Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Video game developers'

This thesis explores the three campaigns Greenpeace has made towards the video game console producing companies, Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. Using a qualitative approach I investigate how communication from an environmental organization may affect companies and what challenges Greenpeace face when they develop campaigns in relation to companies. Even though the industry is quickly expanding, almost no one had ever discussed video game consoles in relation to the environment. The situation changed when Greenpeace included Microsoft and Nintendo in their 6th edition of the “Guide to Greener Electronics”. In this guide companies in the consumer electronic industry were ranked based on their environmental communication and Microsoft and Nintendo received a very low score. Greenpeace was critiqued for the way their guide was carried out. The “Clash of the Consoles” campaign was an internet video summarizing the critics towards the game console producing companies from “Guide to Greener Electronics”. The campaign “Playing Dirty” investigated chemicals in the consoles and concluded that the companies followed legislation on regulated chemicals, but on unregulated chemicals high levels was fond in some cases. Greenpeace is usually known for using a direct approach with striking images in their campaigns. But in these cases no striking images have been used which makes it harder for them to gain sympathy for their campaigns. The concept of CSR which is socially constructed has great importance for environmental communication. However CSR has a large number of different interpretations. As shown in the thesis Greenpeace and the three companies focus on different aspects of CSR.

This thesis analyzes how the institutional environment of the Chinese market affects market entry by foreign PC video game developers. The thesis utilizes a qualitative, multiple case study of five independent PC video game developers from around the world. The results of the thesis finds that despite China’s strict rules regarding video game publishing by foreign developers, culture and language are stronger influences on market entry strategies than Chinese regulations for the PC platform. This is due to the prevalent use of Steam, not only by foreign developers, but also their Chinese partners who publish the game to bypass the approval process mandated by the State Administration of Press and Publication (SAPP). The study also finds that, despite being in a leveraged market position due to regulations, Chinese publishers provide host of services for the developer partners for a revenue share deemed within industry standards. Additionally, localization strategies are discussed by each of the cases and this thesis finds that, while a basic translation can have success in the Chinese market, utilizing native Chinese speakers has a significant impact on a game's success, regardless of the professional level of the translation. Finally, despite the notoriety of piracy in China, developers expressed indifference to the practice, however, several methods have been identified to help mitigate the activity.

Using ethnographic research methods, I worked with the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) to conduct an exploratory study about developer perspectives on video game preservation. I conducted in-depth interviews with independent developers in the Dallas-Fort Worth region, a hub for Texas game development. These interviews explored developers' knowledge and awareness of game preservation as a topic of concern, archival culture and practices in the industry, and the IGDA's potential role in addressing issues related to preservation work. This research contributes to a growing body of literature on game preservation, urgently needed as many gaming technologies face obsolescence in the near future. I use Ellen Cushman's concept of "perseverance" to examine the difference between simply preserving video games for the future, and the perseverance of game development as a professional trade and artistic craft.

This research considers how the culture of game developer Cyan Worlds influences the gameplay environment and the culture of fans in Myst Online: Uru Live. The game has gone through two commercial releases and in both cases it was cancelled after a short time. Fans have attempted to salvage the game by producing their own server software and content creation tools. Recently, Cyan released their own source code and development tools to the fan community, giving fans an official channel for creating new content. This work builds off of Pearce's (2009b) study of the culture of Uru players and emergent play, but adds the dimension of considering the culture of developers themselves. A primary goal of this study was to determine how the culture of a game developer like Cyan shapes the constraints of the designed "play ecosystem" (Pearce 2009b: 7), and how it shapes the processes by which fans can salvage aspects of the game to create new content. One finding is that the design of Uru's gameplay environment is rooted in the cultural practices, personal philosophical goals and individual personality traits of its developers. Fans were able to assert ownership over the Uru story-world and the means of production of new content by proactively applying technical and problem-solving skills--the same sorts of skills that players must apply to solving puzzles in Myst games. This fan action, coupled with Cyan's goal of making an open-ended world, has helped to propel the initiative to provide open-source tools for creating new content. When fans produce new content, they draw significantly from an existing shared cultural repertoire of cues and conventions. These conventions are supported both by the software affordances of the development environment and by cultural precedent--they are readily adapted to Myst-like narratives and are easily "read" by experienced players.

