Download or read book Analog Game Studies Volume I written by Aaron Trammell and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2016-06-21 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analog Game Studiesis a bi-monthy journal for the research and critique of analog games. We define analog games broadly and include work on tabletop and live-action role-playing games, board games, card games, pervasive games, game-like performances, carnival games, experimental games, and more.Analog Game Studieswas founded to reserve a space for scholarship on analog games in the wider field of game studies."
Download or read book Analog Game Studies Volume III written by Evan Torner and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2019-02-05 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analog Game Studies is a bi-monthy journal for the research and critique of analog games. We define analog games broadly and include work on tabletop and live-action role-playing games, board games, card games, pervasive games, game-like performances, carnival games, experimental games, and more. Analog Game Studies was founded to reserve a space for scholarship on analog games in the wider field of game studies.
Download or read book Tabletop written by Drew Davidson and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2011 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume, people of diverse backgrounds talk about tabletop games, game culture, and the intersection of games with learning, theater, and other forms. Some have chosen to write about their design process, others about games they admire, others about the culture of tabletop games and their fans. The results are various and individual, but all cast some light on what is a multivarious and fascinating set of game styles.
Download or read book Board Games as Media written by Paul Booth and published by Bloomsbury Academic. This book was released on 2021-01-14 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading expert Paul Booth explores the growth in popularity of board games today, and unpacks what it means to read a board game. What does a game communicate? How do games play us? And how do we decide which games to play and which are just wastes of cardboard? With little scholarly research in this still-emerging field, Board Games as Media underscores the importance of board games in the ever-evolving world of media.
Download or read book Role Playing Game Studies written by Sebastian Deterding and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-04-17 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook collects, for the first time, the state of research on role-playing games (RPGs) across disciplines, cultures, and media in a single, accessible volume. Collaboratively authored by more than 50 key scholars, it traces the history of RPGs, from wargaming precursors to tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons to the rise of live action role-play and contemporary computer RPG and massively multiplayer online RPG franchises, like Fallout and World of Warcraft. Individual chapters survey the perspectives, concepts, and findings on RPGs from key disciplines, like performance studies, sociology, psychology, education, economics, game design, literary studies, and more. Other chapters integrate insights from RPG studies around broadly significant topics, like transmedia worldbuilding, immersion, transgressive play, or player–character relations. Each chapter includes definitions of key terms and recommended readings to help fans, students, and scholars new to RPG studies find their way into this new interdisciplinary field.
Download or read book Game Time written by Christopher Hanson and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-08 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pausing, slowing, rewinding, replaying, reactivating, reanimating . . . Has manipulating video game timelines altered our experience of time? “Compelling.” —Choice Video game scholar Christopher Hanson argues that the mechanics of time in digital games have presented a new model for understanding time in contemporary culture, a concept he calls “game time.” Multivalent in nature, game time is characterized by apparent malleability, navigability, and possibility while simultaneously being highly restrictive and requiring replay and repetition. When compared to analog tabletop games, sports, film, television, and other forms of media, Hanson demonstrates, the temporal structures of digital games provide unique opportunities to engage players with liveness, causality, potentiality, and lived experience that create new ways of experiencing time. Features comparative analysis of key video games titles—including Braid, Quantum Break, Battle of the Bulge, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Passage, The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time, Lifeline, and A Dark Room. “The text is well-researched, and the introduction is an excellent, focused overview of video game studies.” —Choice
Download or read book Games Game Design Game Studies written by Gundolf S. Freyermuth and published by Fuego. This book was released on 2016-03-18 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did games rise to become the central audiovisual form of expression and storytelling in digital culture? How did the practices of their artistic production come into being? How did the academic analysis of the new medium's social effects and cultural meaning develop? Addressing these fundamental questions and aspects of digital game culture in a holistic way for the first time, Gundolf S. Freyermuth's introduction outlines the media-historical development phases of analog and digital games, the history and artistic practices of game design, as well as the history, academic approaches, and most important research topics of game studies.
