Download or read book Video Game Spaces written by Michael Nitsche and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2008-12-05 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of how we see, use, and make sense of modern video game worlds. The move to 3D graphics represents a dramatic artistic and technical development in the history of video games that suggests an overall transformation of games as media. The experience of space has become a key element of how we understand games and how we play them. In Video Game Spaces, Michael Nitsche investigates what this shift means for video game design and analysis. Navigable 3D spaces allow us to crawl, jump, fly, or even teleport through fictional worlds that come to life in our imagination. We encounter these spaces through a combination of perception and interaction. Drawing on concepts from literary studies, architecture, and cinema, Nitsche argues that game spaces can evoke narratives because the player is interpreting them in order to engage with them. Consequently, Nitsche approaches game spaces not as pure visual spectacles but as meaningful virtual locations. His argument investigates what structures are at work in these locations, proceeds to an in-depth analysis of the audiovisual presentation of gameworlds, and ultimately explores how we use and comprehend their functionality. Nitsche introduces five analytical layers—rule-based space, mediated space, fictional space, play space, and social space—and uses them in the analyses of games that range from early classics to recent titles. He revisits current topics in game research, including narrative, rules, and play, from this new perspective. Video Game Spaces provides a range of necessary arguments and tools for media scholars, designers, and game researchers with an interest in 3D game worlds and the new challenges they pose.
Download or read book Video Game Worlds written by Timothy Rowlands and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-06-16 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As massively multiplayer online (MMO) games grow in scope and popularity, what are the characteristics of their emerging gaming culture? How is this culture shaped by the decisions made by game designers and the collective interpretations of a game’s player base? In this book, Timothy Rowlands brings a diverse mix of ethnographic, semiotic, and analytical approaches to the virtual world of EverQuest. Through first-hand player experiences and interviews of other gamers, Rowlands analyzes a gaming environment that, as time goes on, looks less like leisure and more like a workspace. This groundbreaking fusion of sociology and the world of MMOs is a must read for scholars and gamers alike.
Download or read book They Create Worlds written by Alexander Smith and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2019-11-19 with total page 575 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: They Create Worlds: The Story of the People and Companies That Shaped the Video Game Industry, Vol. 1 is the first in a three-volume set that provides an in-depth analysis of the creation and evolution of the video game industry. Beginning with the advent of computers in the mid-20th century, Alexander Smith’s text comprehensively highlights and examines individuals, companies, and market forces that have shaped the development of the video game industry around the world. Volume one, places an emphasis on the emerging ideas, concepts, and games developed from the commencement of the budding video game art form in the 1950s and 1960s through the first commercial activity in the 1970s and early 1980s. They Create Worlds aims to build a new foundation upon which future scholars and the video game industry itself can chart new paths. Key Features: The most in-depth examination of the video game industry ever written, They Create Worlds charts the technological breakthroughs, design decisions, and market forces in the United States, Europe, and East Asia that birthed a $100 billion industry. The books derive their information from rare primary sources such as little-studied trade publications, personal papers collections, and oral history interviews with designers and executives, many of whom have never told their stories before. Spread over three volumes, They Create Worlds focuses on the creative designers, shrewd marketers, and innovative companies that have shaped video games from their earliest days as a novelty attraction to their current status as the most important entertainment medium of the 21st Century. The books examine the formation of the video game industry in a clear narrative style that will make them useful as teaching aids in classes on the history of game design and economics, but they are not being written specifically as instructional books and can be enjoyed by anyone with a passion for video game history.
Download or read book Ultimate Game Design Building Game Worlds written by Tom Meigs and published by McGraw Hill Professional. This book was released on 2003-06-09 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Build games with techniques and insights from a pro.
Download or read book Game Worlds Get Real written by Zek Valkyrie and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-07-14 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how after 20 years of existence, virtual world games have evolved: the social landscapes within digital worlds have become rigid and commodified, and "play" and "fun" have become rational and mechanical products. Twenty million people worldwide play Massively Multi-Player Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs). Online role-playing gaming is no longer an activity of a tiny niche community. World of Warcraft—the most popular game within the genre—is more than a decade old. As technology has advanced and MMORPGs became exponentially more popular, gaming culture has evolved dramatically over the last 20 years. Game Worlds Get Real: How Who We Are Online Became Who We Are Offline presents a compelling insider's examination of how adventuring through virtual worlds has transformed the meaning of play for millions of gamers. The book provides a historical review of earlier incarnations of virtual world games and culture in the late 1990s, covering the early years of popular games like EverQuest, to the soaring popularity of World of Warcraft, to the current era of the genre and its more general gaming climate. Author Zek Valkyrie—a researcher in the areas of gaming culture, digital communities, gender, sexualities, and visual sociology as well as an avid gamer himself—explores the evolution of the meaning of "play" in the virtual game world, explains how changes in game design have reduced opportunities for social experimentation, and identifies how player types such as the gender switcher, the cybersexual, the explorer, and the trial-and-error player have been left behind in the interest of social and informational transparency.
