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Fall 2020

Salvador Dias, Luisa.

Videogames have a problem with narrative. It is an ironic fact that this age’s “most persuasive medium” (Bogost, 2007) would find it so difficult to tell stories, yet this is a long-standing issue that has been pointed out by critics and players alike. I came to suspect that this perceived...

Spring 2023

Zaman, Md Sayeed Al

Bangladesh, the world’s fourth-largest Muslim country, has a growing community of social media users. With the increasing social media usage, misinformation emerging from social media also becomes widespread in the country. In particular, religious misinformation has become more commonplace,...

Fall 2022

Budac, Andrea

This project studied the practice of information sharing in the context of online communities devoted to the preservation of video game mods. My research investigates how these fan communities share and archive challenging content, and how they react to the potential and actual loss of these...

Spring 2020

Tarnarutckaia, Elizaveta

Modern visual culture and, specifically, popular TV-series place great emphasis on technology and its relationship with humankind. Issues such as codependency between technology and users, the boundaries of human potential with regard to artificial intelligence, and cognitive loss from the...

Fall 2022

Barnard, Sara H.

Can a bibliographic network identify the major characteristics of a corresponding social network, and what can those networks reveal about Albertan literary history in the 1970s? By combining bibliometric network methods with social network analysis, this thesis attempts to answer the above...

Fall 2021

Barnes, Kateryna Sarah Ellwood

Environmental racism manifests in videogames and is an under-explored facet of videogame ecology, as are Indigenous worldviews such as relationality. Using primarily decolonial poststructuralist semiotic analysis and Indigenous Métissage, this thesis highlights the signs and simulacra of...

Spring 2022

Claflin, Kaitlyn

In this thesis I analyse the depiction of video game fathers and their daughters, who eventually become playable protagonists, in four popular, mainstream video game titles: The Last of Us, BioShock Infinite, Dishonored and The Walking Dead as well as the downloadable content add-ons Left Behind...

Fall 2019

Jérémie Pelletier-Gagnon

This dissertation examines the phenomenon of play that takes place in Japanese game centres. After reviewing and establishing a history of early amusement centres and video game arcade parlours in Japan and the academic and critical discourses surrounding them, I engage in a close reading of...

Fall 2021

Budac, Robert

Violence is commonplace in video games, making the practice of engaging in pacifist runs — the completion of violent video games using minimal amounts of violence, or avoiding it all together — a fascinating object of study. In real life, the practice of pacifism is about opposing violence due to...

Spring 2019

Beyer, Jocelyn Ann

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...