Master in Games User Experience

Sweden is a leading nation in the global game industry, and Skövde is the leading Swedish city in which to study game development. Here you will find four master's programs in games, eight bachelor's programs covering all disciplines of game development, extensive game research, a successful game incubator, and last but not least, a large number of game companies. All these activities are located in the middle of Skövde and united under the umbrella of Sweden Game Arena. As a master's student in games user experience, you will become part of this ecosystem and benefit from a competitive advantage in a career within the international game industry.

About The Program

The Games User Experience master's program 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 program can move on to work with game design and game user experience studies in game companies, or apply to Ph.D. programs in most countries. However, it is also possible to stay in Skövde and pursue a career in games.

The focus of your studies

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 program provides you with knowledge about how to analyze and understand what happens when people play games. What feelings are invoked? How can we better understand the 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?"

Upon completion of your studies

The specialization 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 works with user experience design and evaluation. And since this is an academically oriented program 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 Ph.D. studies or other types of research positions.