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 Half Real written by Jesper Juul and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2011-08-19 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An in-depth analysis of game development and rules and fiction in video games—with concrete examples, including The Legend of Zelda, Grand Theft Auto, and more A video game is half-real: we play by real rules while imagining a fictional world. We win or lose the game in the real world, but we slay a dragon (for example) only in the world of the game. In this thought-provoking study, Jesper Juul examines the constantly evolving tension between rules and fiction in video games. Discussing games from Pong to The Legend of Zelda, from chess to Grand Theft Auto, he shows how video games are both a departure from and a development of traditional non-electronic games. The book combines perspectives from such fields as literary and film theory, computer science, psychology, economic game theory, and game studies, to outline a theory of what video games are, how they work with the player, how they have developed historically, and why they are fun to play. Locating video games in a history of games that goes back to Ancient Egypt, Juul argues that there is a basic affinity between games and computers. Just as the printing press and the cinema have promoted and enabled new kinds of storytelling, computers work as enablers of games, letting us play old games in new ways and allowing for new kinds of games that would not have been possible before computers. Juul presents a classic game model, which describes the traditional construction of games and points to possible future developments. He examines how rules provide challenges, learning, and enjoyment for players, and how a game cues the player into imagining its fictional world. Juul’s lively style and eclectic deployment of sources will make Half-Real of interest to media, literature, and game scholars as well as to game professionals and gamers.
Download or read book Game Worlds Get Real written by Zek Valkyrie and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-07-14 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how after 20 years of existence, virtual world games have evolved: the social landscapes within digital worlds have become rigid and commodified, and "play" and "fun" have become rational and mechanical products. Twenty million people worldwide play Massively Multi-Player Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs). Online role-playing gaming is no longer an activity of a tiny niche community. World of Warcraft—the most popular game within the genre—is more than a decade old. As technology has advanced and MMORPGs became exponentially more popular, gaming culture has evolved dramatically over the last 20 years. Game Worlds Get Real: How Who We Are Online Became Who We Are Offline presents a compelling insider's examination of how adventuring through virtual worlds has transformed the meaning of play for millions of gamers. The book provides a historical review of earlier incarnations of virtual world games and culture in the late 1990s, covering the early years of popular games like EverQuest, to the soaring popularity of World of Warcraft, to the current era of the genre and its more general gaming climate. Author Zek Valkyrie—a researcher in the areas of gaming culture, digital communities, gender, sexualities, and visual sociology as well as an avid gamer himself—explores the evolution of the meaning of "play" in the virtual game world, explains how changes in game design have reduced opportunities for social experimentation, and identifies how player types such as the gender switcher, the cybersexual, the explorer, and the trial-and-error player have been left behind in the interest of social and informational transparency.
Download or read book Video Games and American Culture written by Aaron A. Toscano and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-12-12 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Digital media are immersive technologies reflecting behaviors, attitudes, and values. The engrossing, entertaining virtual worlds video games provide are important sites for 21st century research. This book moves beyond assertions that video games cause violence by analyzing the culture that produces such material. While some popular media reinforce the idea that video games lead to violence, this book uses a cultural studies lens to reveal a more complex situation. Video games do not lead to violence, sexism, and chauvinism. Rather, Toscano argues, a violent, sexist, chauvinistic culture reproduces texts that reflect these values. Although video games have a worldwide audience, this book focuses on American culture and how this multi-billion dollar industry entertains us in our leisure time (and sometimes at work), bringing us into virtual environments where we have fun learning, fighting, discovering, and acquiring bragging rights. When politicians and moral crusaders push agendas that claim video games cause a range of social ills from obesity to mass shooting, these perspectives fail to recognize that video games reproduce hegemonic American values. This book, in contrast, focuses on what these highly entertaining cultural products tell us about who we are.
