Jul 082023
 

A Springer tem uma série de livros “International Series on Computer, Entertainment and Media Technology” que este ano vai publicar o livro “The Structure of Game Design” com as secções de:
Part I
Front Matter
Creating a Game Idea
Defining a Game Idea
The Appeal of Games
Game Design Elements
Understanding Game Loops
Randomness in Games
Psychology in Games
Game Balance
Part II
Front Matter
Understanding Fun
Fun in Movement
Fun in Puzzles
Fun in Combat
Fun in Strategy
Fun in Economics
Fun in Storytelling
Part III
Front Matter
Turning a Game Idea into a Real Game

O resumo:
“The Structure of Game Design is designed to help aspiring and existing game designers turn their ideas into working games. Creating a game involves understanding the core foundational elements of all types of games from paper-based games to the latest video games. By understanding how these core principles work in all types of games, you can apply these same principles to design your own game.

Games are about goals, structure, play and fun. While everyone will always have their own idea of what might be “fun”, any game designer can maximize player enjoyment through meaningful choices that offer various risks and rewards. Such challenges, combined with rules and limitations, force players to overcome obstacles and problems using a variety of skills including dexterity, puzzle solving, intelligence, and strategy. Essentially games allow players to venture forth into new worlds and overcome problems in a safe but exciting environment that allows them to triumph in the end.
Just as playing games have proven popular around the world to all ages, genders, and cultures, so has game designing proven equally popular. Games can challenge players to make the best move, solve puzzles, engage in combat, manage resources, and tell stories. By understanding how randomness, psychology, and balance can change the way games play, readers can decide what game elements are best for their own game creation.

Whether your goal is to make money, learn something new, make a social statement, improve on an existing game idea, or challenge your artistic, programming, or design skills, game design can be just as much fun as game playing. By knowing the parts of a game, how they work, how they interact, and why they’re fun, you can use your knowledge to turn any idea into a game that others can play and enjoy.”

+infos(oficial): https://www.springer.com/series/13820/

Jun 282022
 

Gostava de ter acesso a este livro “Fifty Key Video Games” editado por Bernard Perron, Kelly Boudreau, Mark J.P. Wolf, Dominic Arsenault

Do conteúdo consta: “This volume examines fifty of the most important video games that have contributed significantly to the history, development, or culture of the medium, providing an overview of video games from their beginning to the present day.
This volume covers a variety of historical periods and platforms, genres, commercial impact, artistic choices, contexts of play, typical and atypical representations, uses of games for specific purposes, uses of materials or techniques, specific subcultures, repurposing, transgressive aesthetics, interfaces, moral or ethical impact, and more. Key video games featured include Animal Crossing, Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, The Legend of Zelda, Minecraft, PONG, Super Mario Bros., Tetris, and World of Warcraft. Each game is closely analyzed in order to properly contextualize it, to emphasize its prominent features, to show how it creates a unique experience of gameplay, and to outline the ways it might speak about society and culture. The book also acts as a highly accessible showcase to a range of disciplinary perspectives that are found and practiced in the field of game studies.
With each entry supplemented by references and suggestions for further reading, Fifty Key Video Games is an indispensable reference for anyone interested in video games.”

da lista de jogos consta:
1. Adventure (1979),
2. Angry Birds (2009),
3. Animal Crossing (2001),
4. Assassin’s Creed Origins (2017),
5. Bejeweled (2001),
6. BRAID (2008),
7. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009),
8. Dance Dance Revolution (1998),
9. Diablo (1996),
10. Donkey Kong (1981),
11. DOOM (1993),
12. Dragon’s Lair (1983),
13. The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall (1996),
14. Elite (1984),
15. EVE Online (2003),
16. FarmVille (2009),
17. FIFA 14 (2013),
18. Final Fantasy VII (1997),
19. Fortnite Battle Royale (2017),
20. Grand Theft Auto III (2001),
21. Guitar Hero (2005),
22. Half-Life (1998),
23. Journey (2012),
24. King’s Quest (1984),
25. The Legend of Zelda (1986),
26. Minecraft (2009),
27. Mortal Kombat (1992),
28. Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit (1998),
29. No Man’s Sky (2016),
30. The Oregon Trail (1971),
31. Pac-Man (1980),
32. Pokémon Go (2016),
33. PONG (1972),
34. Portal (2007),
35. Resident Evil (1996),
36. Riven (1997),
37. Sid Meier’s Civilization (1991),
38. SimCity (1989),
39. The Sims 4 (2014),
40. Space Invaders (1978),
41. StarCraft (1998),
42. Super Mario 64 (1996),
43. Super Mario Bros. (1985),
44. Tetris (1984),
45. This War of Mine (2014),
46. Ultima IV: The Quest of the Avatar (1985),
47. Wii Sports (2006),
48. Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger (1994),
49. World of Warcraft (2004),
50. Zork (1980)

