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A gaming academic offers a \"fascinating\" exploration of why we play video games--despite the unhappiness we feel when we fail at them ( Boston Globe ) We may think of video games as being \"fun,\" but in The Art of Failure , Jesper Juul claims that this is almost entirely mistaken.

This volume is the first reader on video games and learning of its kind. Covering game design, game culture and games as twenty-first-century pedagogy, it demonstrates the depth and breadth of scholarship on games and learning to date. The chapters represent some of the most influential thinkers, designers and writers in the emerging field of games and learning - including James Paul Gee, Soren Johnson, Eric Klopfer, Colleen Macklin, Thomas Malaby, Bonnie Nardi, David Sirlin and others. Together, their work functions both as an excellent introduction to the field of games and learning and as a powerful argument for the use of games in formal and informal learning environments in a digital age.

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.

Historically the bodies of civilians are the most damaged by the increasing mechanization and derealization of warfare, but this is not reflected in the representation of violence in popular media. In War Without Bodies , author Martin Danahay argues that the media in the United States in particular constructs a \"war without bodies\" in which neither the corpses of soldiers or civilians are shown. War Without Bodies traces the intertwining of new communications technologies and war from the Crimean War, when Roger Fenton took the first photographs of the British army and William Howard Russell used the telegraph to transmit his dispatches, to the first of three \"video wars\" in the Gulf region in 1990-91, within the context of a war culture that made the costs of organized violence acceptable to a wider public. New modes of communication have paradoxically not made more war \"real\" but made it more ubiquitous and at the same time unremarkable as bodies are erased from coverage. Media such as photography and instantaneous video initially seemed to promise more realism but were assimilated into existing conventions that implicitly justified war. These new representations of war were framed in a way that erased the human cost of violence and replaced it with images that defused opposition to warfare. Analyzing poetry, photographs, video and video games the book illustrates the ways in which war was framed in these different historical contexts. It examines the cultural assumptions that influenced the reception of images of war and discusses how death and damage to bodies was made acceptable to the public. War Without Bodies aims to heighten awareness of how acceptance of war is coded into texts and how active resistance to such hidden messages can help prevent future unnecessary wars.

Platform sponsors typically have both incentive and opportunity to manage the overall value of their ecosystems. Through selective promotion, a platform sponsor can reward successful complements, bring attention to underappreciated complements, and influence the consumer’s perception of the ecosystem’s depth and breadth. It can use promotion to induce and reward loyalty of powerful complement producers, and it can time such promotion to both boost sales during slow periods and reduce competitive interactions between complements. We develop arguments about whether and when a platform sponsor will selectively promote individual complements and test these arguments on data from the console video game industry in the United Kingdom. We find that platform sponsors do not simply promote “best in class” complements; they strategically invest in complements in ways that address complex trade-offs in ecosystem value. Our arguments and results build significant new theory that helps us understand how a platform sponsor orchestrates value creation in the overall ecosystem.

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.

Despite record sales and an ever-growing global industry, the simple fact is that videogames are disappearing. Most obviously, the physical deterioration of discs, cartridges, consoles and controllers means that the data and devices will crumble to dust and eventually will be lost forever. However, there is more to the disappearance of videogames than plastic corrosion and bit rot. Best Before examines how the videogames industry's retail, publishing, technology design, advertising and marketing practices actively produce obsolescence, wearing out and retiring old games to make way for the always new, just out of reach, 'coming soon' title and 'next generation' platform. Set against the context of material deterioration and the discursive production of obsolescence, Best Before examines the conceptual and practical challenges faced within the nascent field of game preservation. Understanding videogames as rich, complex and mutable texts and experiences that are supported and sustained by cultures of gameplay and fandom, Best Before considers how - and even whether - we might preserve and present games for future generations.

