Download or read book Minor Platforms in Videogame History written by Benjamin Nicoll and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-06 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Videogame history is not just a history of one successful technology replacing the next. It is also a history of platforms and communities that never quite made it; that struggled to make their voices heard; that aggravated against the conventions of the day; and that never enjoyed the commercial success or recognition of their major counterparts. In *Minor Platforms in Videogame History*, Benjamin Nicoll argues that 'minor' videogame histories are anything but insignificant. Through an analysis of transitional, decolonial, imaginary, residual, and minor videogame platforms, Nicoll highlights moments of difference and discontinuity in videogame history. From the domestication of vector graphics in the early years of videogame consoles to the 'cloning' of Japanese computer games in South Korea in the 1980s, this book explores case studies that challenge taken-for-granted approaches to videogames, platforms, and their histories.
Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies written by Mark J.P. Wolf and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-06-19 with total page 832 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A definitive guide to contemporary video game studies, this second edition has been fully revised and updated to address the ongoing theoretical and methodological development of game studies. Expertly compiled by well-known video game scholars Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, the Companion includes comprehensive and interdisciplinary models and approaches for analyzing video games, new perspectives on video games both as an art form and cultural phenomenon, explorations of the technical and creative dimensions of video games, and accounts of the political, social, and cultural dynamics of video games. Brand new to this second edition are chapters examining topics such as preservation; augmented, mixed, and virtual reality; eSports; disability; diversity; and identity, as well as a new section that specifically examines the industrial aspects of video games including digital distribution, game labor, triple-A games, indie games, and globalization. Each essay provides a lively and succinct summary of its target area, quickly bringing the reader up-to-date on the pertinent issues surrounding each aspect of the field, including references for further reading. A comprehensive overview of the present state of video game studies that will undoubtedly prove invaluable to students, scholars, and game designers alike.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Video Games 3 volumes written by Mark J. P. Wolf and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2021-05-24 with total page 1365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now in its second edition, the Encyclopedia of Video Games: The Culture, Technology, and Art of Gaming is the definitive, go-to resource for anyone interested in the diverse and expanding video game industry. This three-volume encyclopedia covers all things video games, including the games themselves, the companies that make them, and the people who play them. Written by scholars who are exceptionally knowledgeable in the field of video game studies, it notes genres, institutions, important concepts, theoretical concerns, and more and is the most comprehensive encyclopedia of video games of its kind, covering video games throughout all periods of their existence and geographically around the world. This is the second edition of Encyclopedia of Video Games: The Culture, Technology, and Art of Gaming, originally published in 2012. All of the entries have been revised to accommodate changes in the industry, and an additional volume has been added to address the recent developments, advances, and changes that have occurred in this ever-evolving field. This set is a vital resource for scholars and video game aficionados alike.
Download or read book Enacting Platforms written by James Malazita and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2024-07-02 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An analysis of the game engine Unreal through feminist, race, and queer theories of technology and media, as well as a critique of the platform studies framework itself. In this first scholarly book on the Unreal game engine, James Malazita explores one of the major contemporary game development platforms through feminist, race, and queer theories of technology and media, revealing how Unreal produces, and is produced by, broader intersections of power. Enacting Platforms takes a novel critical platform studies approach, raising deeper questions: what are the material and cultural limits of platforms themselves? What is the relationship between the analyst and the platform of study, and how does that relationship in part determine what “counts” as the platform itself? Malazita also offers a forward-looking critique of the platform studies framework itself. The Unreal platform serves as a kind of technical and political archive of the games industry, highlighting how the techniques and concerns of games have shifted and accreted over the past 30 years. Today, Unreal is also used in contexts far beyond games, including in public communication, biomedical research, civil engineering, and military simulation and training. The author’s depth of technical analysis, combined with new archival findings, contributes to discussions of topics rarely covered in games studies (such as the politics of graphical rendering algorithms), as well as new readings of previously “closed” case studies (such as the engine’s entanglement with the US military and American masculinity in America’s Army). Culture, Malazita writes, is not “built into” software but emerges through human practices with code.