+infos(oficial): LINK

Jun 172022
 

Gostava de ter acesso a este livro:
Live Visuals, History, Theory, Practice dos editores BySteve Gibson, Stefan Arisona, Donna Leishman, Atau Tanaka

“This volume surveys the key histories, theories and practice of artists, musicians, filmmakers, designers, architects and technologists that have worked and continue to work with visual material in real time.
Covering a wide historical period from Pythagoras’s mathematics of music and colour in ancient Greece, to Castel’s ocular harpsichord in the 18th century, to the visual music of the mid-20th century, to the liquid light shows of the 1960s and finally to the virtual reality and projection mapping of the present moment, Live Visuals is both an overarching history of real-time visuals and audio-visual art and a crucial source for understanding the various theories about audio-visual synchronization. With the inclusion of an overview of various forms of contemporary practice in Live Visuals culture – from VJing to immersive environments, architecture to design – Live Visuals also presents the key ideas of practitioners who work with the visual in a live context.
This book will appeal to a wide range of scholars, students, artists, designers and enthusiasts. It will particularly interest VJs, DJs, electronic musicians, filmmakers, interaction designers and technologists.”

do índice faz parte:
PART I THE HISTORY OF LIVE VISUALS
Chapter 1 – Inventing Instruments: Colour-Tone Correspondence to Colour-Music Performance (pre-1900) de Maura McDonnell
Chapter 2 – Moving Towards the Performed Image (Colour Organs, Synesthesia and Visual Music): Early Modernism (1900-1955) de Steve Gibson
Chapter 3 – Liquid Visuals: Late Modernism and Analogue Live Visuals (1950-1985) de Steve Gibson
Chapter 4 – Scratch Video and Rave: The Rise of the Live Visuals Performer (1985-2000) de Léon McCarthy and Steve Gibson
Chapter 5 – The Post-conceptual Digital Era (2000-present) de Paul Goodfellow and Steve Gibson

PART II THE THEORY OF LIVE VISUALS
Chapter 6 – Cross-Modal Theories of Sound and Image de Joseph Hyde
Chapter 7 – Live Visuals in Theory and Art de Paul Goodfellow
Chapter 8 – Live Visuals: Technology and Aesthetics de Léon McCarthy
Chapter 9 – AVUIs: Audio-Visual User Interfaces – Working with Users to Create Performance Technologies de Nuno N. Correia and Atau Tanaka
Chapter 10 – A Parametric Model for Audio-Visual Instrument Design, Composition and Performance de Adriana Sá and Atau Tanaka
Chapter 11 – Presence and Live Visuals Performance de Donna Leishman

PART III THE PRACTICE OF LIVE VISUALS
Chapter 12 – VJing, Live Audio-Visuals and Live Cinema de Steve Gibson and Stefan Arisona
Chapter 13 – Immersive Environments and Live Visuals de Steve Gibson
Chapter 14 – Architectural Projections: Changing the Perception of Architecture with Light de Simon Schubiger, Stefan Arisona, Lukas Treyer, and Gerhard Schmitt
Chapter 15 – Design and Live Visuals de Donna Leishman

PART IV INTERVIEWS WITH KEY PRACITIONERS–STEVE GIBSON
Chapter 16 – Interview 1 – Tony Hill, Expanded Cinema pioneer
Chapter 17 – Interview 2 – Christopher Thomas Allen, Founder & Director, The Light Surgeons
Chapter 18 – Interview 3 - Greg Hermanovic, CEO, Derivative
Chapter 19 – Interview 4 – Markus Heckmann, Technical Director, Derivative; Programmer for Carsten Nicolai and others.
Chapter 20 – Interview 5 – Peter Mettler, Digital and Live Cinema Artist

