Download or read book Breakout Pilgrim in the Microworld written by David Sudnow and published by Boss Fight Books. This book was released on 2020-02-26 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Just as the video game console market was about to crash into the New Mexico desert in 1983, professor and sociologist David Sudnow was unearthing the secrets of “eye, mind, and the essence of video skill” through an exploration of Atari’s Breakout, one of the earliest hits of the arcade world. Originally released under the title Pilgrim in the Microworld, Sudnow’s groundbreaking longform criticism of a single game predates the rise of game studies by decades. While its earliest critics often scorned the idea of a serious book about an object of play, the book’s modern readers remain fascinated by an obsessive, brilliant, and often hilarious quest to learn to play Breakout just as one would learn the piano. Featuring a new foreword and freshly edited text, Breakout makes a perfect addition to Boss Fight’s lineup of critical, historical, and personal looks at single video games. We’re proud to restore this classic to print and share with new audiences Sudnow’s wild pilgrimage into the limitless microworld of play.
Download or read book Pilgrim in the Microworld written by Neil David, Sr. and published by Grand Central Pub. This book was released on 1984-01-01 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the human mind and body's interaction with the computer in its most compelling form, the video game, focuses on the author's own obsessed immersion in a computer game and its possibilities
Download or read book Pilgrim in the Microworld written by David Sudnow and published by . This book was released on 1983-01-01 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 Introduction to Game Analysis written by Clara Fernández-Vara and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-17 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Game analysis allows us to understand games better, providing insight into the player-game relationship, the construction of the game, and its sociocultural relevance. As the field of game studies grows, videogame writing is evolving from the mere evaluation of gameplay, graphics, sound, and replayablity, to more reflective writing that manages to convey the complexity of a game and the way it is played in a cultural context. Introduction to Game Analysis serves as an accessible guide to analyzing games using strategies borrowed from textual analysis. Clara Fernández-Vara’s concise primer provides instruction on the basic building blocks of game analysis—examination of context, content and reception, and formal qualities—as well as the vocabulary necessary for talking about videogames' distinguishing characteristics. Examples are drawn from a range of games, both digital and non-digital—from Bioshock and World of Warcraft to Monopoly—and the book provides a variety of exercises and sample analyses, as well as a comprehensive ludography and glossary.
Download or read book Game Feel written by Steve Swink and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2008-10-13 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Game Feel" exposes "feel" as a hidden language in game design that no one has fully articulated yet. The language could be compared to the building blocks of music (time signatures, chord progressions, verse) - no matter the instruments, style or time period - these building blocks come into play. Feel and sensation are similar building blocks whe
Download or read book Keys to Play written by Roger Moseley and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2016-10-28 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program for monographs. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. How do keyboards make music playable? Drawing on theories of media, systems, and cultural techniques, Keys to Play spans Greek myth and contemporary Japanese digital games to chart a genealogy of musical play and its animation via improvisation, performance, and recreation. As a paradigmatic digital interface, the keyboard forms a field of play on which the book’s diverse objects of inquiry—from clavichords to PCs and eighteenth-century musical dice games to the latest rhythm-action titles—enter into analogical relations. Remapping the keyboard’s topography by way of Mozart and Super Mario, who head an expansive cast of historical and virtual actors, Keys to Play invites readers to unlock ludic dimensions of music that are at once old and new.
Download or read book Ways of the Hand written by David Sudnow and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is David Sudnow's classic account of how his hands learned to improvise jazz on the piano. David Sudnow is the author of Passing On and editor of Studies in Social Interaction. Since writing this book, he has developed a piano training method based on its insights.
Download or read book Reality Is Broken written by Jane McGonigal and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2011-01-20 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “McGonigal is a clear, methodical writer, and her ideas are well argued. Assertions are backed by countless psychological studies.” —The Boston Globe “Powerful and provocative . . . McGonigal makes a persuasive case that games have a lot to teach us about how to make our lives, and the world, better.” —San Jose Mercury News “Jane McGonigal's insights have the elegant, compact, deadly simplicity of plutonium, and the same explosive force.” —Cory Doctorow, author of Little Brother A visionary game designer reveals how we can harness the power of games to boost global happiness. With 174 million gamers in the United States alone, we now live in a world where every generation will be a gamer generation. But why, Jane McGonigal asks, should games be used for escapist entertainment alone? In this groundbreaking book, she shows how we can leverage the power of games to fix what is wrong with the real world-from social problems like depression and obesity to global issues like poverty and climate change-and introduces us to cutting-edge games that are already changing the business, education, and nonprofit worlds. Written for gamers and non-gamers alike, Reality Is Broken shows that the future will belong to those who can understand, design, and play games. Jane McGonigal is also the author of SuperBetter: A Revolutionary Approach to Getting Stronger, Happier, Braver and More Resilient.
