by the synthetic non-human subjects. In order to do this I use Judith Butlers and Sara Ahmeds queer theory, and Donna Haraways cyborg feminism. I concluded that EDI em­braces her embodiments and is given a highly sexualized female body, being more of a woman than a machine. While Legion is rather embracing disembodiment and is given a non sexualized, androgynous male body, be­ing more of a machine than a man.

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.

This report investigates digital games with focus on differences and similarities between children?s point of view when it comes to games focusing on learning compared to those focusing on entertainment. The approached group was children, 7 years old. The study contains investigations and analysis of how these children used games in both school and home environment. The most used theory ?8 theories of fun? by Marc LeBlanc (2004) raises the most important parts making a game fun.

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.

I have in my thesis produced a start of a multiplayer, voxel, strategy sandbox game withadvanced AI. The world is made out of voxels in the form of blocks that both the players andother units can affect and change. In a world where every block follows the laws of physicsfor both fluids and physics. The game is designed for several players that fights for controllover land and resources..

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..

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 study is to try to explain the process using both an actor driven perspective as well as a structural perspective examining the reasons why the County Council of Värmland wants to merge with Region Västra Götaland. The answers to the following research questions are sought to shed light on the problem: What constrained the discretion of  the political actors in the choice of region to merge with? Which role did  different political actors play? Does the study provide Game theory, from Rational Choice theory,  and Path Dependency, from Historic Institutionalism, a new perspective and strength especially  when bringing them together? The study is limited to two policy areas, health care and regional development policy. The structural background is drawn upon the Annual Report 2008 of the County Council Värmland, the Regional Development Program and Regional Transport Infrastructure Plan 2010-2021 by Region Värmland. The chronological order of decisions and events is drawn upon protocols from various regional political organs all linked to the municipal of Värmland and the correspondence between the officials of Värmland?s municipal and the Legal, Financial and Administrative Services Agency of the State.

In the research field of the cultivation theory focus has shifted from TV in general to studying specific genres instead. It is proposed that there are similarities in otherwise different shows and that these shows give it´s voyeurs a solution to their problems.  The purpose however of this study is to investigate how the myth about the good life is posed in Tv3´s supply.  The theories used in this study are closely linked by their meaning. Narrative talks about the fact that texts, video in this case, contain stories. Ideology is the set of visions and beliefs one person has on the world and myth makes social, historic and cultural decided power orders in to facts.

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.

The essay?s main focus has been to investigate and analyze the political actions behind the 2015?s grade compromise; an agreement to introduce grades from the fourth year in primary school. Through a game-theory analysis, mainly based in Leif Lewin?s and Jörgen Herman's research on rationality in politics, this study examined the grade debate  during a fifteen year period. The primary task has thereby been to explain the grade compromise through game-theory.