+infos(oficial): LINK

May 012022
 

Da apresentação do livro “Code as Creative Medium: A Handbook for Computational Art and Design de Golan Levin, Tega Brain” em que:
“An essential guide for teaching and learning computational art and design: exercises, assignments, interviews, and more than 170 illustrations of creative work.
This book is an essential resource for art educators and practitioners who want to explore code as a creative medium, and serves as a guide for computer scientists transitioning from STEM to STEAM in their syllabi or practice. It provides a collection of classic creative coding prompts and assignments, accompanied by annotated examples of both classic and contemporary projects, and more than 170 illustrations of creative work, and features a set of interviews with leading educators. Picking up where standard programming guides leave off, the authors highlight alternative programming pedagogies suitable for the art- and design-oriented classroom, including teaching approaches, resources, and community support structures.”

Do índice consta:
Part One: Assignments
Iterative Pattern
Face Generator
Clock
Generative Landscape
Virtual Creature
Custom Pixel
Drawing Machine
Modular Alphabet
Data Self-Portrait
Augmented Projection
One-Button Game
Bot
Collective Memory
Experimental Chat
Browser Extension
Creative Cryptography
Voice Machine
Measuring Device
Personal Prosthetic
Parametric Object
Virtual Public Sculpture
Extrapolated Body
Synesthetic Instrument

Part Two: Exercises
Computing without a Computer
Graphic Elements
Iteration
Color
Conditional Testing
Unpredictability
Arrays
Time and Interactivity
Typography
Curves
Shapes
Geometry
Image
Visualization
Text and Language
Simulation
Machine Learning
Sound
Games

Part Three: Interviews
Teaching Programming
to Artists and Designers
The Bimodal Classroom
Encouraging a Point of View
The First Day
Favorite Assignment
When Things Go Wrong
Most Memorable Response
Advice for New Educators

Classroom Techniques

Provenance

Appendices
Authors and Contributors
Notes on Computational
Book Design
Acknowledgments

+infos(oficial): https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/code-creative-medium

Mar 262022
 

A autora Marina Umaschi Bers lançou mais um livro acerca de crianças e pelo facto delas aprenderem a escrever código, com o titulo “Beyond Coding HOW CHILDREN LEARN HUMAN VALUES THROUGH PROGRAMMING” e que tem como conteúdo:
1 Coding, Robotics, and Values 1
2 The Coding Wars 23
3 The Rise of STEM 45
4 Coding as Another Language 63
5 From Theory to Practice 87
6 Coding Character 117
7 The Palette of Virtues 137
8 Coding Bridges 183
Further Readings 203
Resources 205

do texto de apresentação surge:
“Today, schools are introducing STEM education and robotics to children in ever-lower grades. In Beyond Coding, Marina Umaschi Bers lays out a pedagogical roadmap for teaching code that encompasses the cultivation of character along with technical knowledge and skills. Presenting code as a universal language, she shows how children discover new ways of thinking, relating, and behaving through creative coding activities. Today’s children will undoubtedly have the technical knowledge to change the world. But cultivating strength of character, socioeconomic maturity, and a moral compass alongside that knowledge, says Bers, is crucial.

Bers, a leading proponent of teaching computational thinking and coding as early as preschool and kindergarten, presents examples of children and teachers using the Scratch Jr. and Kibo robotics platforms to make explicit some of the positive values implicit in the process of learning computer science. If we are to do right by our children, our approach to coding must incorporate the elements of a moral education: the use of narrative to explore identity and values, the development of logical thinking to think critically and solve technical and ethical problems, and experiences in the community to enable personal relationships. Through learning the language of programming, says Bers, it is possible for diverse cultural and religious groups to find points of connection, put assumptions and stereotypes behind them, and work together toward a common goal.”

+infos(oficial): LINK

Feb 122022
 

Minor Platforms in Videogame History de Benjamin Nicoll
Videogame history is not just a history of one successful technology replacing the next. It is also a history of platforms and communities that never quite made it; that struggled to make their voices heard; that aggravated against the conventions of the day; and that never enjoyed the commercial success or recognition of their major counterparts. In Minor Platforms in Videogame History, Benjamin Nicoll argues that ‘minor’ videogame histories are anything but insignificant. Through an analysis of transitional, decolonial, imaginary, residual, and minor videogame platforms, Nicoll highlights moments of difference and discontinuity in videogame history. From the domestication of vector graphics in the early years of videogame consoles to the ‘cloning’ of Japanese computer games in South Korea in the 1980s, this book explores case studies that challenge taken-for-granted approaches to videogames, platforms, and their histories.