Download or read book Ethnomethodology s Program written by Harold Garfinkel and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2002 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the 1967 publication of Studies in Ethnomethodology, Harold Garfinkel has indelibly influenced the social sciences and humanities worldwide. This new book, the long-awaited sequel to Studies, comprises Garfinkel's work over three decades to further elaborate the study of ethnomethodology. 'Working out Durkheim's Aphorism, ' the title used for this new book, emphasizes Garfinkel's insistence that his position focuses on fundamental sociological issues--and that interpretations of his position as indifferent to sociology have been misunderstandings. Durkheim's aphorism states that the concreteness of social facts is sociology's most fundamental phenomenon. Garfinkel argues that sociologists have, for a century or more, ignored this aphorism and treated social facts as theoretical, or conceptual, constructions. Garfinkel in this new book shows how and why sociology must restore Durkheim's aphorism, through an insistence on the concreteness of social facts that are produced by complex social practices enacted by participants in the social order. Garfinkel's new book, like Studies, will likely stand as another landmark in sociological theory, yet it is clearer and more concrete in revealing human social practices.
Download or read book Handbook of Computer Game Studies written by Joost Raessens and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2011-08-19 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A broad treatment of computer and video games from a wide range of perspectives, including cognitive science and artificial intelligence, psychology, history, film and theater, cultural studies, and philosophy. New media students, teachers, and professionals have long needed a comprehensive scholarly treatment of digital games that deals with the history, design, reception, and aesthetics of games along with their social and cultural context. The Handbook of Computer Game Studies fills this need with a definitive look at the subject from a broad range of perspectives. Contributors come from cognitive science and artificial intelligence, developmental, social, and clinical psychology, history, film, theater, and literary studies, cultural studies, and philosophy as well as game design and development. The text includes both scholarly articles and journalism from such well-known voices as Douglas Rushkoff, Sherry Turkle, Henry Jenkins, Katie Salen, Eric Zimmerman, and others. Part I considers the "prehistory" of computer games (including slot machines and pinball machines), the development of computer games themselves, and the future of mobile gaming. The chapters in part II describe game development from the designer's point of view, including the design of play elements, an analysis of screenwriting, and game-based learning. Part III reviews empirical research on the psychological effects of computer games, and includes a discussion of the use of computer games in clinical and educational settings. Part IV considers the aesthetics of games in comparison to film and literature, and part V discusses the effect of computer games on cultural identity, including gender and ethnicity. Finally, part VI looks at the relation of computer games to social behavior, considering, among other matters, the inadequacy of laboratory experiments linking games and aggression and the different modes of participation in computer game culture.
Download or read book A Play of Bodies written by Brendan Keogh and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-04-06 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An investigation of the embodied engagement between the playing body and the videogame: how player and game incorporate each other. Our bodies engage with videogames in complex and fascinating ways. Through an entanglement of eyes-on-screens, ears-at-speakers, and muscles-against-interfaces, we experience games with our senses. But, as Brendan Keogh argues in A Play of Bodies, this corporal engagement goes both ways; as we touch the videogame, it touches back, augmenting the very senses with which we perceive. Keogh investigates this merging of actual and virtual bodies and worlds, asking how our embodied sense of perception constitutes, and becomes constituted by, the phenomenon of videogame play. In short, how do we perceive videogames? Keogh works toward formulating a phenomenology of videogame experience, focusing on what happens in the embodied engagement between the playing body and the videogame, and anchoring his analysis in an eclectic series of games that range from mainstream to niche titles. Considering smartphone videogames, he proposes a notion of co-attentiveness to understand how players can feel present in a virtual world without forgetting that they are touching a screen in the actual world. He discusses the somatic basis of videogame play, whether games involve vigorous physical movement or quietly sitting on a couch with a controller; the sometimes overlooked visual and audible pleasures of videogame experience; and modes of temporality represented by character death, failure, and repetition. Finally, he considers two metaphorical characters: the “hacker,” representing the hegemonic, masculine gamers concerned with control and configuration; and the “cyborg,” less concerned with control than with embodiment and incorporation.
Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Mobile Socialities written by Annette Hill and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-05-06 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a state-of-the-art survey of an emerging area of study in media, communication and cultural studies, mobility studies and mobile communications. ‘Mobile socialities’ demarcates a new area of research that captures people’s various and contrary experiences of media in relation to their mobilities and socialities. The chapters in this volume are written by a range of international scholars offering a comprehensive overview and source of inspiration for a diverse range of topics on the contingent practices and finite resources of people and media on the move. The book demonstrates through empirical and theoretical research how mobile socialities is a generative concept for thinking through power, identity and the contexts of media in public and mediated spaces, work and everyday life, addressing a spectrum of mobile socialities and lived politics. The research and various cases make visible previously hidden, or obscured, social practices and allow us to rethink the meanings of mobility, digital media or the home in these examples of people living within the centre and peripheries of society. The Handbook establishes mobile socialities as a new area of academic enquiry, ideal for advanced undergraduate students and scholars across the disciplines of media, communication and cultural studies, anthropology, cultural geography and sociology.
