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?"

We are a modern and welcoming university, with first-class education and internationally competitive research, a place where we strive for the greatest accomplishments.

Ever since its inception in 1977, we have aimed for excellence. Every decision, every achievement has emerged from a focus on creating excellent and well-known educations and research specializations that make a difference to reality.

Education

We are a modern and welcoming university, with first-class education and internationally competitive research, a place where we strive for the greatest accomplishments. The University of Skövde offers a wide range of postgraduate studies and International Master's programs taught in English as well as three Bachelor's programs.

Research for Change

The researchers at the University of Skövde want to contribute to making changes. That is why our research efforts are carried out in tight collaboration with our community. Furthermore, the research has a clear connection to the education at the university.

Our aim is that the university's research should make a difference locally, nationally as well as internationally. The share of the research that receives external funds is 66% (2019), and our principal contributors are KK-stiftelsen (The Knowledge Foundation), the EU, the Region Västra Götaland, and private companies.

The University of Skövde has five research fields. Three of these are Systems Biology, Informatics, and Virtual Engineering. These three form the foundation for INFINIT. The university's joint theme of Digitalization for Sustainable Development should always be integrated into all research projects and environments to the greatest extent possible.