Download or read book Architectonics of Game Spaces written by Andri Gerber and published by Transcript Verlag, Roswitha Gost, Sigrid Nokel u. Dr. Karin Werner. This book was released on 2019-10 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What consequences does the design of the virtual yield for architecture and to what extent can architecture be used to turn game-worlds into sustainable places in "reality"? This pioneering collection gives an overview of contemporary developments in designing video games and of the relationships such practices have established with architecture.

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 Understanding Machinima written by Jenna Ng and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-07-30 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this groundbreaking collection, Dr. Jenna Ng brings together academics and award-winning artists and machinima makers to explore the fascinating combination of cinema, animation and games in machinima (the use of computer game engines to produce animated films in cost- and time-efficient ways). Book-ended by a preface by Henry Lowood (curator for history of science and technology collections at Stanford University) and an interview with Isabelle Arvers (machinima artist, trainer, critic, and curator), the collection features wide-ranging discussions addressing machinima not only from diverse theoretical perspectives, but also in its many dimensions as game art, First Nations media art, documentary, and pedagogical tool. Making use of interactive multimedia to enhance the text, each chapter features a QR code which leads to a mobile website cross-referencing with its print text, integrating digital and print content while also taking into account the portability of digital devices in resonance with machinima's mobile digital forms. Exploring the many dimensions of machinima production and reception, Understanding Machinima extends machinima's critical scholarship and debate, underscoring the exciting potential of this emerging media form.

Download or read book Sylvanas World of Warcraft written by Christie Golden and published by Random House Worlds. This book was released on 2022-03-29 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The epic, definitive story of Sylvanas Windrunner, one of World of Warcraft’s most enduring and iconic characters, as chronicled by bestselling author Christie Golden. Ranger-General. Banshee Queen. Warchief. Sylvanas Windrunner has borne many titles. To some, she is a hero—to others, a villain. But whether in pursuit of justice, vengeance, or something more, Sylvanas has always sought to control her own destiny. The power to achieve her goals has never been closer, as Sylvanas works alongside the Jailer to liberate all Azeroth from the prison of fate. Her final task? Secure the fealty of their prisoner—King Anduin Wrynn. To succeed, Sylvanas will be forced to reflect on the harrowing path that brought her to the Jailer’s side and to reveal her truest self to her greatest rival. Here, Sylvanas’s complete story is laid bare: the breaking of the Windrunner family and her rise to Ranger- General; her own death at the hands of Arthas and her renewed purpose in founding the Forsaken; the moment she first beheld the Maw and understood the true consequences of what lay beyond the veil of death. But as her moment of victory draws near, Sylvanas Windrunner will make a choice that may ultimately come to define her. A choice that’s hers to make.

Download or read book Blue Crucible written by Benjamin Tyler Smith and published by Blood Moon Press. This book was released on 2020-03-11 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Virtual Cities written by Konstantinos Dimopoulos and published by Unbound Publishing. This book was released on 2020-11-12 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Virtual cities are places of often-fractured geographies, impossible physics, outrageous assumptions and almost untamed imaginations given digital structure. This book, the first atlas of its kind, aims to explore, map, study and celebrate them. To imagine what they would be like in reality. To paint a lasting picture of their domes, arches and walls. From metropolitan sci-fi open worlds and medieval fantasy towns to contemporary cities and glimpses of gothic horror, author and urban planner Konstantinos Dimopoulos and visual artist Maria Kallikaki have brought to life over forty game cities. Together, they document the deep and exhilarating history of iconic gaming landscapes through richly illustrated commentary and analysis. Virtual Cities transports us into these imaginary worlds, through cities that span over four decades of digital history across literary and gaming genres. Travel to fantasy cities like World of Warcraft’s Orgrimmar and Grim Fandango’s Rubacava; envision what could be in the familiar cities of Assassin’s Creed’s London and Gabriel Knight’s New Orleans; and steal a glimpse of cities of the future, in Final Fantasy VII’s Midgar and Half-Life 2’s City 17. Within, there are many more worlds to discover – each formed in the deepest corners of the imagination, their immense beauty and complexity astounding for artists, game designers, world builders and, above all, anyone who plays and cares about video games.

Download or read book Songs of Valor written by Chris Kennedy and published by New Mythology Press. This book was released on 2021-03-17 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Computer Games and the Social Imaginary written by Graeme Kirkpatrick and published by Polity. This book was released on 2013-10-07 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Computer games have fundamentally altered the relation of self and society in the digital age. Analysing topics such as technology and power, the formation of gaming culture and the subjective impact of play with computer games, this text will be of great interest to students and scholars of digital media, games studies and the information society.