Download or read book The Art of Game Worlds written by Dave Morris and published by The Ilex Press Ltd. This book was released on 2004 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book includes a complete illustrated guide to the modern computer game world with in depth examples of the most popular games across all formats.
Download or read book Worlds in Play written by Suzanne De Castell and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2007 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Worlds in Play, a map of the «state of play» in digital games research today, illustrates the great variety and extreme contrasts in the landscape cleft by contemporary digital games research. The chapters in this volume are the work of an international review board of seventy game-study specialists from fields spanning social sciences, arts, and humanities to the physical and applied sciences and technologies. A wellspring of inspiring concepts, models, protocols, data, methods, tools, critical perspectives, and directions for future work, Worlds in Play will support and assist in reading not only within, but across fields of play - disciplinary, temporal, and geographical - and encourage all of us to widen our focus to encompass the omni-dimensional phenomenon of «worlds in play.»
Download or read book Possible Worlds in Video Games From Classic Narrative to Meaningful Actions written by Antonio José Planells de la Maza and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2017-11-21 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In current digital games, classic fictional worlds are transformed into ludofictional worlds, spaces rich in characters and emotions that are especially affected by the intervention of a player. In this book, we propose a model, inspired by the Semantics of Fiction and Possible Worlds, which is oriented to the analysis of video games as integrated systems.
Download or read book Making Videogames written by Duncan Harris and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2022-06-28 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An in-depth visual guide presenting the detailed creative journeys behind the development of the world’s leading videogames. Making Videogames is an extraordinary snapshot of modern interactive entertainment, with insight from pioneers about the most important games in the industry. Illustrated with some of the most arresting in-game images ever seen in print, this book explores the unique alchemy of a technical and artistic endeavor striking a captivating balance between insider insight and accessibility. Across twelve chapters, each focusing on a specific game from AAA blockbusters such as Control and Half-Life: Alyx to cult breakthrough games including No Man’s Sky and Return of the Obra Dinn, this volume documents the incredible craft of videogame worldbuilding. These chapters present masterful visual storytelling via the world’s most popular, but seldom fully understood, entertainment medium. Demonstrating the magic and method behind each studio’s work, the book includes enlightening text by Alex Wiltshire complementing specially created imagery “photographed” in-engine by screen capture artist Duncan Harris. A book for die-hard videogame fanatics, aspiring designer-creatives, video game developers, and the visually curious alike, Making Videogames will showcase the boundless creativity of this thrilling industry.
Download or read book Video Game Worlds written by Timothy Rowlands and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-06-16 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Timothy Rowlands brings a diverse mix of ethnographic, semiotic, and analytical approaches to analyze the massively multiplayer online game Everquest.
Download or read book Video Games Around the World written by Mark J. P. Wolf and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2015-05-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thirty-nine essays explore the vast diversity of video game history and culture across all the world's continents. Video games have become a global industry, and their history spans dozens of national industries where foreign imports compete with domestic productions, legitimate industry contends with piracy, and national identity faces the global marketplace. This volume describes video game history and culture across every continent, with essays covering areas as disparate and far-flung as Argentina and Thailand, Hungary and Indonesia, Iran and Ireland. Most of the essays are written by natives of the countries they discuss, many of them game designers and founders of game companies, offering distinctively firsthand perspectives. Some of these national histories appear for the first time in English, and some for the first time in any language. Readers will learn, for example, about the rapid growth of mobile games in Africa; how a meat-packing company held the rights to import the Atari VCS 2600 into Mexico; and how the Indonesian MMORPG Nusantara Online reflects that country's cultural history and folklore. Every country or region's unique conditions provide the context that shapes its national industry; for example, the long history of computer science in the United Kingdom and Scandinavia, the problems of piracy in China, the PC Bangs of South Korea, or the Dutch industry's emphasis on serious games. As these essays demonstrate, local innovation and diversification thrive alongside productions and corporations with global aspirations. Africa • Arab World • Argentina • Australia • Austria • Brazil • Canada • China • Colombia • Czech Republic • Finland • France • Germany • Hong Kong • Hungary • India • Indonesia • Iran • Ireland • Italy • Japan • Mexico • The Netherlands • New Zealand • Peru • Poland • Portugal • Russia • Scandinavia • Singapore • South Korea • Spain • Switzerland • Thailand • Turkey • United Kingdom • United States of America • Uruguay • Venezuela
Download or read book Gameworlds written by Seth Giddings and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-05-19 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Game studies is a rapidly developing field across the world, with a growing number of dedicated courses addressing video games and digital play as significant phenomena in contemporary everyday life and media cultures. Seth Giddings looks to fill a gap by focusing on the relationship between the actual and virtual worlds of play in everyday life. He addresses both the continuities and differences between digital play and longer-established modes of play. The 'gameworlds' title indicates both the virtual world designed into the videogame and the wider environments in which play is manifested: social relationships between players; hardware and software; between the virtual worlds of the game and the media universes they extend (e.g. Pokémon, Harry Potter, Lego, Star Wars); and the gameworlds generated by children's imaginations and creativity (through talk and role-play, drawings and outdoor play). The gameworld raises questions about who, and what, is in play. Drawing on recent theoretical work in science and technology studies, games studies and new media studies, a key theme is the material and embodied character of these gameworlds and their components (players' bodies, computer hardware, toys, virtual physics, and the physical environment). Building on detailed small-scale ethnographic case studies, Gameworlds is the first book to explore the nature of play in the virtual worlds of video games and how this play relates to, and crosses over into, everyday play in the actual world.