Creative Project Abstract: The creative project of this thesis is a script prototype for Underland, a crime drama video game and digital playable story that demonstrates writing and design methods for negotiating narrative and player agency. The story is set in October 2006 and players are investigative psychologists given access to a secure police server and tasked with analysing evidence related to two linked murders that have resulted in the arrest of journalist Silvi Moore. The aim is to uncover what happened and why by analysing Silvi’s flat, calendar of events, emails, texts, photos, voicemail, call log, 999 call, a map of the city of Plymouth and a crime scene. It is a combination of story exploration game and digital epistolary fiction that is structured via an authored fabula and dynamic syuzhet and uses the Internal-Exploratory and Internal-Ontological interactive modes to negotiate narrative and player agency. Its use of this structure and these modes shows how playable stories are uniquely positioned to deliver self-directed and empathetic emotional immersion simultaneously. The story is told in a mixture of enacted, embedded, evoked, environmental and epistolary narrative, the combination of which contributes new knowledge on how writers can use mystery, suspense and dramatic irony in playable stories. The interactive script prototype is accessible at underlandgame.com and is a means to represent how the final game is intended to be experienced by players. Thesis Abstract: This thesis considers writing and design methods for playable stories that negotiate narrative and player agency. By approaching the topic through the lens of creative writing practice, it seeks to fill a gap in the literature related to the execution of interactive and narrative devices as a practitioner. Chapter 1 defines the key terms for understanding the field and surveys the academic and theoretical debate to identify the challenges and opportunities for writers and creators. In this it departs from the dominant vision of the future of digital playable stories as the ‘holodeck,’ a simulated reality players can enter and manipulate and that shapes around them as story protagonists. Building on narratological theory it contributes a new term—the dynamic syuzhet—to express an alternate negotiation of narrative and player agency within current technological realities. Three further terms—the authored fabula, fixed syuzhet and improvised fabula—are also contributed as means to compare and contrast the narrative structures and affordances available to writers of live, digital and live-digital hybrid work. Chapter 2 conducts a qualitative analysis of digital, live and live-digital playable stories, released 2010–2016, and combines this with insights gained from primary interviews with their writers and creators to identify the techniques at work and their implications for narrative and player agency. This analysis contributes new knowledge to writing and design approaches in four interactive modes—Internal-Ontological, Internal-Exploratory, External-Ontological and External-Exploratory—that impact on where players are positioned in the work and how the experiential narrative unfolds. Chapter 3 shows how the knowledge developed through academic research informed the creation of a new playable story, Underland; as well as how the creative practice informed the academic research. Underland provides a means to demonstrate how making players protagonists of the experience, rather than of the story, enables the coupling of self-directed and empathetic emotional immersion in a way uniquely available to digital playable stories. It further shows how this negotiation of narrative and player agency can use a combination of enacted, embedded, evoked, environmental and epistolary narrative to employ dramatic irony in a new way. These findings demonstrate ways playable stories can be written and designed to deliver the ‘traditional’ pleasure of narrative and the ‘newer’ pleasure of player agency without sacrificing either.