Download or read book Tank Action written by David Render and published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. This book was released on 2016-06-16 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gripping account of the Second World War, from the perspective of a young tank commander. In 1944, David Render was a nineteen-year-old second lieutenant fresh from Sandhurst when he was sent to France. Joining the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry five days after the D-Day landings, the combat-hardened men he was sent to command did not expect him to last long. However, in the following weeks of ferocious fighting in which more than 90 per cent of his fellow tank commanders became casualties, his ability to emerge unscathed from countless combat engagements earned him the nickname of the 'Inevitable Mr Render'. In Tank Action Render tells his remarkable story, spanning every major episode of the last year of the Second World War from the invasion of Normandy to the fall of Germany. Ultimately it is a story of survival, comradeship and the ability to stand up and be counted as a leader in combat.

Download or read book Naruto Vol 13 written by Masashi Kishimoto and published by VIZ Media LLC. This book was released on 2011-02-14 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The final battle of the Chûnin Exam is at hand! Sasuke makes it to the arena in time to compete, but the anticipation has only whetted Gaara’s terrible bloodlust and strained his already fragile sanity. Can Gaara pull himself together in time to face Sasuke’s new-found strength? Or will the demon inside him take complete control and wreak havoc on Konohagakure?! -- VIZ Media

Download or read book Korea s Online Gaming Empire written by Dal Yong Jin and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rapid growth of the Korean online game industry, viewed in social, cultural, and economic contexts. In South Korea, online gaming is a cultural phenomenon. Games are broadcast on television, professional gamers are celebrities, and youth culture is often identified with online gaming. Uniquely in the online games market, Korea not only dominates the local market but has also made its mark globally. In Korea's Online Gaming Empire, Dal Yong Jin examines the rapid growth of this industry from a political economy perspective, discussing it in social, cultural, and economic terms. Korea has the largest percentage of broadband subscribers of any country in the world, and Koreans spend increasing amounts of time and money on Internet-based games. Online gaming has become a mode of socializing—a channel for human relationships. The Korean online game industry has been a pioneer in software development and eSports (electronic sports and leagues). Jin discusses the policies of the Korean government that encouraged the development of online gaming both as a cutting-edge business and as a cultural touchstone; the impact of economic globalization; the relationship between online games and Korean society; and the future of the industry. He examines the rise of Korean online games in the global marketplace, the emergence of eSport as a youth culture phenomenon, the working conditions of professional gamers, the role of game fans as consumers, how Korea's local online game industry has become global, and whether these emerging firms have challenged the West's dominance in global markets.

Download or read book Gaming written by Alexander R. Galloway and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2006-05-27 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Video games have been a central feature of the cultural landscape for over twenty years and now rival older media like movies, television, and music in popularity and cultural influence. Yet there have been relatively few attempts to understand the video game as an independent medium. Most such efforts focus on the earliest generation of text-based adventures (Zork, for example) and have little to say about such visually and conceptually sophisticated games as Final Fantasy X, Shenmue, Grand Theft Auto, Halo, and The Sims, in which players inhabit elaborately detailed worlds and manipulate digital avatars with a vast—and in some cases, almost unlimited—array of actions and choices. In Gaming, Alexander Galloway instead considers the video game as a distinct cultural form that demands a new and unique interpretive framework. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines, particularly critical theory and media studies, he analyzes video games as something to be played rather than as texts to be read, and traces in five concise chapters how the “algorithmic culture” created by video games intersects with theories of visuality, realism, allegory, and the avant-garde. If photographs are images and films are moving images, then, Galloway asserts, video games are best defined as actions. Using examples from more than fifty video games, Galloway constructs a classification system of action in video games, incorporating standard elements of gameplay as well as software crashes, network lags, and the use of cheats and game hacks. In subsequent chapters, he explores the overlap between the conventions of film and video games, the political and cultural implications of gaming practices, the visual environment of video games, and the status of games as an emerging cultural form. Together, these essays offer a new conception of gaming and, more broadly, of electronic culture as a whole, one that celebrates and does not lament the qualities of the digital age. Alexander R. Galloway is assistant professor of culture and communication at New York University and author of Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization.

Download or read book Franchise Era written by Fleury James Fleury and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-01 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Hollywood shifts towards the digital era, the role of the media franchise has become more prominent. This edited collection, from a range of international scholars, argues that the franchise is now an integral element of American media culture. As such, the collection explores the production, distribution and marketing of franchises as a historical form of media-making - analysing the complex industrial practice of managing franchises across interconnected online platforms. Examining how traditional media incumbents like studios and networks have responded to the rise of new entrants from the technology sector (such as Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google), the authors take a critical look at the way new and old industrial logics collide in an increasingly fragmented and consolidated mediascape.