Researchers have suggested that acute exposure to violent video games is a cause of aggressive behavior. We tested this hypothesis by using violent and nonviolent games that were closely matched, collecting a large sample, and using a single outcome. We randomly assigned 275 male undergraduates to play a first-person-shooter game modified to be either violent or less violent and hard or easy. After completing the game-play session, participants were provoked by a confederate and given an opportunity to behave aggressively. Neither game violence nor game difficulty predicted aggressive behavior. Incidentally, we found that 2D:4D digit ratio, thought to index prenatal testosterone exposure, did not predict aggressive behavior. Results do not support acute violent-game exposure and low 2D:4D ratio as causes of aggressive behavior.

Video game technology is changing from 2D to 3D and virtual reality (VR) graphics. In this research, we analyze how an identical video game that is either played in a 2D, stereoscopic 3D or Head-Mounted-Display (HMD) VR version is experienced by the players, and how brands that are placed in the video game are affected. The game related variables, which are analyzed, are presence, attitude towards the video game and arousal while playing the video game. Brand placement related variables are attitude towards the placed brands and memory (recall and recognition) for the placed brands. 237 players took part in the main study and played a jump'n'run game consisting of three levels. Results indicate that presence was higher in the HMD VR than in the stereoscopic 3D than in the 2D video game, but neither arousal nor attitude towards the video game differed. Memory for the placed brands was lower in the HMD VR than in the stereoscopic 3D than in the 2D video game, whereas attitudes towards the brands were not affected. A post hoc study (n = 53) shows that cognitive load was highest in the VR game, and lowest in the 3D game. Subjects reported higher levels of dizziness and motion-sickness in the VR game than in the 3D and in the 2D game. Limitations are addressed and implications for researchers, marketers and video game developers are outlined.

There is a worldwide shortage of health workers, and this issue requires innovative education solutions. Serious gaming and gamification education have the potential to provide a quality, cost-effective, novel approach that is flexible, portable, and enjoyable and allow interaction with tutors and peers. The aim of this systematic review was to evaluate the effectiveness of serious gaming/gamification for health professions education compared with traditional learning, other types of digital education, or other serious gaming/gamification interventions in terms of patient outcomes, knowledge, skills, professional attitudes, and satisfaction (primary outcomes) as well as economic outcomes of education and adverse events (secondary outcomes). A comprehensive search of MEDLINE, EMBASE, Web of Knowledge, Educational Resources Information Centre, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, PsycINFO, and Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature was conducted from 1990 to August 2017. Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and cluster RCTs were eligible for inclusion. Two reviewers independently searched, screened, and assessed the study quality and extracted data. A meta-analysis was not deemed appropriate due to the heterogeneity of populations, interventions, comparisons, and outcomes. Therefore, a narrative synthesis is presented. A total of 27 RCTs and 3 cluster RCTs with 3634 participants were included. Two studies evaluated gamification interventions, and the remaining evaluated serious gaming interventions. One study reported a small statistically significant difference between serious gaming and digital education of primary care physicians in the time to control blood pressure in a subgroup of their patients already taking antihypertensive medications. There was evidence of a moderate-to-large magnitude of effect from five studies evaluating individually delivered interventions for objectively measured knowledge compared with traditional learning. There was also evidence of a small-to-large magnitude of effect from 10 studies for improved skills compared with traditional learning. Two and four studies suggested equivalence between interventions and controls for knowledge and skills, respectively. Evidence suggested that serious gaming was at least as effective as other digital education modalities for these outcomes. There was insufficient evidence to conclude whether one type of serious gaming/gamification intervention is more effective than any other. There was limited evidence for the effects of serious gaming/gamification on professional attitudes. Serious gaming/gamification may improve satisfaction, but the evidence was limited. Evidence was of low or very low quality for all outcomes. Quality of evidence was downgraded due to the imprecision, inconsistency, and limitations of the study. Serious gaming/gamification appears to be at least as effective as controls, and in many studies, more effective for improving knowledge, skills, and satisfaction. However, the available evidence is mostly of low quality and calls for further rigorous, theory-driven research.