People play games now more than ever before. While the digital gaming industry dominates the market, boardgaming has been living in its shadow. Board games offer a physical tangibility and a social experience that can be found in few digital games. How do we create a tool that further builds upon those strengths? The purpose of this study is to examine the possibility of developing a service that consists of an mobile application and board game events to promote social face-to-face interaction. Focus has been on the social face-to-face interaction in the context of a board game session.

This essay is about the history of the Swedish board game-industry from the 1970?s to today. The essay focuses on the companies in the business and how they change during this period and about the causes of this change. This essay aims both at accurately describing the development of the industry as well as asking the question of what influence factors from outside of the industry have upon the change during this period of time. The material used in this essay is mainly extracts from interviews with people who have been working in the industry during the period, as well as literature on the subject and product-catalogues from certain years in the time-frame.From this material I have outlined the basic history of the industry.

The aim of this report is to see whether the graphic design of a game influences children?s will to play games. I am especially looking at minimalist graphic design and how well it works for a game aimed at children age 7-9. Does the style of the game design have any impact at all concerning the children?s wish to play the game or is the game mechanic all that matters.

For many people, a good game is synonymous with good graphics. One thing that is often forgotten, is that the graphics only makes up one part of the games. An aspect of the games that is far to often forgotten, is the game?s content and ability to tell stories. Through analyses of the games of the Zelda series, the development of content and storytelling aspects of computer- and video games, since the later half of the 1980:s and up till today, are examined..

The aim of this Masters thesis is to examine what part and importance electronic games play in the life of girls, how the girls use electronic games and what the girls think and say about their use of electronic games. We also intend to examine what girls have to say about electronic games at the public library. Our attempt is to illuminate and bring knowledge to those who work within the library with the selection, purchase and conveyance of electronic games. Method used in the survey is focusgroup-interviews with girls in the age between 12-14 years in three different schools. The findings are related to four different perspectives, theory of child development, from a gender perspective, theories of understanding how young people use computer games and theories to understand the purpose of public libraries.

This study investigates the effects that commercial computer games have on young individuals social comfort and learning progress. As a systematic study of literature, scholarly articles have been analysed in order to illuminate the positive as well as negative effects on social comfort and learning progress that may come with playing computer games. The social effects have mainly been discussed with role-playing games, such as World of Warcraft, as starting point, while the learning effects have been coupled with strategy games, such as Civilization IV. The study does not simply declare how these games can be good for these factors, but also in what respect computer games may prevent the development of young individuals socials skills and learning progress. The study showed that in spite of perpetual prejudices against computer games in the technological age, computer games might actually be good to use as a tool in order to authorize the development of young individuals regarding learning and social aspects.

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.

This essay is about the use of narrative in video games, and the discussion surrounding it. For years ludologists (game researchers) and narratologists (narrativity researchers) have been arguing about how to analyze narrativity in games. While ludologists have chosen to see games as a product by itself, and therefore something to be analyzed separately, narratologists instead see games as a narrative medium alongside film, theater and books. This essay starts by taking a look at the arguments from both sides, and then introduces three questions regarding narrative in games, and how this phenomenon has changed over the past 13 years. To answer these questions, five case studies are carried out, analyzing games with the help of a new framework built on narrative theory.

This Masters thesis concerns computer games in Swedish public libraries. We have investigated the opinions of public librarians concerning what they think about computer games, and to what extent they believe it should be a part of the public library. The method we have chosen is qualitative interviews. The theory we have used is a pedagogical literature strategy, which we have reformulated so that it fits our investigation. The results show that the interviewed public librarians think that the library should offer computer games for children and youths to use at the library, and that they should offer computer games for lending, to all the library users.

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..

The purpose of the study is to examine how the teachers in second grade use SMART Board and compare two schools.The process I used was qualitative interviews and classrooms observations. Previous studies shows how widely SMART Board is used in classrooms, and this has also been shown in my study. The study shows how differently SMART Board is used in the classrooms, and how important education in the technology of SMART Board is to achieve in the classroom. The final discussion clearly shows similarities and differences in the use of SMART Board in different classrooms and also the teachers? thoughts about SMART Board as a tool.A central aspect in the use of SMART Board shows how important the basic education in SMART Board is.

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 paper aims to investigate how Helsingborg?s city library?s visi-tors feel about computer games being available for lending and in which way computer gamers see Helsingborg?s city library as a resource. This was examined first with a study of 100 of the library?s visitors and then with five interviews with computer gamers and an interview with the librarian responsible for purchasing games.The study showed that most visitors were neutral to having games at the library and of the ones that were not neutral many more were positive than negative. Of the five gamers who were inter-viewed, there were several who had borrowed games in the past.

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..