Having emerged from the self-taught hacker culture of 1980s home-computing, contemporary video game development is now a mainstream global business. Since the industry has managed to gain respectability without sacrificing credibility, it is widely perceived as both financially and intrinsically rewarding, and so has therefore become an aspirational graduate career choice. Despite such desirability, however, there is a considerable lack of diversity amongst the workforce, which consists almost entirely of young white men. Women are particularly poorly represented, not only in relation to overall employee numbers, but also in terms of their distribution across both job roles and the corporate hierarchy. Although conforming to stereotypical expectations, it is apparent that this cannot simply be attributed to inherent sex differences in ability or preference. In addition, a number of online exposés have revealed that, despite having a positive public image, extreme working hours are endemic within the industry. Rather counterintuitively, it appears that employees choose to adopt such working practices, rather than being made to. This thesis considers how such problematic issues are interrelated through the existence of a particular workplace culture, and suggests that it is both a cause and a consequence of them. In particular, it is proposed that the extreme working practices within video game development provide traditionally marginalised male groups with a resource for the social performance of a locally hegemonic form of masculine gender identity. Consequently, this suggests that there is a significant incentive for those benefiting from such masculine resources to protect them, which is likely to result in an industry culture that is hostile to feminine women. By examining the discourse within a number of social interactions that naturally occur at the interface between the industry and the public, this thesis considers how the maintenance of such a masculine version of 'reality' is carried out in practice. Particular attention is paid to the way in which the utilisation of dichotomous categorical stereotypes to manage local interactional issues acts to further propagate such constructs as global resources for use in future interactions. Most significantly, the application of a novel method of visual analysis to metaphorical representations of video game developers suggests that recruitment advertisements act to conflate masculinity and competence. Employees who fail to perform masculinity through the adoption of extreme working practices are therefore likely to be regarded as technically incompetent. As a consequence, women who wish to maintain their femininity will either not enter the industry at all, or remain in low status positions. Since the few women that do progress must behave like stereotypical men in order to attain positions of power, they are then unlikely to regard the culture as problematic or seek to reform it. The self-reinforcing nature of such a workplace culture offers an explanation as to why stand-alone interventions have so far had little impact on either work/life balance or female underrepresentation, and suggests that such issues cannot be addressed by simply seeking to impose a critical mass of women into the industry. Instead, it is proposed that interventions should treat these issues as mutually reinforcing, and therefore directly tackle the way in which they are linked by an industry culture that is maintained through the ongoing reproduction of various problematic discourses relating to dichotomous categorical stereotypes.

Background: Tough competition, time- and resource constraints, and changing consumer demands in the video game industry requires business models that can cope with the pressure.    Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to use business model framework in order to better understand how independent video game developers develop their business models. We aim to contribute to the development of business model literature within the context of independent video game development by further the understanding of how a business model framework can be utilized in this new context.   Method: A case study method was used, focusing on a single-case and interviews with participants from the case company.   Conclusion: We further develop the BMC by proposing to divide the BMC for independent video game developers into a pre-release and post-release BMC to better describe the business model for an independent video game developer and the business model evolution from pre-release to post-release.

Cette thèse s'inscrit dans le domaine de l'ingénierie des Environnements Virtuels pour l’Apprentissage Humain (EVAH). Les jeux épistémiques numériques (JEN) sont une catégorie des jeux sérieux dédiés à la résolution de problèmes complexes, pluridisciplinaires et non-déterministes afin de proposer des situations d'apprentissage plus authentiques.La première partie de la thèse est consacrée à l’exploration des dimensions spatiales, temporelles et sociales des interactions dans un JEN. Des expérimentations ont été menées en milieu écologique et ont montré un apport pédagogique par une augmentation de l'engagement des apprenants. La conception des prototypes expérimentés a mis en évidence que le développement informatique des interactions immersives d'un EVAH demeure actuellement réservé à des spécialistes en Réalité Mixte ou Virtuelle (RMV).Ainsi la seconde partie de la thèse a été dédiée à la proposition d'un environnement de développement (MIREDGE). Une interface de programmation visuelle permet aux développeurs de modéliser des interactions sans connaissance spécifique en RMV par réutilisation de blocs. Des expérimentations ont permis d'évaluer l'efficacité et l'efficience de MIREDGE pour le profil des développeurs RMV ainsi que celui des développeurs non-initiés à la RMV. Les développeurs RMV ayant une nécessité à poursuivre leur algorithme au-delà de la programmation visuelle, MIREDGE permet une génération automatique de code dans leur moteur de jeu. L'approche garantie une large compatibilité avec les environnements de développement et les périphériques, ouvrant ainsi des perspectives sur l'étude de logiques d'interactions universelles
This thesis is in the field of the virtual environments for human learning. Digital Epistemic Games (DEG) are a category of serious games dedicated to solving complex, multidisciplinary and non-deterministic problems. The objective of DEGs is to propose authentic learning situations in terms of interactions so that learners can construct and anchor knowledge in their context of use.The first part of the thesis is devoted to exploring spatial, temporal and social dimensions of DEG interactions. Experiments were conducted in ecological environment and showed an educational contribution through an increase in the learner engagement. The design of the prototypes showed that the development of the immersive interactions of a virtual environment for human learning currently remains reserved for specialists in Mixed Reality or Virtual (MVR).So the second part of the thesis was the proposal of a development environment named MIREDGE. A visual programming interface allows developers to model interactions without specific knowledge in MVR through the reuse of blocks. Experiments have evaluated the effectiveness and efficiency of MIREDGE for specialist and non-specialist developers in MVR.As specialist developers in MVR have to continue their algorithm beyond visual programming, MIREDGE allows automatic generation of code providing the corresponding script being totally re-editable in their game engine. The MIREDGE approach ensures wide compatibility with development environments and peripherals. This opens perspectives on the study of the logics of universal interactions

