Game Design Commons^™

Story And Play: Applying Narrative Game Scholarship To Game Design, Rodale Wenger

University Honors Theses

This paper examines the relationship of narrative to computer games from a design perspective. Over the past three decades, the academic discourse on narratives games has evolved considerably while producing a wealth of serious scholarship. However, the process of narrative game design continues to be an underdeveloped area of study. In this thesis, I review influential scholarship on narrative games and the broader topic of interactive digital narrative (IDN) and attempt to analyze its potential application to the process of design. I examine some of the major works on IDN, explore historical and ongoing debates related to narrativity within games, …

Lucid, Gabriela Garcia

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

The PC video game, Lucid, promotes self-reflection and emotional exploration by balancing interactive dream journals with a meditative platform puzzle. Players switch between reflecting on their dreams through dream journals and following the main character’s story as they realize they are in a dream. To finish the platforming portion, the player travels up and around the mountain by completing short puzzles. This is done to deliver the last living flower from the garden to the castle at the top of the mountain.

By building personal dream journals into the game, Lucid highlights how games can be used as tools for …

A Date With Cheemis: Bullying In The Virtual Space, Nicholas Roger Nolasco

Liberal Arts and Engineering Studies

A Date With Cheemis is an alternative game mode for the social platform VRChat designed in the Unity real-time 3D development platform. The project is an experience where the player meets many non-playable characters (NPCs) and makes decisions based on different scenarios. The game tells the story of a VRChat user named Cheemis who is bullied for the avatar they use and how they interact with other characters. The player must make choices of how to react to the way the NPCs treat Cheemis, whether that be defending him or being a bystander. This experience is only available through the …

Indie Developers And The Queer Content Renaissance In Video Games, 2013-2017, Shane Michael Hansaruk Mr.

Major Papers

Queer content in video games has existed since the 1970s, but as time and technology have progressed, so too have the potential for queer content in video games. During the mid-2010’s, a sudden increase in the number of games with queer content began, lasting between the years 2013 and 2017. This research project examines this period in great detail to determine the cause of this drastic increase. Through examining queer games literature, two queer games databases, and two select titles from this period, I determine that independent, or “indie” developers, have a substantial impact on the increase of queer games …

The Lighthouse Is Calling Me, Ina Muphy

Graduate Artistry Projects, Performances, Theses, & Dissertations

This is a story about the longing for and pursuit of Home when confronted with the reality that one has been resigned to settling their heart in exile.

Utilizing Game-Based Learning To Promote Mental Health Advocacy In Black And Brown Communities, Ashlyn Stewart, Tracey L. Moore, Hira Roberts

Pursue: Undergraduate Research Journal

The aim of this project was to explore the effectiveness of video games and game-based learning as a means of mental health advocacy within People of Color (POC) and their communities. Research has shown that within black and brown communities, a heightened stigma is attached to the discussion of mental health, often preventing those who are affected from seeking treatment. This unwillingness to accept and care for mental illness within communities of color is highly detrimental, especially in the context of conditions such as Alzheimer’s or dementia, where African-Americans and Hispanics are at a significantly higher risk of developing these …

Metamosque – Envisioning The Mosque As A Virtual Public Space, Alaa Albarazy

Theses and Dissertations

Historically, the mosque was not only a space for a communal prayer but also a place for building a community. Today, however, with conflicts and diseases fragmenting society, people are less able to gather physically in large spaces. Out of necessity, people rely on technology to get together and interact virtually. In this context, my research challenges the notion of the mosque as a physical space, proposing, instead, its extension into virtual space. Recent global events pose the question: Can the metaverse offer an opportunity for the mosque to reassert itself as a public space. I propose that a MetaMosque …

Ready Raider One: Exploring The Misuse Of Cloud Gaming Services, Guannan Liu, Daiping Liu, Shuai Hao, Xing Gao, Kun Sun, Haining Wang

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Cloud gaming has become an emerging computing paradigm in recent years, allowing computer games to offload complex graphics and logic computation to the cloud. To deliver a smooth and high-quality gaming experience, cloud gaming services have invested abundant computing resources in the cloud, including adequate CPUs, top-tier GPUs, and high-bandwidth Internet connections. Unfortunately, the abundant computing resources offered by cloud gaming are vulnerable to misuse and exploitation for malicious purposes. In this paper, we present an in-depth study on security vulnerabilities in cloud gaming services. Specifically, we reveal that adversaries can purposely inject malicious programs/URLs into the cloud gaming services …

Artists As Assets: Labor And Capital In The Unity Asset Store, D'An Knowles Ball

English Faculty Publications

The Unity Asset Store sells amateur designers and artists a promise of being able to participate in an idealized, rationalized vision of how the game design industry operates. However, the Unity Asset Store depends on marketing the content created by amateur artists in ways that require the artists to essentially package their work as labor and to mask their role as artists. This essay views labor and capital in the Unity Asset Store through a Marxist lens, informed by Kline, Dyer-Witheford, and de Peuter's (2003) model of technological, cultural, and marketing forces as "three circuits of interactivity" in the mediatized …

Humans And The Core Partition: An Agent-Based Modeling Experiment, Andrew J. Collins, Sheida Etemadidavan

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

Although strategic coalition formation is traditionally modeled using cooperative game theory, behavioral game theorists have repeatedly shown that outcomes predicted by game theory are different from those generated by actual human behavior. To further explore these differences, in a cooperative game theory context, we experiment to compare the outcomes resulting from human participants’ behavior to those generated by a cooperative game theory solution mechanism called the core partition. Our experiment uses an interactive simulation of a glove game, a particular type of cooperative game, to collect the participant’s decision choices and their resultant outcomes. Two different glove games are considered, …

