The aim of this essay is to investigate the function and development of Non-player characters (NPC) in the TV/computer game Dragon Age: Origins. The NPCs are analysed in order to see if their development is affected by the player character?s (PC) background and interactions. The game?s ethics is also investigated by studying how the NPCs treat the PC and what significance they give to his background and actions.The results show that the NPCs are affected by the PC?s interactions, and furthermore, that they are round characters, which is unusual in TV/computer games.

This essay analyses the use of history in the video game Assassin's Creed 2. How have the developers used history in their game? The paper also analyses how the game can stimulate, arouse and mobilize the historical consciousness of the player. The essay presents a theoretical analysis of the uses of history and historical consciousness. This analysis is then linked with the results.

This essay is about the female characters in the books of Hemingway. Are they as simple as some critics say, or are they more complex beings, and which ones of the women in the life of Hemingway, can be noticed in his female characters? In the work with this essay, biographies of Hemingway as well as a few of his novels have been studied. The selected novels are Farewell to Arms, Across the River and into the Trees, The Sun also rises and the short story The Snows of Kilimanjaro. The selection was based on the fact that these stories contain good female characters.

The purpose of this report is to answer the question:How do you create a media player that can stream music for a website?We started the work by searching the web and reading books about the subjectand found several technologies to use to stream media files over the internet.We decided upon using the http protocol and created the media player itself inMacromedia Flash.The website is mostly developed with PHP, JavaScript and CSS templates andthe websites design was created with Macromedia Dreamweaver and AdobePhotoshop. We also created an administrative system for the media player withPHP programming.The website contains a simple guestbook; the guestbook makes use of adatabase created with MySQL.Our work resulted in a webpage with a fully functional media player thatstreams audio files together with a corresponding administrative system for it..

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 is the result of a 10 week long study about if player behaviors and choices are affectedby the surrounding colors in their environment. A number of players are asked to movethrough a virtual environment, while being clocked, where they have to make left and rightdecisions based on different colors (red, green, blue and gray). While most choices consist oftwo different colors, some use the same color. The result shows that the players most likelyprefer one color over another, and that they most likely prefer a non-neutral color over aneutral color. With these results and the interviews that are conducted the conclusion is madethat it is very likely the players choices are affected by the colors in the environment, but it isnot clear to say how they are affected..

The purpose of this study is to investigate how male and female is produced in the literary children?s literature that is found in a Municipal preschool. My issues are the following:Which sex dominates as a main character in the preschools literary books?What type of properties is attributed to the characters?What type of clothes is portrayed on the books characters?I performed a quantitative study of 136 children?s books. I used Maria Nikolajevas perceptions of stereotypical male and female properties to analyze my empirical data.

This paper explains the basis for impartial games and the classicgame Nim. Nim is complicated by a modular Muller twist and thesolution for this game is described by a simple theorem. The modularMuller twist means that at the end of each move the player selects a kand the number of sticks the next player leaves in the pile, where thedraw is made, must be congruent with k modulo m. The number m isfixed throughout the game..

This study explores Environmental Storytelling techniques and whether these can beused in combination with each other to lead a player through a game scene in aspecific pattern, affect the player?s narrative and exploratory view and explorewhether Self-paced Exploration can be combined with these techniques.It is a qualitative study conducted by six gaming sessions with accompanyinginterviews in which six people get to play one of three versions of the same gamescene. The only differences between the scenes are the different guidance techniquesused. The informants' movement patterns are identified and interviews recorded byaudio, as well as screen recording. The results shows that Environmental Storytellingtechniques can very well be used to control the player's exploration patterns, bothnarratively and navigation purposes and Self-paced Exploration can be utilized to agreater efficiency in combination with these..

In this paper I have examined how the structure of society affects the characters in the movies of Gus Van Sant, and what there is that characterizes Van Sant as an auteur. I have also looked at the thematics and how the characters develop throughout from his first movie Mala Noche (US 1985) until one of his latest Milk (US 2008). Van Sant is open with his Homosexuality and those perspectives are of major importance for this study. He presents how his characters try to live a normal life in a society that is not made for them. I have chosen to analyze five different movies.

The purpose of this study is to analyze how homosexuality is portrayed in young- adult novels. I use books published in Sweden from 1977- 2003. Three of the books have female main characters and the other three have male main characters. My purpose is therefore to compare the different results between the sexes.I will examine and discuss the homosexuality in the novels with focus on the homosexual identity of the young characters and how it is formed. I relate the results to a queer discussion about identity.

The purpose of this essay is to do a narratological analysis of Utvandrarna by Vilhelm Moberg to see how the form affects the theme of freedom and liberation. I used narratology as the method of analysis and my questions for the text regards the significance of the narrator, the use of focalization, the powers, helpers and opponents, the locations and spaces, and how these aspects affect the theme. In my analysis of the novel I found that the narration took place in three levels. This gave the story different perspectives of the theme; an outer perspective, a semi-distant perspective and a more personal perspective. The focalization of the main characters creates sympathies, and the focalization of non-main characters gives the reader an outer perspective on the characters.

When a videogame is being played it is rarely a static experience. A videogame can consist of various systems that affect each other in an unpredictable manner which makes the player experience unique for every player.Throughout the years developers of games have used random chance in a games programming to affect the user experience. Sometimes it even goes so far as to having entire games based around the idea of the game itself randomly generating content for a player to experience.This paper will examine randomly generated content in videogames. It will take examples from existing ones and describe how they use it, and reason regarding the benefits and drawbacks of having random chance affect the user experience.The paper will step-by-step examine the purpose of various commonly occurring objects and features of a typical dungeon in an adventure videogame. It will reason around their purpose, and figure out ways to use them in a structured  manner so that we can guarantee that there will be no deadlocks that the player can't overcome.This will range from the environments in rooms, the shape of them, to the objects and creatures that inhabit them, such as locked doors, keys, and bosses.

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.

Should new buildings blend in or contrast from the older buildings around? Could contrasts even emphasize different characters? This report is a discussion on that theme. I´ve studied different architects wiev on the question and studied different of examples of where new buildings contrast to the context in a successful way. In part two I´ve done a proposal on a new housing settlement next to Hammarbyhöjden in Stockholm. The new buildings contrast to the existing and the aim is to emphasize the characters in Hammarbyhöjden as well as in the new structure.