碩士
國立臺灣科技大學
管理學院MBA
101
In these past 5 years, economic growth in Indonesia is climbing and may expand more in 2013. Micro, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (MSMEs) are one of the key sources of economic growth in Indonesia. Many firms from the same industry form a business community, and it can become a network of inter-organizational relationships or business networks for the firm. SMEs need to implement network approach strategic management by managing the business networks they had and creating business strategy based on the networks’ resources and competencies to gain competitive advantages. In order to grow using network approach strategy a firm should know what’s the nature of the business environment where they reside and formulate business strategy that define what resources and competencies the company possesses by itself, and what it aims to acquire from external organizations and what kind of linkages it needs to have to access those required external resources and competencies. It needs also be concerned with the resources and competencies that the existing relationship portfolio provides and the means of developing and exploiting that portfolio. And implement the strategy by doing strategic management activities in networks.

Tese de doutoramento em Ciências e Tecnologia da Informação, apresentada à Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade de Coimbra
Currently, expertise in sound design in games is mostly tacit and held by senior professionals, who are not numerous and who typically work for resourceful teams that are able to afford them. Indie game developers, usually working with low resources, often have to cope with lack of expertise in sound design. We propose to provide guidance for the empowerment of non-expert practitioners to perform sound design in games, assuming the impracticality of integrating sound design experts in their teams. This empowerment also implies leveraging the literacy in this specific domain, hence providing abilities to communicate and participate in the conception of possible explorations. Such abilities could also be beneficial to the broader audience of game developers, where it could create the conditions for expert sound designers to be invited more regularly and earlier into game projects. Our proposal is composed of several contributions. First, we present an operative adherence to a holistic practice of sound design, embedded in game design, in which the exploration of sound is performed in the early phases of ideation and addressed by its purposefulness to the game experience. Then, we present an initial set of design guidelines for sound design in games, which include multidisciplinary concepts and insights. Our observation of game design practitioners using these guidelines led us to also propose a lower-level of guidance: a pattern language for sound design in games, representing recurrent sound explorations found in games of recognized quality. In its current state, version 2.0, the pattern language consists of a network of 81 candidate design patterns, publicly available through the wiki soundingames.com. We also present a deck of cards for sound design in games, which was originally developed for research purposes as way to audit the participation of the patterns during design phenomena, but which eventually evolved into an end-user interface with the pattern language. Through experimentation, we gathered indicators that the proposed guidance can empower non-expert practitioners. The experiments also informed revisions to the proposals and contributed to refine our understanding of the research problem. We conclude this dissertation by presenting the conditions that we have been developing to open the body of knowledge to the community of practice, for discussion and appropriation.
O conhecimento pericial em desenho de som em jogos é, atualmente, maioritariamente tácito e mantido por profissionais experientes que não são numerosos e que trabalham para equipas que possuem recursos para os contratar. Os criadores de jogos independentes, usualmente a trabalhar com escassos recursos, têm frequentemente que lidar com a falta de conhecimento especializado em desenho de som. Propomos fornecer orientações para a capacitação de praticantes não especialistas em desenho de som em jogos, assumindo a impraticabilidade de integrar especialistas com essa competência nas suas equipas. Esta capacitação implica também fomentar a literacia neste domínio específico, promovendo, assim, competências para comunicar e participar na concepção de explorações de som. Tais capacidades também podem ser vantajosas no âmbito mais amplo dos criadores de jogos, junto do qual poderiam criar as condições para que os especialistas em desenho de som fossem convidados com mais regularidade, e mais cedo, para os projetos de criação de jogos. A nossa proposta é constituída por várias contribuições. Começamos por apresentar uma operacionalização holística da prática de desenho de som, incorporada no desenho de jogos, em que a exploração do som é realizada nas fases iniciais da ideação e é apreciada em função do seu propósito para a experiência de jogo. Seguidamente, apresentamos um conjunto inicial de linhas orientadoras para o desenho de som em jogos, que incluem conceitos e influências multidisciplinares. A observação que fizemos da utilização dessas linhas orientadores, por parte de praticantes em desenho de jogos, levou-nos a propor também orientação de mais baixo nível: uma linguagem de padrões para desenho de som em jogos, representando explorações de som recorrentes em jogos de reconhecida qualidade. No seu estado atual, versão 2.0, esta linguagem de padrões consiste numa rede de 81 padrões candidatos, publicamente disponíveis através da wiki soundingames.com. Apresentamos também um instrumento na forma de um baralho de cartas para o desenho de som em jogos, que foi originalmente desenvolvido com fins de investigação, como forma de auditar a participação dos padrões durante a atividade de desenho de jogos, mas que evoluiu para se tornar uma interface entre a linguagem de padrões e o utilizador final. Com base em experimentação, reunimos indicadores de que a orientação que propomos pode capacitar praticantes não especializados. Os exercícios realizados também informaram revisões às propostas e contribuíram para aumentar a nossa compreensão da questão em investigação. Concluímos apresentando condições que temos vindo a desenvolver para abrir esta base de conhecimento à comunidade de prática, para discussão e apropriação.

