"Millions of children visit virtual worlds every day. In such virtual play spaces as Habbo Hotel, Toontown, and Whyville, kids chat with friends from school, meet new people, construct avatars, and earn and spend virtual currency. In 'Connected Play', Yasmin Kafai and Deborah Fields investigate what happens when kids play in virtual worlds, how this matters for their offline lives, and what thi…
"How family video game play promotes intergenerational communication, connection, and learning. Video games have a bad reputation in the mainstream media. They are blamed for encouraging social isolation, promoting violence, and creating tensions between parents and children. In this book, Sinem Siyahhan and Elisabeth Gee offer another view. They show that video games can be a tool for connecti…
Journalism has embraced digital media in its struggle to survive. But most online journalism just translates existing practices to the Web: stories are written and edited as they are for print; video and audio features are produced as they would be for television and radio. The authors of Newsgames propose a new way of doing good journalism: videogames. Videogames are native to computers rather…
"In the early days of arcades and Nintendo, many players didn't recognize Japanese games as coming from Japan; they were simply new and interesting games to play. But since then, fans, media, and the games industry have thought further about the "Japaneseness" of particular games. Game developers try to decide whether a game's Japaneseness is a selling point or stumbling block; critics try to d…
What if every part of our everyday life was turned into a game? The implications of "gamification."OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
"While there have been a great many triumphs written about video games (the first game developed jointly by MIT and Harvard; the wild success of Pong at a rather seedy bar in Sunnyvale, CA; the Golden Age of Videogames; and the growing prominence of video games over screen-based entertainment mediums), there of course had to be failures and the Nintendo SNES (Super Nintendo Entertainment System…
Anyone who has ever been to a public hearing or community meeting would agree that participatory democracy can be boring. Hours of repetitive presentations, alternatingly alarmist or complacent, for or against, accompanied by constant heckling, often with no clear outcome or decision. Is this the best democracy can offer? In Making Democracy Fun, Josh Lerner offers a novel solution for the sad …
"Based on oral histories gathered from players, game creators and hobbyists active in the 1980s, as well as archival material like computer club newsletters, official documents, hobby magazines, TV broadcasts and the games produced in the period, Gaming the Iron Curtain offers a social history of games in Communist-era Czechoslovakia - a country with a rigid centrally planned economy, separated…
An investigation of the embodied engagement between the playing body and the videogame: how player and game incorporate each other. Our bodies engage with videogames in complex and fascinating ways. Through an entanglement of eyes-on-screens, ears-at-speakers, and muscles-against-interfaces, we experience games with our senses. But, as Brendan Keogh argues in A Play of Bodies , this corporal en…
"This book explains that the tools and concepts we use for making games are intimately connected to what games can and do mean"--OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.