Download or read book Ultima and Worldbuilding in the Computer Role Playing Game written by Carly A. Kocurek and published by Amherst College Press. This book was released on 2024-04-09 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ultima and World-Building in the Computer Role-Playing Game is the first scholarly book to focus exclusively on the long-running Ultima series of computer role-playing games (RPG) and to assess its lasting impact on the RPG genre and video game industry. Through archival and popular media sources, examinations of fan communities, and the game itself, this book historicizes the games and their authors. By attending to the salient moments and sites of game creation throughout the series’ storied past, authors Carly A. Kocurek and Matthew Thomas Payne detail the creative choices and structural forces that brought Ultima’s celebrated brand of role-playing to fruition. This book first considers the contributions of series founder and lead designer, Richard Garriott, examining how his fame and notoriety as a pioneering computer game auteur shaped Ultima’s reception and paved the way for the evolution of the series. Next, the authors retrace the steps that Garriott took in fusing analog, tabletop role-playing with his self-taught lessons in computer programming. Close textual analyses of Ultima I outline how its gameplay elements offered a foundational framework for subsequent innovations in design and storytelling. Moving beyond the game itself, the authors assess how marketing materials and physical collectibles amplified its immersive hold and how the series’ legions of fans have preserved the series. Game designers, long-time gamers, and fans will enjoy digging into the games’ production history and mechanics while media studies and game scholars will find Ultima and World-Building in the Computer Role-Playing Game a useful extension of inquiry into authorship, media history, and the role of fantasy in computer game design.
Download or read book An Architectural Approach to Level Design written by Christopher W. Totten and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2018-09-03 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explore Level Design through the Lens of Architectural and Spatial Experience Theory Written by a game developer and professor trained in architecture, An Architectural Approach to Level Design is one of the first books to integrate architectural and spatial design theory with the field of level design. It explores the principles of level design through the context and history of architecture, providing information useful to both academics and game development professionals. Understand Spatial Design Principles for Game Levels in 2D, 3D, and Multiplayer Applications The book presents architectural techniques and theories for level designers to use in their own work. The author connects architecture and level design in different ways that address the practical elements of how designers construct space and the experiential elements of how and why humans interact with this space. Throughout the text, readers learn skills for spatial layout, evoking emotion through gamespaces, and creating better levels through architectural theory. Create Meaningful User Experiences in Your Games Bringing together topics in game design and architecture, this book helps designers create better spaces for their games. Software independent, the book discusses tools and techniques that designers can use in crafting their interactive worlds.
Download or read book The Philosophy of Computer Games written by John Richard Sageng and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-07-10 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Computer games have become a major cultural and economic force, and a subject of extensive academic interest. Up until now, however, computer games have received relatively little attention from philosophy. Seeking to remedy this, the present collection of newly written papers by philosophers and media researchers addresses a range of philosophical questions related to three issues of crucial importance for understanding the phenomenon of computer games: the nature of gameplay and player experience, the moral evaluability of player and avatar actions, and the reality status of the gaming environment. By doing so, the book aims to establish the philosophy of computer games as an important strand of computer games research, and as a separate field of philosophical inquiry. The book is required reading for anyone with an academic or professional interest in computer games, and will also be of value to readers curious about the philosophical issues raised by contemporary digital culture.
Download or read book Final Fantasy VI written by Sebastian Deken and published by Boss Fight Books. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Terra the magical half-human. Shadow the mysterious assassin. Celes the tough, tender general. Kefka the fool who would be god. Each of the many unforgettable characters in Final Fantasy VI has made a huge impression on a generation of players, but why do we feel such affection for these 16-bit heroes and villains as so many others fade? The credit goes to the game’s score, composed by the legendary Nobuo Uematsu. Armed with newly translated interviews and an expert ear for sound, writer and musician Sebastian Deken conducts a critical analysis of the musical structures of FF6, the game that pushed the Super Nintendo’s sound capabilities to their absolute limits and launched Uematsu’s reputation as the “Beethoven of video game music.” Deken ventures deep into the game’s lush soundscape—from its expertly crafted leitmotifs to its unforgettable opera sequence—exploring the soundtrack’s lasting influence and how it helped clear space for game music on classical stages around the world.