Inspiré par la réflexion quant aux nouvelles formes d’organisation du travail de la nouvelle économie, ce mémoire s’intéresse à la question des heures supplémentaires non formellement rémunérées chez une frange de travailleurs hautement qualifiés, les concepteurs de jeux vidéo. Très innovantes pour les employeurs, ces formes d’organisation, en particulier l’organisation par projets, ne sont pas sans poser des problèmes aux travailleurs. À l’instar des travailleurs du savoir qui sont souvent prêts à investir de longues heures au travail, les concepteurs de jeux vidéo travaillent fréquemment en heures supplémentaires. Or ces heures supplémentaires sont non seulement non rémunérées, mais elles sont aussi longues et fréquentes. Comment en vient-on à faire accepter aux concepteurs cette situation, sans toutefois exiger d’eux qu’ils travaillent en heures supplémentaires? Pour explorer cette question, les discours de 53 concepteurs de jeux vidéo montréalais ont été analysés. Les résultats de cette recherche dévoilent une explication basée sur un système informel de récompenses et de châtiments qui induit chez la majorité des concepteurs de jeux interrogés une propension à travailler en heures supplémentaires non rémunérées.
Inspired by the reflection made on the new forms of work organization system brought by the new economy, this M. Sc. Thesis is interested in unlimited overtime informally compensated for, among a highly skilled group of workers: video game developers. Innovative from employer’s standpoint, these types of organization system, in particular the project-based system does generate problems for the workers. Like the knowledge workers who are willing to invest long hours of work, the video game developers frequently work overtime. Not only is this overtime unpaid, but also it is long and frequent. How does management come to make the developers consent to such a demand, without requiring them to work overtime? To explore this question, we analyzed the interviews done with 53 designers from the Montreal’s video game industry. Indeed, interviews revealed that a majority of game developers make unlimited unpaid overtime on a regular basis. The results of this research offer an explanation based on an informal system of rewards and punishments.