Download or read book The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist written by Brendan Keogh and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2023-04-18 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The precarious reality of videogame production beyond the corporate blockbuster studios of North America. The videogame industry, we're invariably told, is a multibillion-dollar, high-tech business conducted by large corporations in certain North American, European, and East Asian cities. But most videogames today, in fact, are made by small clusters of people working on shoestring budgets, relying on existing, freely available software platforms, and hoping, often in vain, to rise to stardom—in short, people working like artists. Aiming squarely at this disconnect between perception and reality, The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist presents a much more accurate and nuanced picture of how the vast majority of videogame-makers work—a picture that reveals the diverse and precarious communities, identities, and approaches that make videogame production a significant cultural practice. Drawing on insights provided by over 400 game developers across Australia, North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia, Brendan Keogh develops a new framework for understanding videogame production as a cultural field in all its complexity. Part-time hobbyists, aspirational students, client-facing contractors, struggling independents, artist collectives, and tightly knit local scenes—all have a place within this model. But proponents of non-commercial game making don't exist in isolation; Keogh shows how they and their commercial counterparts are deeply interconnected and codependent in the field of videogame production. A cultural intervention, The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist challenges core assumptions about videogame production—ideas about creativity, professionalism, labor, diversity, education, globalization, and community. Its in-depth, complex portrayal suggests new ways of seeing, and engaging in, the videogame industry that really does exist.
Download or read book Abstractions and Embodiments written by Janet Abbate and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2022-08-30 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This anthology of original historical essays examines how social relations are enacted in and through computing using the twin frameworks of abstraction and embodiment. The book highlights a wide range of understudied contexts and experiences, such as computing and disability, working mothers as technical innovators, race and community formation, and gaming behind the Iron Curtain"--
Download or read book The Media and Communications in Australia written by Bridget Griffen-Foley and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-11-17 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At a time when the traditional media have been reshaped by digital technologies and audiences have fragmented, people are using mediated forms of communication to manage all aspects of their daily lives as well as for news and entertainment. The Media and Communications in Australia offers a systematic introduction to this dynamic field. Fully updated and expanded, this fifth edition outlines the key media industries – from print, sound and television to film, gaming and public relations – and explains how communications technologies have changed the ways in which they now operate. It offers an overview of the key approaches to the field, including a consideration of Indigenous communication, and features a ‘hot topics’ section with contributions on issues including diversity, misinformation, algorithms, COVID-19, web series and national security. With chapters from Australia’s leading researchers and teachers in the field, The Media and Communications in Australia remains the most comprehensive and reliable introduction to media and communications from an Australian perspective. It is an ideal student text and a key resource for teachers, lecturers, media practitioners and anyone interested in understanding these influential industries.
Download or read book The Unity Game Engine and the Circuits of Cultural Software written by Benjamin Nicoll and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-08-22 with total page 123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Videogames were once made with a vast range of tools and technologies, but in recent years a small number of commercially available 'game engines' have reached an unprecedented level of dominance in the global videogame industry. In particular, the Unity game engine has penetrated all scales of videogame development, from the large studio to the hobbyist bedroom, such that over half of all new videogames are reportedly being made with Unity. This book provides an urgently needed critical analysis of Unity as ‘cultural software’ that facilitates particular production workflows, design methodologies, and software literacies. Building on long-standing methods in media and cultural studies, and drawing on interviews with a range of videogame developers, Benjamin Nicoll and Brendan Keogh argue that Unity deploys a discourse of democratization to draw users into its ‘circuits of cultural software’. For scholars of media production, software culture, and platform studies, this book provides a framework and language to better articulate the increasingly dominant role of software tools in cultural production. For videogame developers, educators, and students, it provides critical and historical grounding for a tool that is widely used yet rarely analysed from a cultural angle.
Download or read book Seeing Red written by Jose P. Zagal and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2024-05-14 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The curious history, technology, and technocultural context of Nintendo’s short-lived stereoscopic gaming console, the Virtual Boy. With glowing red stereoscopic 3D graphics, the Virtual Boy cast a prophetic hue: Shortly after its release in 1995, Nintendo's balance sheet for the product was "in the red" as well. Of all the innovative long shots the game industry has witnessed over the years, perhaps the most infamous and least understood was the Virtual Boy. Why the Virtual Boy failed, and where it succeeded, are questions that video game experts José Zagal and Benj Edwards explore in Seeing Red, but even more interesting to the authors is what the platform actually was: what it promised, how it worked, and where it fit into the story of gaming. Nintendo released the Virtual Boy as a standalone table-top device in 1995—and quickly discontinued it after lackluster sales and a lukewarm critical reception. In Seeing Red, Zagal and Edwards examine the device's technical capabilities, its games, and the cultural context in the US in the 1990s when Nintendo developed and released the unusual console. The Virtual Boy, in their account, built upon and extended an often-forgotten historical tradition of immersive layered dioramas going back 100 years that was largely unexplored in video games at the time. The authors also show how the platform's library of games conveyed a distinct visual aesthetic style that has not been significantly explored since the Virtual Boy's release, having been superseded by polygonal 3D graphics. The platform's meaning, they contend, lies as much in its design and technical capabilities and affordances as it does in an audience's perception of those capabilities. Offering rare insight into how we think about video game platforms, Seeing Red illustrates where perception and context come, quite literally, into play.