Download or read book Gaming the Stage written by Gina Bloom and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2018-07-10 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rich connections between gaming and theater stretch back to the 16th and 17th centuries, when England's first commercial theaters appeared right next door to gaming houses and blood-sport arenas. In the first book-length exploration of gaming in the early modern period, Gina Bloom shows that theaters succeeded in London's new entertainment marketplace largely because watching a play and playing a game were similar experiences. Audiences did not just see a play; they were encouraged to play the play, and knowledge of gaming helped them become better theatergoers. Examining dramas written for these theaters alongside evidence of analog games popular then and today, Bloom argues for games as theatrical media and theater as an interactive gaming technology. Gaming the Stage also introduces a new archive for game studies: scenes of onstage gaming, which appear at climactic moments in dramatic literature. Bloom reveals plays to be systems of information for theater spectators: games of withholding, divulging, speculating, and wagering on knowledge. Her book breaks new ground through examinations of plays such as The Tempest, Arden of Faversham, A Woman Killed with Kindness, and A Game at Chess; the histories of familiar games such as cards, backgammon, and chess; less familiar ones, like Game of the Goose; and even a mixed-reality theater videogame.
Download or read book Watch Us Roll written by Shelly Jones and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2021-08-03 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Actual play is a movement within role-playing gaming in which players livestream their gameplay for others to watch and enjoy. This new medium has allowed the playing of games to become a digestible, consumable text for individuals to watch, enjoy, learn from, and analyze. Bridging the gap between the analog and the digital, actual play is changing and challenging our expectations of tabletop role-playing and providing a space for new scholarship. This edited collection of essays focuses on Dungeons and Dragons actual play and examines this phenomenon from a variety of different disciplinary approaches. Authors explore how to define actual play, how fans interact with and affect the narrative and gameplay of actual play, the diversity of gamers (or lack thereof) within actual play media, and how audiences can use actual play media for more than mere entertainment.
Download or read book Rerolling Boardgames written by Douglas Brown and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2020-08-27 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the advent and explosion of videogames, boardgames--from fast-paced party games to intensely strategic titles--have in recent years become more numerous and more diverse in terms of genre, ethos and content. The growth of gaming events and conventions such as Essen Spiel, Gen Con and the UK Games EXPO, as well as crowdfunding through sites like Kickstarter, has diversified the evolution of game development, which is increasingly driven by fans, and boardgames provide an important glue to geek culture. In academia, boardgames are used in a practical sense to teach elements of design and game mechanics. Game studies is also recognizing the importance of expanding its focus beyond the digital. As yet, however, no collected work has explored the many different approaches emerging around the critical challenges that boardgaming represents. In this collection, game theorists analyze boardgame play and player behavior, and explore the complex interactions between the sociality, conflict, competition and cooperation that boardgames foster. Game designers discuss the opportunities boardgame system designs offer for narrative and social play. Cultural theorists discuss boardgames' complex history as both beautiful physical artifacts and special places within cultural experiences of play.
Download or read book Storytelling in the Modern Board Game written by Marco Arnaudo and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2018-08-28 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the years, board games have evolved to include relatable characters, vivid settings and compelling, intricate plotlines. In turn, players have become more emotionally involved--taking on, in essence, the role of coauthors in an interactive narrative. Through the lens of game studies and narratology--traditional storytelling concepts applied to the gaming world--this book explores the synergy of board games, designers and players in story-oriented designs. The author provides development guidance for game designers and recommends games to explore for hobby players.
Download or read book Simulating War written by Philip Sabin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2012-01-19 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past fifty years, many thousands of conflict simulations have been published that bring the dynamics of past and possible future wars to life. In this book, Philip Sabin explores the theory and practice of conflict simulation as a topic in its own right, based on his thirty years of experience in designing wargames and using them in teaching. Simulating War sets conflict simulation in its proper context alongside more familiar techniques such as game theory and operational analysis. It explains in detail the analytical and modelling techniques involved, and it teaches you how to design your own simulations of conflicts of your choice. The book provides eight simple illustrative simulations of specific historical conflicts, complete with rules, maps and counters. Simulating War is essential reading for all recreational or professional simulation gamers, and for anyone who is interested in modelling war, from teachers and students to military officers.
