This decommissioned ERA site remains active temporarily to support our final migration steps to https://ualberta.scholaris.ca, ERA's new home. All new collections and items, including Spring 2025 theses, are at that site. For assistance, please contact erahelp@ualberta.ca.
Search
Skip to Search Results- 1Beyer, Jocelyn Ann
- 1Brammadesam Manavalan, Yathirajan
- 1Gallivan, Matthew
- 1Gordon, MacKenzie
- 1Henry, Calen
- 1Mirgati, Seyyede Negar
-
Fall 2015
Brammadesam Manavalan, Yathirajan
Displaying believable emotional reactions in virtual characters is required in applications ranging from virtual-reality trainers to video games. Manual scripting is the most frequently used method and enables an arbitrarily high fidelity of the emotions displayed. However, scripting is labor...
-
Fall 2013
Interactive Storytelling (IS) acknowledges that people want to be participants in the unfolding of a story plot. Given the complex nature of IS, Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods can be called upon to improve and enhance interactive stories in video games. In the past decade, a number of...
-
Fall 2011
By looking at how genres names have evolved over the past two decades and tracing some of the history of literary genres I will make the case for a new way of looking at video games. This framework uses Mikhail Bakhtin’s work in The Dialogic Imagination (1981) to view video games through three...
-
Spring 2016
This thesis reviews how in-level wayfinding cues in video games can be harnessed to create immersive and enjoyable game experiences. It conducts an extensive literature review of game level design, and examines how modern games guide players to their destination. Many modern games rely heavily on...
-
Fall 2024
Procedural Content Generation via Machine Learning (PCGML) faces a significant hurdle that sets it apart from other ML problems, such as image or text generation, which is limited annotated data. For example, many existing methods for level generation via machine learning specifically require a...
-
Let's Play with Trauma: An Autoethnographic Study of Traumatic Experience, Alienation, and Control in Video Games
DownloadSpring 2021
This autoethnographic, interdisciplinary dissertation addresses the question “how have video games helped me to survive and overcome trauma – a kind of trauma that left me feeling alienated - and how might video games help others in the same way?” Written as a dialogue between various personas,...
-
Fall 2024
The video game industry has become a powerhouse in the global entertainment economy. Creating engaging, high-quality games demands intricate development processes and significant resources. As projects grow in complexity and scale, developers often grapple with demanding schedules, tight...
-
Fall 2021
Heuristic search is a core area of Artificial Intelligence (AI) with numerous applications. In video games it is commonly used to calculate paths of AI-controlled agents. Traditionally, heuristic search algorithms have been designed by humans. Recent work attempted to synthesise heuristic search...
-
Playing with Consent: An Autoethnographic Analysis of Representations of Race, Rape, and Colonialism in BioWare’s Dragon Age
DownloadSpring 2019
In this thesis I analyse BioWare’s Dragon Age series of video games using a modified autoethnographic method and Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenology to explore how rape and consent are represented within the games. I find that the player embodies three roles throughout the games in relation to...
-
Fall 2018
In recent decades video games have been adopted to tackle a slew of complex social problems, with games increasingly employed across health and social services. Yet the sexual violence prevention sector has been slow to adopt games as tools and little research exists to support or refute uses of...