Download or read book Virtual Photography written by Ali Shobeiri and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2024-09-30 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While it has traditionally been seen as a means of documenting an external reality or expressing an internal feeling, photography is now capable of actualizing never-existed pasts and never-lived experiences. Thanks to the latest photographic technologies, we can now take photos in computer games, interpolate them in extended reality platforms, or synthesize them via artificial intelligence. To account for the most recent shifts in conceptualizations of photography, this book proposes the term virtual photography as a binding theoretical framework, defined as a photography that retains the efficiency and function of real photography (made with or without a camera) while manifesting these in an unfamiliar or noncustomary form.
Download or read book Perspectives on the European Videogamehb written by NAVARRO-REMESAL and published by . This book was released on 2021-12-20 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1. Despite the creative and innovative strength of European videogame companies, the study of the European videogame, as well as of the European gaming culture, is still a rather unexplored field. 2. This book includes and emphasises a supranational perspective on the European videogame, unlike other previous works focused on specific national cases. 3. Very often, the link Europe-videogames has been addressed through the question of the representations of Europe and, especially, European history (with World War II as the most common case). This book includes the question of representations of Europe but it doesn't limit itself to it, paying also attention to the design styles and approaches of European creators.
Download or read book Digital Media Production for Beginners written by Julia V. Griffey and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-08-30 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written for the non-specialist media producer, this book offers a practical and engaging guide to basic digital media production using modern equipment and software. As media production tools and software become more pervasive and traditional media jobs scarcer, today’s media professionals are now expected to be content creators across multiple forms of media, often working with little more equipment than a smartphone. In this accessible manual, Griffey explains how well-crafted media can help sell products, bolster subscriptions, and influence public opinion—and how to go about crafting it in a landscape of high-speed social media consumption. Topics covered include the basics of photography, film, video, and audio production, as well as animation and building websites. Readers will learn not just how to shoot or record content, but also how to edit, compress, and share it, considering the most appropriate file types, equipment, software, and platforms to use for each scenario. After reading this book, students will understand best practices associated with almost every area of media production and possess the essential skills to get the job done. This book is an essential companion for students in communication disciplines, including PR, advertising, journalism, and marketing, looking for a solid grounding in digital media production to prepare them for the competitive job market.
Download or read book Handbook of Digital Public History written by Serge Noiret and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-04-04 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook provides a systematic overview of the present state of international research in digital public history. Individual studies by internationally renowned public historians, digital humanists, and digital historians elucidate central issues in the field and present a critical account of the major public history accomplishments, research activities, and practices with the public and of their digital context. The handbook applies an international and comparative approach, looks at the historical development of the field, focuses on technical background and the use of specific digital media and tools. Furthermore, the handbook analyzes connections with local communities and different publics worldwide when engaging in digital activities with the past, indicating directions for future research, and teaching activities.
Download or read book Vintage Game Consoles written by Bill Loguidice and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2014-02-24 with total page 814 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vintage Game Consoles tells the story of the most influential videogame platforms of all time, including the Apple II, Commodore 64, Nintendo Entertainment System, Game Boy, Sega Genesis, Sony PlayStation, and many more. It uncovers the details behind the consoles, computers, handhelds, and arcade machines that made videogames possible. Drawing on extensive research and the authors’ own lifelong experience with videogames, Vintage Game Consoles explores each system’s development, history, fan community, its most important games, and information for collectors and emulation enthusiasts. It also features hundreds of exclusive full-color screenshots and images that help bring each system’s unique story to life. Vintage Game Consoles is the ideal book for gamers, students, and professionals who want to know the story behind their favorite computers, handhelds, and consoles, without forgetting about why they play in the first place – the fun! Bill Loguidice is a critically acclaimed technology author who has worked on over a dozen books, including CoCo: The Colorful History of Tandy’s Underdog Computer, written with Boisy G. Pitre. He’s also the co-founder and Managing Director for the popular Website, Armchair Arcade. A noted videogame and computer historian and subject matter expert, Bill personally owns and maintains well over 400 different systems from the 1970s to the present day, including a large volume of associated materials. Matt Barton is an associate professor of English at Saint Cloud State University in Saint Cloud, Minnesota, where he lives with his wife Elizabeth. He’s the producer of the "Matt Chat," a weekly YouTube series featuring in-depth interviews with notable game developers. In addition to the original Vintage Games, which he co-authored with Bill, he’s author of Dungeons & Desktops: The History of Computer Role-Playing Games and Honoring the Code: Conversations with Great Game Designers.
