Games User Design

The Games User Experience master’s programme is aimed at applicants with a bachelor’s degree in any of the many areas involved in game development. You will gain not only a theoretical and practical understanding of the experiences and emotions games elicit in their players, but, more importantly, how to examine and evaluate them. Students who graduate from the programme can move on to work with game design and game user experience studies in game companies, or apply to PhD programmes in most countries. However it is also possible to stay in Skövde and pursue a career in games.Developing games is about creating engaging experiences for players. The growing ubiquity of games in society and culture means that new and diverse user groups are playing games. This has led not only to new opportunities, but also many new challenges for game developers. One of these is to better understand how players interact with games and in what ways these interactions can be studied, understood and improved. Working with games user experience will involve working with interaction design, research methodology, human-computer interaction, and game development in order to fully be able to unpack peoples’ experiences of playing games.To put it briefly: the Games User Experience programme provides you with knowledge about how to analyse and understand what happens when people play games. What feelings are invoked? How can we better understand players´ reactions? How can we make games more accessible and engaging for new audiences? In this rapidly growing field of expertise, researchers and developers are continuously trying to figure out how best to answer the big question: why is this fun?The specialisation in Games User Experience gives you the opportunity to develop excellence in this specific and rapidly growing field of game development. This provides a good foundation for an international career in the game industry, as many studios are increasingly starting to see the value in being able to evaluate their own development choices. Another possible career path is represented by companies outside of the traditional game industry that work with user experience design and evaluation. And since this is an academically oriented programme with a heavy emphasis on applied research methods, there are also of course many opportunities for pursuing a career in academia by proceeding on to PhD studies or other types of research positions.