Download or read book Phenomenology of the Gameworld A Philosophical Toolbox for Video Game Developers written by Matthew E. Gladden and published by Defragmenter Media. This book was released on 2019-12-15 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The human mind is the most powerful game engine – but it can always use some help. This book is meant for developers who want to create games that will evoke richer and more memorable “gameworlds” in the minds of their players. We don’t just enter such unforgettable gameworlds when we play first-person 3D RPGs with high-resolution graphics; even relatively simple 2D puzzle or strategy games with 8-bit-style visuals can immerse players in worlds that are beautiful, terrifying, mysterious, or moving, that are brutally realistic or delightfully whimsical. Indeed, good video games can transport us to incredible new worlds. The process by which a particular gameworld emerges is a symbiotic collaboration between developer and player: the game system presents a carefully architected stream of polygons and pixels, which somehow leads the player’s mind to construct and explore an intricate world full of places, people, relationships, dilemmas, and quests that transcends what’s actually appearing onscreen. Drawing on insights from ontology and philosophical aesthetics, this volume provides you with conceptual frameworks and concrete tools that will enhance your ability to design games whose iconic gameworlds encourage the types of gameplay experiences you want to offer your players. Among other topics, the book investigates: · The unusual ways in which a gameworld’s contents can “shrink” or “grow” in players’ minds, depending on whether the players are mentally positioned within a game’s social space, cultural space, built space, or tactical space. · The manner in which players’ minds spontaneously “concretize” the countless gaps that exist in a game – and how this dynamic explains why so many players still enjoy 8-bit-style games with retro pixel art. · The differing ways in which players experience success and failure, danger and safety, good and evil, the future and the past, the known and the unknown, and engagement and retreat, depending on whether a game reveals its gameworld through a “1D” game environment (like that of a text-based adventure), 2D environment (like that of a sidescroller or a grand strategy game with a top-down map view), 2.5D environment (like that of an isometric turn-based tactics game) or 3D environment (like that of a first-person shooter). · The powerful way in which players are able to mentally “explore” a gameworld simply by shifting their conscious awareness between different senses, media, ontological strata, and constituent spaces – without needing to travel through the gameworld’s terrain at all. · Necessary and optional elements of the gameworld – from built areas, natural landscapes, laws of nature, and a cosmogony to the game’s player and designer – and their roles in shaping the gameplay experience. · How to strategically employ the architectural paradigms of the Cyberspatial Grid, Maze Space, Biomimetic Net, Simulacral World, Virtual Museum, and Protean World when architecting locales within your game, in order to evoke particular kinds of emotional gameplay experiences for your players. · The nature of the unique “sixth sense” that 2D games grant to player characters (and players). · Simple techniques for helping your 2D game to “feel” more like a 3D game. · The differing kinds of immersiveness, interactivity, and determinacy possessed by different types of games and their implications for the gameplay experience. Once you’ve undertaken this philosophical and artistic journey, you’ll never look at your games – or their gameworlds – in quite the same way again. Phenomenology of the Gameworld is a book by the award-winning video game designer, philosopher, and writer Matthew E. Gladden. He has over 20 years of experience with commercial and non-commercial game development, has published numerous scholarly and popular works relating to the philosophy of video game design, virtual reality, and neurocybernetics, and has served as a video game conference keynote speaker.
