Videogames
Download Videogames PDF/ePub or read online books in Mobi eBooks. Click Download or Read Online button to get Videogames book now. This website allows unlimited access to, at the time of writing, more than 1.5 million titles, including hundreds of thousands of titles in various foreign languages.
Understanding Video Games
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.
What Is a Game?
What is a videogame? What makes a videogame "good"? If a game is supposed to be fun, can it be fun without a good story? If another is supposed to be an accurate simulation, does it still need to be entertaining? With the ever-expanding explosion of new videogames and new developments in the gaming world, questions about videogame criticism are becoming more complex. The differing definitions that players and critics use to decide what a game is and what makes a game successful, often lead to different ideas of how games succeed or fail. This collection of new essays puts on display the variety and ambiguity of videogames. Each essay is a work of game criticism that takes a different approach to defining the game and analyzing it. Through analysis and critical methods, these essays discuss whether a game is defined by its rules, its narrative, its technology, or by the activity of playing it, and the tensions between these definitions. With essays on Overwatch, Dark Souls 3, Far Cry 4, Farmville and more, this collection attempts to show the complex changes, challenges and advances to game criticism in the era of videogames.
Unboxing Japanese Videogames
A new perspective on the spatial complexity and plurality of Japanese videogames. Unboxing Japanese Videogames uncovers the complex and plural spatialities of commercial videogames published in Japan between 1985 and 2015. Rejecting the “boxing” inherent in the phrase “Japanese videogames,” Martin Roth explores a series of spatialities that unfold in videogame production and distribution. The book develops a notion of spatialization that is applied in the analysis of contents or genre distributions in Japan, the US, the UK, Germany, and France, the distribution of videogame works across different important markets, the geography of actors involved in videogame production and their gradual spatialization over time, and the functional spatialization of game production across a diverse range of platforms. This book is the first English-language study to provide an overview of the subject and also the first to explore the spatial history of FromSoftware games. It stands out because it does so quantitatively, offering a macro-perspective on the field of commercial videogames instead of relying on sales statistics or case studies. In addition to a wide range of related scholarship in English, the book engages actively with scholarship and other relevant resources in Japanese. Over thirty visualizations make the findings of the book tangible and invite the reader to explore the spatial complexity of commercial videogames further.