+infos(oficial): LINK

Perspectives on the European Videogame, editores Víctor Navarro-Remesal, Óliver Pérez-Latorre
The history of European videogames has so far been overshadowed by the global impact of the Japanese and North American industries. However, European game development studios have played a major role in videogame history, and many prominent videogames in popular culture, such as Grand Theft Auto, Tomb Raider, Alone in the Dark, and The Witcher, were made in Europe. This book proposes an inquiry into European videogames, including both analyses of transnational aspects of European production and close readings of national specificities. It offers a kaleidoscope of European videogame culture, focusing on the analysis of European works and creators but also addressing contextual aspects and placing videogames within a wider sociocultural and philosophical ground.
The aim of this collective work is to contribute to the creation of a, until now, almost non-existent yet necessary academic endeavour: a story and critical exploration of the works, authors, styles, and cultures of the European videogame.

+infos(oficial): LINK

Jan 072022
 

Encontrei este livro: “Why Video Games are Good for Your Soul” de James Paul Gee que parece ser interessante de se ler. Tentei obter informações acerca do índice do livro mas sem sucesso, contudo o o google books disponibiliza esta parte e que é a introdução:
“Good video games are good for your soul. Now there’s a statement that begs for some qualifications!

First, what’s a video game? What I mean are the sorts of commercial games people play on computers and game platforms like the Playstation 2, the GameCube, the Xbox, and the handheld Game Boy. I mean action, adventure, shooter, strategy, sports, and role-playing games. I mean games like Castlevania, Half-Life, Deus Ex, Metal Gear Solid, Max Payne, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Tony Hawk Underground, Rise of Nations, Civilization, Age of Mythology, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, Allied Assault, Call of Duty, Tales of Symphonia, 1C0, Pikmin, Zelda: The Wind Waker, and Ninja Gaiden to name some random good games off the top of my head. There are many others.

Second, what does “good for you” mean? Next to nothing is good or bad for you in and of itself and all by itself. It all depends on how it is used and the context in which it is used. Is television good or bad for children? Neither and both. It’s good if people around them are getting them to think and talk about what they are watching, bad when they sit there alone watching passively being baby-sat by the tube (Greenfield 1984). The same is true of books. Reading reflectively, asking yourself questions, and engaging in a dialogue with others, is good for your head. Believing everything you read uncritically is bad for you and for the rest of us, as well, since you may well become a danger to the world.

So good video games are good for your soul when you play them with thought, reflection, and engagement with the world around you. They are good if, as a player, you begin to think and act like a game designer While you play the game, something good games encourage. After all, players co-author games by playing them, since if the player doesn’t interact with the game and make choices about what will happen, nothing will happen. Each page of a book and each scene in a move is predetermined before you see it and is the same for every reader. Many acts and their order in a video game, however, are open to player choice and different for different players.

So, then, what’s a good, as opposed to a bad, Video game? It would take a book longer than this one to explicate what makes good games good and gamers don’t know how to put it all into words. You have to play the games. So, then, what’s a good, as opposed to a bad, video game? It would take a book longer than this one to explicate what makes good games good and gamers don’t know how to put it all into words. You have to play the games.
Good games are the ones gamers come to see as “gaming goodness”, “fair”, and sometimes even “deep”—all terms of gaming art. Good games are the games that lots of gamers come to agree are good, though they rarely think any one game is perfect.

Some games, like [CO or American McGee’s Alice, get discovered late and become underground classics, while others, like Half-Life or Zelda: The Wind Waker, nearly everyone agrees from the outset are good. Then there are
games like Anachronox, which didn’t sell well and received some rather tepid reviews, but is, I’m telling you, a darn good game—you see I have my own opinions about these matters. In fact, different gamers like and dislike different games and different types of games.

OK, then, what for heaven’s sake is your soul? And what could playing Video games have to do with it? Once, years ago, I had the special experience of going back into time and living for several years in the Middle Ages. The
details need not detain us—you’ll just have to trust me on this—but, believe me, that experience taught me what souls meant in one context. That is not what I mean here.

