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The Art of Failure
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.
eBook
Video game of the year : a year-by-year guide to the best, boldest, and most bizarre games from every year since 1977
\"For each of the 40 years of video game history, there is a defining game, a game that captured the zeitgeist and left a legacy for all games that followed. Through a series of entertaining, informative, and opinionated critical essays, author and tech journalist Jordan Minor investigates, in chronological order, the innovative, genre-bending, and earth-shattering games from 1977 through 2022. Minor explores development stories, critical reception, and legacy, and also looks at how gaming intersects with and eventually influences society at large while reveling in how uniquely and delightfully bizarre even the most famous games tend to be\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Games, Learning, and Society
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.
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
Understanding video games : the essential introduction
\"From Pong to virtual reality, Understanding Video Games, 4th Edition, takes video game studies into the next decade of the twenty-first century, highlighting changes in the area, including mobile, social, and casual gaming. In this new edition of the pioneering text, students learn to assess the major theories used to analyze games, such as ludology and narratology, and gain familiarity with the commercial and organizational aspects of the game industry. Drawing from historical and contemporary examples, the student-friendly text also explores the aesthetics of games, evaluates the cultural position of video games, and considers the potential effects of both violent and \"serious\" games. Extensively illustrated and featuring discussion questions, a glossary of key terms, and a detailed video game history timeline, this new edition is an indispensable resource for students, scholars, and teachers interested in examining the ways video games continue to reshape entertainment and society.\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
War without Bodies
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.
eBook
Introduction to game analysis
\"This accessible textbook gives students the tools they need to analyze games using strategies borrowed from textual analysis. As the field of game studies grows, videogame writing is evolving from the mere evaluation of gameplay, graphics, sound, and replayablity, to more reflective writing that manages to convey the complexity of a game and the way it is played in a cultural context. Clara Fernández-Vara's concise primer provides readers with instruction on the basic building blocks of game analysis--examination of context, content and reception, and formal qualities--as well as the vocabulary necessary for talking about videogames' distinguishing characteristics. Examples are drawn from a range of games, both digital and non-digital--from Bioshock and World of Warcraft to Monopoly--and the book provides a variety of exercises and sample analyses, as well as a comprehensive ludography and glossary. In this second edition of the popular textbook, Fernández-Vara brings the book firmly up-to-date, pulling in fresh examples from ground-breaking new works in this dynamic field. Introduction to Game Analysis remains a unique practical tool for students who want to become more fluent writers and critics of not just video games, but digital media overall\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Platform Strategy: Managing Ecosystem Value Through Selective Promotion of Complements
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.
Journal Article