"Peterson animates the history of role-playing games found in zines, from the collision of the niche audiences of war gaming and fantasy in the 60s to the extreme commercial growth of D&D in the 80s"--OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
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 ethical…
From the Publisher: World of Warcraft is more than a game. There is no ultimate goal, no winning hard, no princess to be rescued. WoW contains more than 5,000 possible quests, games within the game, and encompasses hundreds of separate parallel realms (computer serves, each of which can handle 4,000 players simultaneously). WoW is an immerse virtual world in which characters must cope in a dang…
"A history of "homebrew" gaming, focusing explicitly on the Australian and New Zealand contexts"--OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
"In The Well-Played Game, games guru Bernard De Koven explores the interaction of play and games, offering players -- as well as game designers, educators, and scholars -- a guide to how games work. De Koven's classic treatise on how human beings play together, first published in 1978, investigates many issues newly resonant in the era of video and computer games, including social gameplay and …
An examination of work, the organization of work, and the market forces that surround it, through the lens of the collaborative practice of game development. Rank-and-file game developers bring videogames from concept to product, and yet their work is almost invisible, hidden behind the famous names of publishers, executives, or console manufacturers. In this book, Casey O'Donnell examines t…
All games express and embody human values, providing a compelling arena in which we play out beliefs and ideas. "Big ideas" such as justice, equity, honesty, and cooperation -- as well as other kinds of ideas, including violence, exploitation, and greed -- may emerge in games whether designers intend them or not. In this book, Mary Flanagan and Helen Nissenbaum present Values at Play, a theoret…
An exploration of the way videogames mount arguments and make expressive statements about the world that analyzes their unique persuasive power in terms of their computational properties.Videogames are an expressive medium, and a persuasive medium; they represent how real and imagined systems work, and they invite players to interact with those systems and form judgments about them. In this inn…
"In Play Between Worlds, T.L. Taylor examines multiplayer gaming life as it is lived on the borders, in the gaps - as players slip in and out of complex social networks that cross online and offline space. Taylor questions the common assumption that playing computer games is an isolating and alienating activity indulged in by solitary teenage boys. Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), in…
In this book, 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, he develops a framework for understanding play, introducing a set of critical tools that can help analyze games and game designs and identify ways in wh…