Too often in the world today people from all sorts of religions believe that those who don’t share their beliefs will go to some sort of hell and, worse, they are sometimes willing to make life hell for others here and now to help them, whether they like it or not, avoid going to hell. Or, perhaps, they just make life hell for others to ensure that they themselves will go to heaven, having displayed their merit by removing a suitable number of infidels. While I do retain a certain nostalgia for the Middle Ages, that nostalgia plays no role in this book.

So what could I mean by “soul?” I mean What the poet Emily Dickinson meant (Dickinson 1924):
My life closed twice before its close —
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me

So huge, so hopeless to conceive
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.

What Emily Dickinson is talking about here is not the immortality, heaven, and hell of traditional religion (Dickinson was skeptical of traditional religion at a time and place where that was socially dangerous, especially for women). She is talking about a fact that every human being knows and feels, a fact that defines what it means to be human. This fact is that we each have two parts. One of these parts is our body. If you truly traumatize the body, it will die and it can die but once, which is, indeed, a mercy.

But there is another part of us, a part to which different religions and cultures through the ages have given different names. This part—let’s just say it is our “soul”—can be traumatized over and over again and not die, just as in the case of the two emotionally damaging events to which Emily Dickinson alludes. No mercy here, as we all very well know, unless you have been very fortunate, indeed, in your life. The rest of us have, if old enough, already died more than once. This part—this soul—is immortal in the sense that, until the body goes, it can go on suffering grievously over and over again, suffering many deaths, unlike the body which can die but once.

But it is because we have this soul part that events and other people can take on such a charge for human beings. It is because we have this soul part that events and other people can give us what we know of heaven here on earth. It is only because losing a loved one, either by death or parting, as Dickinson is alluding to, can give rise to such pain that loving others can rise to such joy. You can’t really have the one without the other. Having the charge, the spark, is heaven and losing it is hell. But you can’t have it if there is no chance of losing it, that’s the way of life for us humans. That’s why we “need” hell. There is no heaven without hell, no positive charges without risk of negative ones.

Emily Dickinson very well knew, then, that it matters hugely whether life here and now for people is heaven or hell. It matters hugely whether we help make life heaven or hell for others, whether we murder or rejoice their other parts, their souls, that part of them that cannot die as long as they have their bodies. It matters. We can be complicit with murder without having killed anyone. The world can murder us several times over long before it takes our bodies.

The Middle Ages saw to it that peasants and the poor died many times before they died. The rich got off more easily, though, by the nature of life itself, they, too, paid their soul dues. Modern life offers more opportunities, but more complexity, as well. For many people—perhaps, all of us at times—modern life offers too much risk and too much complexity (Kelly 1994). We don’t really understand what’s going on around us, lots of it just doesn’t make any good sense, at least as far as we can tell. We can understand why some people turn to fundamentalism to garner secure “truths” without thought and reflection. It is, indeed, an attempt to save their souls, to protect themselves from the traumas of modern life, a life Where often the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and everyone suffers risks created by other people, even people clear across the globe.

If people are to nurture their souls, they need to feel a sense of control, meaningfulness, even expertise in the face of risk and complexity. They want and need to feel like heroes in their own life stories and to feel that their stories make sense. They need to feel that they matter and that they have mattered in other people’s stories. If the body feeds on food, the soul feeds on agency and meaningfulness. I will argue that good video games are, in this sense, food for the soul, particularly appropriate food in modern times. Of course, the hope is that this food will empower the soul to find agency and meaning in other aspects of life.

This book is primarily about the pleasures—the charge—that good video games can give people. These pleasures are connected to control, agency, and meaningfulness. But it is also about how good games create deep learning, learning that is better than what we often see today in our schools. Pleasure and learning: For most people these two don’t seem to go together. But that is a mistruth we have picked up at school, where we have been taught that pleasure is fun and learning is work, and, thus, that work is not fun (Gee 2004). But, in fact, good videos games are hard work and deep fun. So is good learning in other contexts.