博士
元智大學
管理學院博士班
103
Through empirical research, we discovered the indeterminacy of the game industry after 40 years of development. In light of two indeterminacies, they are marketing expenses and developing time. We performed a case study to understand the role of outsourcing in product creation and proposed a dataless pre-marketing sales forecasting method for use before a game’s launch. In this context, our first step, which we address in Chapter 2, is to investigate the game industry’s background via literature review. After this investigation, we presented relevant methods for Structured-Pragmatic-Situational (SPS), fuzzy measure, Choquet integral model and Multi-layer perceptron (MLP) model in Chapter 3. We employed as our method a cross-culture case study combined with the SPS method with boundary spanning activity and boundary spanning leadership. Herein, we presented our empirical study, the conversation of which continues into Chapter 4. We address the procedure, how boundary spanning activity and boundary spanning leadership influence outsourcing, as well as how sales forecasting influences the effectiveness of pre-marketing. Chapter 5 offers conclusions, recommendations and future research directions. Our findings give several insights into the linkage between boundary spanning activity and boundary spanning leadership. Capability (seek capability) and strategy (network changed) played important roles in four combinations, at different phases of product outsourcing. We also provided the results of three simulations to predict pre-marketing sales data dependent on game’s release timing: the Christmas season, the Game developers conference (in March), and the Tokyo Game Show (in September). We believe this study, introducing the coupling of the boundary spanning governance and pre- marketing forecasting approach, will contribute to the knowledge of video game industry dynamics.

Atualmente, a indústria dos videojogos tem grande relevância no panorama da indústria cultural, tendo em conta que as receitas para este mercado foram estimadas em 119 mil milhões de euros em 2018. As editoras e criadores de videojogos estão presentes nas várias plataformas online, onde comunicam, em diferentes níveis, com os jogadores. Assim, com a presente dissertação pretende-se compreender a importância que essa comunicação tem na atual indústria dos videojogos. Para tal, numa primeira fase, fez-se observação participante em três grandes comunidades online de jogadores no Reddit, de modo a perceber as representações dos utilizadores em relação à comunicação dos criadores de videojogos. Numa segunda fase, foram realizadas entrevistas a gestores de comunidades online de jogadores. Na terceira fase, foi aplicado um inquérito online às três maiores comunidades de gaming no Reddit. Através da observação participante foi possível concluir que uma comunicação eficaz entre criadores e jogadores depende da editora e sublinha-se o papel importante dos gestores de comunidade. Através das entrevistas a gestores de comunidades de jogadores, foi possível enquadrar a necessidade de marcar presença, de forma assídua, nas várias plataformas, como é o caso das redes sociais Facebook e Twitter, onde atualizam os jogadores com novidades e respondem a sugestões e críticas. Os resultados do inquérito online indicam que a comunicação regular é de grande importância para o sucesso dos jogos e dos próprios criadores. O tipo de comunicação mais esperado pelos jogadores é a resposta a ideias ou problemas, sendo que os jogadores atribuem grande importância às redes sociais online para que tal aconteça.
Currently, the video games industry is very important in the cultural industry, considering that revenues for this market were estimated at 119 billion euros in 2018. Video game publishers and developers are present today in the various online platforms where they communicate at different levels with players. Thus, the main objective of this dissertation is to perceive the importance that this communication has in the current video game industry. To achieve this, first, a participant observation was conducted in three large online communities of players on Reddit, in order to perceive the representations of the users in relation to the communication of creators of video games. Afterwards, interviews were conducted with managers of online gaming communities. In a third moment, an online survey was applied to the three largest gaming communities on Reddit. Through participant observation, it was possible to conclude that effective communication between creators and players depends on the publisher and here the important role of community managers is highlighted. Through the interviews with managers of players' communities, it is possible to conclude that it is necessary to have a regular presence on the various platforms, such as the social networks Facebook and Twitter, where community managers update players with news and respond to suggestions and criticism. The online survey results indicate that regular communication is of great importance for the success of video games and the creators themselves. The type of communication most expected by players is the response to ideas or issues, and players attribute great importance to online social media for this to happen.