Author: Matthew E. Gladden
Publisher: Defragmenter Media
ISBN: 1944373748
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 362
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Book Description
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.
Author: Matthew E. Gladden
Publisher: Defragmenter Media
ISBN: 1944373748
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 362
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Book Description
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.
Author: Eddie Lohmeyer
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501364898
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 216
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Book Description
Throughout the 1990s, artists experimented with game engine technologies to disrupt our habitual relationships to video games. They hacked, glitched, and dismantled popular first-person shooters such as Doom (1993) and Quake (1996) to engage players in new kinds of embodied activity. In Unstable Aesthetics: Game Engines and the Strangeness of Art Modding, Eddie Lohmeyer investigates historical episodes of art modding practices-the alteration of a game system's existing code or hardware to generate abstract spaces-situated around a recent archaeology of the game engine: software for rendering two and three-dimensional gameworlds. The contemporary artists highlighted throughout this book-Cory Arcangel, JODI, Julian Oliver, Krista Hoefle, and Brent Watanabe, among others - were attracted to the architectures of engines because they allowed them to explore vital relationships among abstraction, technology, and the body. Artists employed a range of modding techniques-hacking the ROM chips on Nintendo cartridges to produce experimental video, deconstructing source code to generate psychedelic glitch patterns, and collaging together surreal gameworlds-to intentionally dissect the engine's operations and unveil illusions of movement within algorithmic spaces. Through key moments in game engine history, Lohmeyer formulates a rich phenomenology of video games by focusing on the liminal spaces of interaction among system and body, or rather the strangeness of art modding.
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Author: Mark J. P. Wolf
Publisher: ABC-CLIO
ISBN: 1440870209
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 1288
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Book Description
Now in its second edition, the Encyclopedia of Video Games: The Culture, Technology, and Art of Gaming is the definitive, go-to resource for anyone interested in the diverse and expanding video game industry. This three-volume encyclopedia covers all things video games, including the games themselves, the companies that make them, and the people who play them. Written by scholars who are exceptionally knowledgeable in the field of video game studies, it notes genres, institutions, important concepts, theoretical concerns, and more and is the most comprehensive encyclopedia of video games of its kind, covering video games throughout all periods of their existence and geographically around the world. This is the second edition of Encyclopedia of Video Games: The Culture, Technology, and Art of Gaming, originally published in 2012. All of the entries have been revised to accommodate changes in the industry, and an additional volume has been added to address the recent developments, advances, and changes that have occurred in this ever-evolving field. This set is a vital resource for scholars and video game aficionados alike. Explores games, people, events, and ideas that are influential in the industry, rather than simply discussing the history of video games Offers a detailed understanding of the variety of video games that have been created over the years Includes contributions from some of the most important scholars of video games Suggests areas of further exploration for students of video games
Author: Stefano Gualeni
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030384780
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 123
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Book Description
This book explores what it means to exist in virtual worlds. Chiefly drawing on the philosophical traditions of existentialism, it articulates the idea that — by means of our technical equipment and coordinated practices — human beings disclose contexts or worlds in which they can perceive, feel, act, and think. More specifically, this book discusses how virtual worlds allow human beings to take new perspectives on their values and beliefs, and explore previously unexperienced ways of being. Virtual Existentialism will be useful for scholars working in the fields of philosophy, anthropology, media studies, and digital game studies.
Author: Seth Giddings
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1623568021
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. 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.
Author: Emir Bektic
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3839453291
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296
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Book Description
Videogames allow us to immerse ourselves in worlds that are reflective of cultural phenomena. At the same time, games are in the process of occupying and utilising the real world as a part of the game. The book provides a combination of theoretical and practical approaches to mixed reality through the lenses of game studies and pedagogy. These novel approaches invite the reader to rethink their conceptions of games and mixed reality. They are complemented with classical analyses of games and applications in educational contexts. In uniting theory and hands-on approaches, the book provides a broad spectrum that facilitates and inspires interdisciplinary thinking and work.
Author: Michael Thomas Carroll
Publisher: Popular Press
ISBN: 9780879728106
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284
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Book Description
Within popular culture studies, one finds discussions about quantitative sociology, Marxism, psychoanalysis, myth criticism, feminism, and semiotics, but hardly a word on the usefulness of phenomenology, the branch of philosophy concerned with human experience. In spite of this omission, there is a close relationship between the aims of phenomenology and the aims of popular culture studies, for both movements have attempted to redirect academic study toward everyday lived experience. The fifteen essays in this volume demonstrate the way in which phenomenological approaches can illuminate popular culture studies, and in so doing they take on the entire range of popular culture.
Author: Miguel Sicart
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262019787
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 189
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Book Description
How computer games can be designed to create ethically relevant experiences for players. Today's blockbuster video games—and their never-ending sequels, sagas, and reboots—provide plenty of excitement in high-resolution but for the most part fail to engage a player's moral imagination. In Beyond Choices, Miguel Sicart calls for a new generation of video and computer games that are ethically relevant by design. In the 1970s, mainstream films—including The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, Raging Bull, and Taxi Driver—filled theaters but also treated their audiences as thinking beings. Why can't mainstream video games have the same moral and aesthetic impact? Sicart argues that it is time for games to claim their place in the cultural landscape as vehicles for ethical reflection. Sicart looks at games in many manifestations: toys, analog games, computer and video games, interactive fictions, commercial entertainments, and independent releases. Drawing on philosophy, design theory, literary studies, aesthetics, and interviews with game developers, Sicart provides a systematic account of how games can be designed to challenge and enrich our moral lives. After discussing such topics as definition of ethical gameplay and the structure of the game as a designed object, Sicart offers a theory of the design of ethical game play. He also analyzes the ethical aspects of game play in a number of current games, including Spec Ops: The Line, Beautiful Escape: Dungeoneer, Fallout New Vegas, and Anna Anthropy's Dys4Ia. Games are designed to evoke specific emotions; games that engage players ethically, Sicart argues, enable us to explore and express our values through play.
Author: Espen Aarseth
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3839447305
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 316
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Book Description
Where do computer games »happen«? The articles collected in this pioneering volume explore the categories of »space«, »place« and »territory« featuring in most general theories of space to lay the groundwork for the study of spatiality in games. Shifting the focus away from earlier debates on, e.g., the narrative nature of games, this collection proposes, instead, that thorough attention be given to the tension between experienced spaces and narrated places as well as to the mapping of both of these.
Author: Gerald Farca
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3839445973
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 434
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Book Description
Video games permeate our everyday existence. They immerse players in fascinating gameworlds and exciting experiences, often inviting them in various ways to reflect on the enacted events. Gerald Farca explores the genre of dystopian video games and the player's aesthetic response to their nightmarish gameworlds. Players, he argues, will gradually come to see similarities between the virtual dystopia and their own 'offline' environment, thus learning to stay wary of social and political developments. In his analysis, Farca draws from a variety of research fields, such as literary theory and game studies, combining them into a coherent theory of aesthetic response to dystopian games.