Pleasure is the basis of learning for humans and learning is, like sex and eating, deeply pleasurable for human beings. Learning is a basic drive for humans. School has taught people to fear and avoid learning as anorexics fear and avoid food, it has turned some people into mental anorexics. Some of these same people learn deeply in and through games, though they say they are playing, not learning. The other people who often say they are playing When they’re working hard at learning are those professionals—scientists, scholars, and craftsmen—who love their work. There is a reason for this kinship between gamers and professionals and that will be one of the things I deal with in this book.

This book is written for anyone interested in video games, whether this be gamers, people interested in learning, or people interested in the pervasive role Video games play in modern society and across the world. After all, games are a massive economic force today and an even more major cultural force, since they are a shared cultui‘e among many young people across the globe (Kent 2001; King 2002; King & Borland 2003; Poole 2002). This book is meant to be a contribution to the emerging field of game studies, though I argue that game studies should interest a wide array of people, gamers and non-gamers alike (Aarseth 1997; Juul 2004; Laurel 1993; Murray 1998; Salin & Zimmerman 2003; Wardrip-Fruin & Harrigan 2004; Wolf 2002, 2003).

I have a confession to make, though. I offer here a partial “theory of games”. I hate to tell you this, because I know lots of you will not like to hear it, since “theory” sounds so boring. But I hasten to add, the book contains precious little jargon (much less than readers had to endure in my earlier book What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, 2003). I hasten to add, as well, that I never venture too far from talking about actual games. Things stick pretty close to the ground, I hope. No arcane philosophy, I promise (well, maybe you found the stuff on the soul arcane).

Well, we have to deal with it. We all know the topic is looming over us. What about violence and video games? Does playing video games lead people to be more violent? More ink has been devoted to this topic than any other concerned with video games. But most of that ink has been wasted.

The 19th century was infinitely more violent than the 20th in terms of crime (though not actual warfare) and no one played Video games. The politicians who have heretofore sent people to war have not played video games—they’re too old. The Japanese play video games more than Americans do, as, indeed, they watch more television, but their society is much less violent than America’s. No, as we said above, video games are neither good nor bad all by themselves, they neither lead to Violence or peace. They can be and do one thing in one family, social, or cultural context, quite another in other such contexts.

If you want to lower Violence, then worry about those contexts, which all extend well beyond just playing video games. Politicians who get hot and heavy about violence in video games usually don’t want to worry about such contexts, contexts like poverty, bad parenting, and a culture that celebrates greed, war, and winning. Too expensive, perhaps. In my View, the violence and Video games question is a silly one and you won’t hear more about it here. I do live in fear of people who would kill someone because they have played a Video game, but I know that they would equally kill someone if they had read a book or seen a movie or even overheard another nut and I would like you first to take their weapons away. Then, too, someone should have taught these people how to play video games, read books, and watch movies critically and reflectively.

In a world in which millions of people across the globe are dying in real wars, many of them civil wars, it is surely a luxury that we can worry about little boys getting excited for ten minutes after playing a shooter. There are much better things to worry about and I just pray that a time comes in the world where such a problem really merits serious attention. Let’s stop the killing, for example in Africa, on the part of people who have never played a video game before we ban games, books, and movies to save ourselves from a handful of disturbed teenagers who would have been better served by better families and schools.

On a more positive note, we should realize that the possibilities of video games and the technologies by which they are made are immense. Video games hold out immense economic opportunities for business and for careers. They hold out equally immense possibilities for the transformation of learning inside and outside schools. They hold out immense promise for changing how people think, value, and live. We haven’t seen the beginning yet. As I write, all the game platforms are on their last legs, soon to replaced by more powerful devices. What wonderful worlds will we eventually see? What charged virtual lives will we be able to live?

The Wild West and space were seen new frontiers. Video games and the virtual worlds to which they give birth are, too, a new frontier and we don’t know where they will lead. It would be a shame, indeed, not to find out because, like any frontier, they were fraught with risk and the unknown. But, then, I have already admitted that all of us in the complex modern world are frightened of risk and the unknown. But that, I will argue, is a disease of the soul that good games can help alleviate, though, of course, not cure. I talk about specific games in this book. The danger is that any game can come to seem out of date as newer shiner games appear on the market. But this is a mistake. New games will offer new things (so long as the industry doesn’t monopolize), but good older games retain their gaming goodness and we have lots to learn from them. Indeed, we will start with Castlevania:
Symphony of the Night, a game made for the old PSOne and a series with roots in even older game platforms. But Castlevania: Symphony of the Night retains all its greatness. It is still a wondrous gaming experience. Gaming is, by historical standards, brand new, but it already has its classics.