Download or read book The Video Games Textbook written by Brian J. Wardyga and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2023-06-13 with total page 751 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Video Games Textbook takes the history of video games to the next level. Coverage includes every major video game console, handheld system, and game-changing personal computer, as well as a look at the business, technology, and people behind the games. Chapters feature objectives and key terms, illustrative timelines, color images, and graphs in addition to the technical specifications and key titles for each platform. Every chapter is a journey into a different segment of gaming, where readers emerge with a clear picture of how video games evolved, why the platforms succeeded or failed, and the impact they had on the industry and culture. Written to capture the attention and interest of students from around the world, this newly revised Second Edition also serves as a go-to handbook for any video game enthusiast. This edition features new content in every chapter, including color timelines, sections on color theory and lighting, the NEC PC-98 series, MSX series, Amstrad CPC, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Milton Bradley Microvision, Nintendo Game & Watch, gender issues, PEGI and CERO rating systems, and new Pro Files and quiz questions, plus expanded coverage on PC and mobile gaming, virtual reality, Valve Steam Deck, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5. Key Features Explores the history, business, and technology of video games, including social, political, and economic motivations Facilitates learning with clear objectives, key terms, illustrative timelines, color images, tables, and graphs Highlights the technical specifications and key titles of all major game consoles, handhelds, personal computers, and mobile platforms Reinforces material with market summaries and reviews of breakthroughs and trends, as well as end-of-chapter activities and quizzes
Download or read book Before the Crash written by Mark J. P. Wolf and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-15 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributors examine the early days of video game history before the industry crash of 1983 that ended the medium’s golden age. Following the first appearance of arcade video games in 1971 and home video game systems in 1972, the commercial video game market was exuberant with fast-paced innovation and profit. New games, gaming systems, and technologies flooded into the market until around 1983, when sales of home game systems dropped, thousands of arcades closed, and major video game makers suffered steep losses or left the market altogether. In Before the Crash: Early Video Game History, editor Mark J. P. Wolf assembles essays that examine the fleeting golden age of video games, an era sometimes overlooked for older games’ lack of availability or their perceived "primitiveness" when compared to contemporary video games. In twelve chapters, contributors consider much of what was going on during the pre-crash era: arcade games, home game consoles, home computer games, handheld games, and even early online games. The technologies of early video games are investigated, as well as the cultural context of the early period—from aesthetic, economic, industrial, and legal perspectives. Since the video game industry and culture got their start and found their form in this era, these years shaped much of what video games would come to be. This volume of early history, then, not only helps readers to understand the pre-crash era, but also reveals much about the present state of the industry. Before the Crash will give readers a thorough overview of the early days of video games along with a sense of the optimism, enthusiasm, and excitement of those times. Students and teachers of media studies will enjoy this compelling volume.
Download or read book The History of Video Games written by Charlie Fish and published by White Owl. This book was released on 2021-05-30 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a potted history of video games, telling all the rollercoaster stories of this fascinating young industry that’s now twice as big globally than the film and music industries combined. Each chapter explores the history of video games through a different lens, giving a uniquely well-rounded overview. Packed with pictures and stats, this book is for video gamers nostalgic for the good old days of gaming, and young gamers curious about how it all began. If you’ve ever enjoyed a video game, or you just want to see what all the fuss is about, this book is for you. There are stories about the experimental games of the 1950s and 1960s; the advent of home gaming in the 1970s; the explosion – and implosion – of arcade gaming in the 1980s; the console wars of the 1990s; the growth of online and mobile games in the 2000s; and we get right up to date with the 2010s, including such cultural phenomena as twitch.tv, the Gamergate scandal, and Fortnite. But rather than telling the whole story from beginning to end, each chapter covers the history of video games from a different angle: platforms and technology, people and personalities, companies and capitalism, gender and representation, culture, community, and finally the games themselves.
