Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
1,025
result(s) for
"Electronic games History."
Sort by:
Coin-Operated Americans
Video gaming: it's a boy's world, right? That's what the industry wants us to think. Why and how we came to comply are what Carly A. Kocurek investigates in this provocative consideration of how an industry's craving for respectability hooked up with cultural narratives about technology, masculinity, and youth at the video arcade.
From the dawn of the golden age of video games with the launch of Atari'sPongin 1972, through the industry-wide crash of 1983, to the recent nostalgia-bathed revival of the arcade,Coin-Operated Americansexplores the development and implications of the \"video gamer\" as a cultural identity. This cultural-historical journey takes us to the Twin Galaxies arcade in Ottumwa, Iowa, for a close look at the origins of competitive gaming. It immerses us in video gaming's first moral panic, generated by Exidy'sDeath Race(1976), an unlicensed adaptation of the filmDeath Race 2000. And it ventures into the realm of video game films such asTronandWarGames, in which gamers become brilliant, boyish heroes.
Whether conducting a phenomenological tour of a classic arcade or evaluating attempts, then and now, to regulate or eradicate arcades and coin-op video games, Kocurek does more than document the rise and fall of a now-booming industry. Drawing on newspapers, interviews, oral history, films, and television, she examines the factors and incidents that contributed to the widespread view of video gaming as an enclave for young men and boys.
A case study of this once emergent and now revived medium became the presumed enclave of boys and young men,Coin-Operated Americansis history that holds valuable lessons for contemporary culture as we struggle to address pervasive sexism in the domain of video games-and in the digital working world beyond.
eBook
Console wars : Sega, Nintendo, and the battle that defined a generation
\"In the tradition of The Accidental Billionaires and Moneyball, a behind-the-scenes business thriller about how the small, scrappy Sega, led by one unlikely visionary, took on the juggernaut Nintendo and changed the face of entertainment\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Aesthetic of Play
The impulse toward play is very ancient, not only pre-cultural but pre-human; zoologists have identified play behaviors in turtles and in chimpanzees. Games have existed since antiquity; 5,000-year-old board games have been recovered from Egyptian tombs. And yet we still lack a critical language for thinking about play. Game designers are better at answering small questions (\"Why is this battle boring?\") than big ones (\"What does this game mean?\"). In this book, the game designer Brian Upton analyzes the experience of play -- how playful activities unfold from moment to moment and how the rules we adopt constrain that unfolding. Drawing on games that range from Monopoly to Dungeons & Dragons to Guitar Hero, Upton develops a framework for understanding play, introducing a set of critical tools that can help us analyze games and game designs and identify ways in which they succeed or fail.Upton also examines the broader epistemological implications of such a framework, exploring the role of play in the construction of meaning and what the existence of play says about the relationship between our thoughts and external reality. He considers the making of meaning in play and in every aspect of human culture, and he draws on findings in pragmatic epistemology, neuroscience, and semiotics to describe how meaning emerges from playful engagement. Upton argues that play can also explain particular aspects of narrative; a play-based interpretive stance, he proposes, can help us understand the structure of books, of music, of theater, of art, and even of the process of critical engagement itself.
eBook
Racing the Beam
The Atari Video Computer System dominated the home video game market so completely that \"Atari\" became the generic term for a video game console. The Atari VCS was affordable and offered the flexibility of changeable cartridges. Nearly a thousand of these were created, the most significant of which established new techniques, mechanics, and even entire genres. This book offers a detailed and accessible study of this influential video game console from both computational and cultural perspectives. Studies of digital media have rarely investigated platforms--the systems underlying computing. This book (the first in a series of Platform Studies) does so, developing a critical approach that examines the relationship between platforms and creative expression. Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost discuss the Atari VCS itself and examine in detail six game cartridges: Combat, Adventure, Pac-Man, Yars' Revenge, Pitfall!, and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. They describe the technical constraints and affordances of the system and track developments in programming, gameplay, interface, and aesthetics. Adventure, for example, was the first game to represent a virtual space larger than the screen (anticipating the boundless virtual spaces of such later games as World of Warcraft and Grand Theft Auto), by allowing the player to walk off one side into another space; and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back was an early instance of interaction between media properties and video games. Montfort and Bogost show that the Atari VCS--often considered merely a retro fetish object--is an essential part of the history of video games.
eBook
Historia ludens : the playing historian
\"This book aims to further a debate about aspects of 'playing' and 'gaming' in connection with history. Reaching out to academics, professionals and students alike, it pursues a dedicated interdisciplinary approach. Rather than only focusing on how professionals could learn from academics in history, the book also ponders the question of what academics can learn from gaming and playing for their own practice, such as gamification for teaching, or using 'play' as a paradigm for novel approaches into historical scholarship. 'Playing' and 'gaming' are thus understood as a broad cultural phenomenon that cross-pollinates the theory and practice of history and gaming alike\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Go nation
Go (Weiqi in Chinese) is one of the most popular games in East Asia, with a steadily increasing fan base around the world. Like chess, Go is a logic game but it is much older, with written records mentioning the game that date back to the 4th century BC. As Chinese politics have changed over the last two millennia, so too has the imagery of the game. In Imperial times it was seen as a tool to seek religious enlightenment and was one of the four noble arts that were a requisite to becoming a cultured gentleman. During the Cultural Revolution it was a stigmatized emblem of the lasting effects of feudalism. Today, it marks the reemergence of cultured gentlemen as an idealized model of manhood. Marc L. Moskowitz explores the fascinating history of the game, as well as providing a vivid snapshot of Chinese Go players today. Go Nation uses this game to come to a better understanding of Chinese masculinity, nationalism, and class, as the PRC reconfigures its history and traditions to meet the future.
eBook
The story of Nintendo
This book reveals how Nintendo came into being, the entrepreneurs behind the success of the brand, the key facts about the video game industry, and Nintendo's impact in the global market.
Book
Games and Game Playing in European Art and Literature, 16th-17th Centuries
This collection of essays examines the vogue for games and game playing as expressed in art, architecture, and literature in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe.
eBook