Game User Research is an emerging field that investigates the interaction between players and games and the surrounding context of play. Game User Researchers have explored different methodologies from e.g. human computer interaction, psychology, interaction design, media studies and the social sciences, extending and modifying existing methodologies to the environments that compose digital gam...

As an important entertainment tool, “digital games” has been used by several hundred millions of people all around the world for almost 30 years. Although the number of game players and total game-play time in Turkey shows parallel figures to the world average, unfortunately very limited digital game development activities and academic studies regarding this issue exist. Therefore, this study a...

Digital games can be considered as an important software development area in our society. This paper proposes the Object Oriented Feature Modeling (OOFM) usage in the digital game domain. It aims to represent and manipulate distinct game features, defined by NESI and GDS models, in a parameterized and hierarchical way. As a result, a Feature-based Environment for Digital Games (FEnDiGa) is prov...

Information technologies have improved dramatically in the last decade, enhancing the potential of digital games to create realistic and engaging environments where players use different cognitive approaches to solve problems, such as, thinking outside of the box, collaborating in groups and searching for information. Unfortunately not all genres of digital games have taken advantage of the new...

This paper looks at the concept of transformation in digital games and posits it as a core pleasure of digital games that can be positioned within a new discourse of “transformative play”. The poetics of transformation are uniquely suited to particular forms of narrative play, and the power of transformative play has significant implications for the design of persuasive games. Transformative pl...

Video games create new relationships between animals and humans by imagining these relationships reconfigured in an entirely digital space. Many games explicitly explore biological issues in their gameplay and premise, structuring a player’s success around her ability to manage resources and modify the digital “bodies” of her avatar or other characters under her control. This is particularly tr...

In this paper I argue that moral agents are obligated to include and pay respect to the equal treatment, equal opportunities and justice of groups and identities usually marked by marginalization, discrimination and/or oppression in the domain of digital games. As a result, I point towards how individual and collective moral agents in digital games culture can pay respect through recognition an...

This thesis explores the concept of social presence in team-based digital games, aiming to enlighten the core elements of social presence in this specific multi-user experience. The thesis achieves this exploration in three main ways, by using a novel approach to establish the core elements of social presence in teambased digital games, by developing a new measure for social presence specifical...