After Castlevania, we will move on to other, more contemporary games, games like Full Spectrum Warrior, Thief: Deadly Shadows, The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, Rise of Nations, and The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. I have chosen games that I myself like and that I think make my points well. But, there is no shortage of games from which to choose and many others would have done as well. Readers may well like different games than I do, though I would still argue that their pleasures stem from the some of the same sources I discuss here.

Not all my readers will be gamers and that is fine. I am an “old” gamer, an inveterate gamer who came to gaming late. Gamers may find I revel in what they take for granted, like a farmer in the big city for the first time. But then the farmer may see things big city folk have already forgotten. Non-gamers may not share my love for games, but I hope they will share my belief that this is an area of culture than must be taken seriously, especially if am right that we gamers are servicing our souls and recovering our atrophied learning muscles at the same time.

Some people may say, well, he’s really arguing it’s all about escape from the perils and pitfalls of real life. But, then, I will say there are escapes that lead no where, like hard drugs, and escapes like scholarly reflection and gaming that can lead to the imagination of new worlds, new possibilities to deal with those perils and pitfalls, new possibilities for better lives for everyone. Our emotions and imagination—our souls—need food for the journeys ahead.”

+infos(loja): LINK

Jan 042022
 

Encontrei este livro Black Games Studies, por Lindsay Grace

o resumo indica que:
“Black Game Studies introduces the work of game makers from the African diaspora through academic scholarship, personal narratives and a catalog of works. It aims to provide a foundation from which researchers, designers, developers, game historians and others can draw an understanding of patterns, present practice, and a potential afro-future. Its works to make more visible, through aggregation and showcase, the creative contributions of Black game makers. It is an effort to meet the need to diversify the game-making community by not only highlighting the work of Black people, but in creating an enduring archive of such work.”

Tem como secções:
An Introduction to Black Games, Blackness in Games, and Otherness
An overview of Games Made by Black Game Makers
Games about Location
Black Analog Game Designers
An Autobiography of Ehdrigohr
On Procedural Rhetoric and Designing Black Like Me
The Black Game Maker’s Experience
Overview on Personal Narratives

..mais informo que o livro (pdf) é gratuito!

+infos(oficial): LINK

Jul 062021
 

Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Narrative Aesthetics in Video Games

Foi publicado o livro com o titulo “Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Narrative Aesthetics in Video Games“, em que:
“Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Narrative Aesthetics in Video Games, Edited By Deniz Denizel, Deniz Eyüce Sansal and Tuna Tetik
Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Narrative Aesthetics in Video Gamesis a collection of contemporary research and interpretation that explores the narrative structures in video games and ludonarrative content design in related media. Featuring coverage of a broad range of topics, including narrative theory, game studies, history of video games, and interdisciplinary studies, this book is ideally designed for scholars, researchers, intellectuals, media professionals, game developers, entrepreneurs, and students who wish to enhance their understanding of the relationship and correlation of video games, narrativity, and aesthetics.”

do qual destaco:
“An Analysis of the Real-Time Strategy Games: The Nineties Extract, Pedro Rito
Abstract: This chapter aims to perform a scoping review related to video games of the genre Real-Time Strategy. Several video games have been associated with the strategy genre, and different titles have appeared on the market over time, some of which have a more military aspect and are usually associated with the subgenre of real-time strategy. These types of games tend to be more dynamic as opposed to turn-based because they feature time-based gameplay and choices about unit building. The difficulty of controlling all elements of the game makes them more attractive to players, with a high degree of uncertainty and complexity. Decisions are not perfect and most often are made abstractly. There has been a profusion of research work that makes use of RTS to develop AI or to build knowledge repositories with options that are made during games by players. The review that is made in this paper demonstrates the diversity of the formal elements that make up the RTS, identifies some of the initiatives that make use of RTS for research on certain topics, as well as the challenges that arise for game designers when making the choices they have to do.
Keywords: Video Games, Real-Time Strategy, Motivations, Game Design, Formal Elements, Military Aspect, Scope Review”

+infos(editora): https://www.peterlang.com/view/title/74563

+infos(amazon): LINK