Winter 2021

In The Loop

2021 Emmy Nominees; Animator Tapped by Cartoon Network; IndieCade Horizons 2021; Hack4Space; Security Daemons Prevail; Role Models: DePaul Originals Game Studio students build industry-level skills that benefit themselves and others; Frames and Fortune: Eugene Bush programmed his indie video studio with patience and planning; Reality Check: Heather Snyder Quinn augments reality to question systems of unchecked power

Difficulty In Video Games, Jason Bechdolt

ART 108: Introduction to Games Studies

Throughout time games have been utilized for a great variety of purposes: relaxing leisure, competitive activity, intellectual exercise, and many other sources of enjoyment. The element of difficulty has existed in various degrees throughout all of those game styles, usually found through the skill of an opponent, but lately many games have been designed to have a digital opponent to provide that difficulty. With access to more information than ever before, people have gotten the chance to witness lives and worlds that they can never physically enjoy, and this has led to a considerable market for games that can provide …

Mechanics Of Ascension Through Genshin Impact, Megan Chao

ART 108: Introduction to Games Studies

Genshin Impact, or Genshin for short, is a free roleplaying, open-world, adventure video game released for Playstation 4, Microsoft Windows, iOS, and Android on September 28th, 2020. Since its initial release, the game has gained considerable recognition for its storytelling ability, in-depth lore, and amazing character and world-building design. They were awarded Apple’s “Game of the Year” in 2020 and have grossed over $100 million from in-app iOS purchases alone.

Acceleration Skinning: Kinematics-Driven Cartoon Effects For Articulated Characters, Niranjan Kalyanasundaram

All Theses

Secondary effects are key to adding fluidity and style to animation. This thesis introduces the idea of “Acceleration Skinning” following a recent well-received technique, Velocity Skinning, to automatically create secondary motion in character animation by modifying the standard pipeline for skeletal rig skinning. These effects, which animators may refer to as squash and stretch or drag, attempt to create an illusion of inertia. In this thesis, I extend the Velocity Skinning technique to include acceleration for creating a wider gamut of cartoon effects. I explore three new deformers that make use of this Acceleration Skinning framework: followthrough, centripetal stretch, and …

Towards A “Filipino” Video Game: Teaching Filipino Culture And Identity For Video Game Development, Christoffer Mitch C. Cerda

Filipino Faculty Publications

This paper uses the author’s experiences of teaching the Filipino module of a multidisciplinary video game development class as a case study in teaching Filipino culture and identity as an element of video game development. A preliminary definition of “Filipino video game” as having Filipino narratives and subject matter, made by Filipino video game developers, and catering to a Filipino audience, is proposed. The realities and limitations of video game development and the video game market in the Philippines is also discussed to show how the dominance of Western video game industry, in terms of the dominance of outsource work …

Game-Based Learning: Building Competence In Visual Literacy Through Simulation, Carol Record

Theses

Game-based learning is an ideal experiential learning framework for introducing the critique process to reduce student anxiety and create competence in visual literacy and self-assessment. Critique, the assessment, and analysis of one’s work is an essential step in any creative process. It is an integral part of art school. However, it can also be a source of high anxiety for new students. This paper discusses the importance of critique, the challenges associated with teaching critique, and the benefits of utilizing game-based learning. Examples of game-based learning solutions are explored, including the development of, and response to, Lumen, a card game …

People, Place, And Pokémon: How Location-Based Games Enhance Well-Being, Rachel B. Peterson

Master of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) Capstone Projects

Social connections and relationships are a critical component of overall human flourishing and well-being. Over time, the structure of physical spaces and how we engage with each other has changed. This paper explores how social ties impact well-being and how advances in technology have shifted people’s conception of public and private spaces and how we interact with each other in them It also examines both the positive and negative effects of video games on social connections and well-being with a focus on location-based games like Pokémon Go which blur the line between physical and virtual reality. It concludes with suggestions …

Full Bloom: Diegetic Ui For Musical Phrases In Virtual Reality, Peter Armstrong, Elliot Cole, Peter Ferry, Joe Geigel, Susan Lakin, Richard Swientonioski, Zachary Talis, Jennie Thomas

Frameless

We propose a novel system for communicating musical note pitch and sequence information to users within a virtual reality environment. Our approach utilizes ‘Blooms,’ objects that resemble flowers with various petal arrangements. These formations, when constructed in view of users, act as diegetic, user-parsable encodings of their inputs. Blooms exist within the virtual space as simulated physics objects that collectively serve the role of a user interface.

Ikkuma: An Artistic Vr Storytelling Experience, Yangli Liu

Frameless

Ikkuma is an interactive storytelling experience utilizing Tilt Brush and Unity. It is about a land being swallowed by the sea, where conflict cracks ice and fire tears families apart. Ikkuma is the Inuvialuit word for fire, a central element to the work. The fundamental theme of Ikkuma is global warming and its impact on the Arctic ecosystem. The players must learn to tame the fire in their hearts and the Inuit traditional knowledge if they hope to survive the harsh yet fragile Arctic tundra.

Changeling: A Single Player Vr Mystery, Kaitlyn S. Tran, Elouise Oyzon, Matthew Pressman, Stephen Callen, Kyle Lekkas, Joshua Bullock, Jake Johnson

Frameless

Changeling is a VR narrative mystery game focusing upon immersive experience. It was created by aspiring game developers from the Rochester Institute of Technology to experience professional development. Each semester, different sets of students get to work on the game, with past ones working part time. Using the ideas of magical realism and urban fantasy we see each family member respond to uncertainty through the lens of their hopes and fears.