Download or read book Analog Game Studies Volume IV written by Evan Torner and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Playing Nature written by Alenda Y. Chang and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2019-12-31 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A potent new book examines the overlap between our ecological crisis and video games Video games may be fun and immersive diversions from daily life, but can they go beyond the realm of entertainment to do something serious—like help us save the planet? As one of the signature issues of the twenty-first century, ecological deterioration is seemingly everywhere, but it is rarely considered via the realm of interactive digital play. In Playing Nature, Alenda Y. Chang offers groundbreaking methods for exploring this vital overlap. Arguing that games need to be understood as part of a cultural response to the growing ecological crisis, Playing Nature seeds conversations around key environmental science concepts and terms. Chang suggests several ways to rethink existing game taxonomies and theories of agency while revealing surprising fundamental similarities between game play and scientific work. Gracefully reconciling new media theory with environmental criticism, Playing Nature examines an exciting range of games and related art forms, including historical and contemporary analog and digital games, alternate- and augmented-reality games, museum exhibitions, film, and science fiction. Chang puts her surprising ideas into conversation with leading media studies and environmental humanities scholars like Alexander Galloway, Donna Haraway, and Ursula Heise, ultimately exploring manifold ecological futures—not all of them dystopian.
Download or read book Immersive Gameplay written by Evan Torner and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-01-10 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of all-new essays approaches the topic of immersion as a product of social and media relations. Examining the premises and aesthetics of live-action and tabletop role-playing games, reality television, social media apps and first-person shooters, the essays take both game rules and the media discourse that games produce as serious objects of study. Scholars of social psychology, sociology, role-playing theory, game studies, and television studies all examine games and game-like environments like reality shows as interdependent sites of social friction and power negotiation. The ten essays articulate the importance of game rules in analyses of media products, and demonstrate methods that allow game rules to be seen in action during the process of play.
Download or read book Rules of Play written by Katie Salen Tekinbas and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2003-09-25 with total page 680 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An impassioned look at games and game design that offers the most ambitious framework for understanding them to date. As pop culture, games are as important as film or television—but game design has yet to develop a theoretical framework or critical vocabulary. In Rules of Play Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman present a much-needed primer for this emerging field. They offer a unified model for looking at all kinds of games, from board games and sports to computer and video games. As active participants in game culture, the authors have written Rules of Play as a catalyst for innovation, filled with new concepts, strategies, and methodologies for creating and understanding games. Building an aesthetics of interactive systems, Salen and Zimmerman define core concepts like "play," "design," and "interactivity." They look at games through a series of eighteen "game design schemas," or conceptual frameworks, including games as systems of emergence and information, as contexts for social play, as a storytelling medium, and as sites of cultural resistance. Written for game scholars, game developers, and interactive designers, Rules of Play is a textbook, reference book, and theoretical guide. It is the first comprehensive attempt to establish a solid theoretical framework for the emerging discipline of game design.
Download or read book How to Play Video Games written by Matthew Thomas Payne and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2019-03-26 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Forty original contributions on games and gaming culture What does Pokémon Go tell us about globalization? What does Tetris teach us about rules? Is feminism boosted or bashed by Kim Kardashian: Hollywood? How does BioShock Infinite help us navigate world-building? From arcades to Atari, and phone apps to virtual reality headsets, video games have been at the epicenter of our ever-evolving technological reality. Unlike other media technologies, video games demand engagement like no other, which begs the question—what is the role that video games play in our lives, from our homes, to our phones, and on global culture writ large? How to Play Video Games brings together forty original essays from today’s leading scholars on video game culture, writing about the games they know best and what they mean in broader social and cultural contexts. Read about avatars in Grand Theft Auto V, or music in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. See how Age of Empires taught a generation about postcolonialism, and how Borderlands exposes the seedy underbelly of capitalism. These essays suggest that understanding video games in a critical context provides a new way to engage in contemporary culture. They are a must read for fans and students of the medium.