Download or read book Metagaming written by Stephanie Boluk and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2017-04-04 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The greatest trick the videogame industry ever pulled was convincing the world that videogames were games rather than a medium for making metagames. Elegantly defined as “games about games,” metagames implicate a diverse range of practices that stray outside the boundaries and bend the rules: from technical glitches and forbidden strategies to Renaissance painting, algorithmic trading, professional sports, and the War on Terror. In Metagaming, Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux demonstrate how games always extend beyond the screen, and how modders, mappers, streamers, spectators, analysts, and artists are changing the way we play. Metagaming uncovers these alternative histories of play by exploring the strange experiences and unexpected effects that emerge in, on, around, and through videogames. Players puzzle through the problems of perspectival rendering in Portal, perform clandestine acts of electronic espionage in EVE Online, compete and commentate in Korean StarCraft, and speedrun The Legend of Zelda in record times (with or without the use of vision). Companies like Valve attempt to capture the metagame through international e-sports and online marketplaces while the corporate history of Super Mario Bros. is undermined by the endless levels of Infinite Mario, the frustrating pranks of Asshole Mario, and even Super Mario Clouds, a ROM hack exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art. One of the only books to include original software alongside each chapter, Metagaming transforms videogames from packaged products into instruments, equipment, tools, and toys for intervening in the sensory and political economies of everyday life. And although videogames conflate the creativity, criticality, and craft of play with the act of consumption, we don’t simply play videogames—we make metagames.

Download or read book The Post Screen Through Virtual Reality Holograms and Light Projections written by DR. ENG Jenna Ng and published by MediaMatters. This book was released on 2021-10-14 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Screens are ubiquitous today. They display information; present image worlds; are portable; connect to mobile networks; mesmerize. However, contemporary screen media also seek to eliminate the presence of the screen and the visibilities of its boundaries. As what is image becomes increasingly indistinguishable against the viewer's actual surroundings, this unsettling prompts re-examination about not only what is the screen, but also how the screen demarcates and what it stands for in relation to our understanding of our realities in, outside and against images. Through case studies drawn from three media technologies - Virtual Reality; holograms; and light projections - this book develops new theories of the surfaces on and spaces in which images are displayed today, interrogating critical lines between art and life; virtuality and actuality; truth and lies. What we have today is not just the contestation of the real against illusion or the unreal, but the disappearance itself of difference and a gluttony of the unreal which both connect up to current politics of distorted truth values and corrupted terms of information. The Post-Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections: Where Screen Boundaries Lie is thus about not only where the image's borders and demarcations are established, but also the screen boundary as the instrumentation of today's intense virtualizations that do not tell the truth. In all this, a new imagination for images emerges, with a new space for cultures of presence and absence, definitions of object and representation, and understandings of dis- and re-placement - the post-screen.

Download or read book CinemaTexas Notes written by Louis Black and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2018-02-26 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Austin’s thriving film culture, renowned for international events such as SXSW and the Austin Film Festival, extends back to the early 1970s when students in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin ran a film programming unit that screened movies for students and the public. Dubbed CinemaTexas, the program offered viewers a wide variety of films—old and new, mainstream, classic, and cult—at a time when finding and watching films after their first run was very difficult and prohibitively expensive. For each film, RTF graduate students wrote program notes that included production details, a sampling of critical reactions, and an original essay that placed the film and its director within context and explained the movie’s historical significance. Over time, CinemaTexas Program Notes became more ambitious and were distributed around the world, including to luminaries such as film critic Pauline Kael. This anthology gathers a sampling of CinemaTexas Program Notes, organized into four sections: “USA Film History,” “Hollywood Auteurs,” “Cinema-Fist: Renegade Talents,” and “America’s Shadow Cinema.” Many of the note writers have become prominent film studies scholars, as well as leading figures in the film, TV, music, and video game industries. As a collection, CinemaTexas Notes strongly contradicts the notion of an effortlessly formed American film canon, showing instead how local film cultures—whether in Austin, New York, or Europe—have forwarded the development of film studies as a discipline.

Download or read book Inside the Sideshow Studio written by . Sideshow and published by Insight Editions. This book was released on 2015-06-16 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inside the Sideshow Studio takes readers on a behind-the-scenes tour of a unique creative environment—the eclectic and dynamic workplace of one of the world’s leading figure arts creators. Admired by collectors for its meticulous attention to detail, Sideshow Collectibles has rooted itself on a foundation of creativity, close collaboration, and boundary-pushing quality. The world of Sideshow itself, and the renaissance-like environment it fosters, is the subject of this unique photographic exploration of creativity and the spaces it inhabits. Through dynamic photography, Inside Sideshow Collectibles takes an in-depth look at an artistic haven expressly devoted to the development of high-end collectible figures, offering a one-of-a-kind examination of the relationship between innovation and spatial design. A must-have for fans and creatives, this beautifully illustrated book will not only grant a look at Sideshow that few have ever seen, but also inspire readers to push the limits of their talent and surround themselves with artistic spaces of their own.