Ultima and Worldbuilding in the Computer Role-Playing Game

Author: Carly A. Kocurek
Publisher: Amherst College Press
ISBN: 1943208654
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 197

Book Description
Ultima and World-Building in the Computer Role-Playing Game is the first scholarly book to focus exclusively on the long-running Ultima series of computer role-playing games (RPG) and to assess its lasting impact on the RPG genre and video game industry. Through archival and popular media sources, examinations of fan communities, and the game itself, this book historicizes the games and their authors. By attending to the salient moments and sites of game creation throughout the series’ storied past, authors Carly A. Kocurek and Matthew Thomas Payne detail the creative choices and structural forces that brought Ultima’s celebrated brand of role-playing to fruition. This book first considers the contributions of series founder and lead designer, Richard Garriott, examining how his fame and notoriety as a pioneering computer game auteur shaped Ultima’s reception and paved the way for the evolution of the series. Next, the authors retrace the steps that Garriott took in fusing analog, tabletop role-playing with his self-taught lessons in computer programming. Close textual analyses of Ultima I outline how its gameplay elements offered a foundational framework for subsequent innovations in design and storytelling. Moving beyond the game itself, the authors assess how marketing materials and physical collectibles amplified its immersive hold and how the series’ legions of fans have preserved the series. Game designers, long-time gamers, and fans will enjoy digging into the games’ production history and mechanics while media studies and game scholars will find Ultima and World-Building in the Computer Role-Playing Game a useful extension of inquiry into authorship, media history, and the role of fantasy in computer game design.

WORLDBUILDING

Author: Julia Stoschek Foundation
Publisher: Hatje Cantz Verlag
ISBN: 3775757015
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 178

Book Description
WORLDBUILDING: Gaming and Art in the Digital Age examines the relationship between gaming and time-based media art. It is the first transgenerational show of this scope to survey how contemporary artists world-wide are appropriating the aesthetics and technology of gaming as their form of expression. Commissioned by the Julia Stoschek Foundation and curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, the exhibition features works by more than 50 artists, including Rebecca Allen, Cory Arcangel, LaTurbo Avedon, Meriem Bennani, Ian Cheng, Cao Fei, Harun Farocki, Porpentine Charity Heartscape, Pierre Huyghe, Rindon Johnson, KAWS, Sondra Perry, Jacolby Satterwhite, Sturtevant, and Suzanne Treister. This catalogue is conceptualized as a future standard reference in the field in close collaboration with Hans Ulrich Obrist. In addition to texts by contemporary theorists, curators, and critics on the individual works, a series of newly commissioned contributions will investigate various perspectives on the intersection of gaming and time-based media art. This playfully designed volume features rounded edges, a screen-printed PVC dust jacket and kiss-cut stickers showing a range of different digital avatars.

Patricia A. McKillip and the Art of Fantasy World-Building

Author: Audrey Isabel Taylor
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 147663145X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 191

Book Description
From wondrous fairy-lands to nightmarish hellscapes, the elements that make fantasy worlds come alive also invite their exploration. This first book-length study of critically acclaimed novelist Patricia A. McKillip's lyrical other-worlds analyzes her characters, environments and legends and their interplay with genre expectations. The author gives long overdue critical attention to McKillip's work and demonstrates how a broader understanding of world-building enables a deeper appreciation of her fantasies.

30 Days of Worldbuilding

Author: A Trevena
Publisher: Maythorne Press
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 80

Book Description
Overwhelmed by creating fantasy worlds? Lost in your world? Unsure where to go next? 30 Days of Worldbuilding breaks the task into manageable chunks. By following 30 creative prompts, this book will guide you from idea, to full world. This workbook will help you to: - Break the epic task of worldbuilding into easy steps - Build a full and complete world with prompts you may not have thought of - Tie your worldbuilding into your story to increase tension and conflict - Bring your worldbuilding back to your characters to get your readers hooked By completing just one prompt each day, you can have a fully created fantasy world in a month. You will also have an invaluable book of worldbuilding notes to keep beside you as you write. Get 30 Days of Worldbuilding today, and stop getting lost in your world.

World Building in Spanish and English Spoken Narratives

Author: Jane Lugea
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474282474
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 237

Book Description
Text World Theory is a powerful framework for discourse analysis that, thus far, has only been used in monolingual Anglophone stylistic analyses. This work adapts Text World Theory for the analysis of Spanish discourse, and in doing so suggests some improvements to the way in which it deals with discourse - in particular, with direct speech and conditional expressions. Furthermore, it applies Text World Theory in a novel way, searching not for style in language, but for the style of a language. Focusing principally on deixis and modality, the author examines whether Spanish speakers and English speakers construct the narrative text-world in any patterned ways. To do so, the 'frog story' methodology is employed, eliciting spoken narratives from native adult speakers of both languages by means of a children's picture book. These narratives are transcribed and subjected to a qualitative text-world analysis, which is supported with a quantitative corpus analysis. The results reveal contrasts in Spanish and English speakers' use of modality and deixis in building the same narrative text-world, and are relevant to scholars working in language typology, cross-cultural pragmatics and translation studies. These novel applications of the Text World Theory push the boundaries of stylistics in new directions, broadening the focus from monolingual texts to languages at large.

Music and World-Building in the Colonial City

Author: Helen English
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429663412
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 222

Book Description
Music and World-Building in the Colonial City investigates how nineteenth-century migrants to Australia used music as a resource for world-building, focusing on coalmining regions of New South Wales. It explores how music-making helped British migrants to create communities in unfamiliar country, often with little to no infrastructure. Its key themes are as follows: people’s relationships to music within specific contexts; how music-making intersects with class, gender and ethnic background; identity through music. Situated within a wider discourse on music and identity, music and well-being and music and emotions, this is an authoritative study of historical communities and their relationship with music. It will be of particular interest to scholars and researchers working in the fields of sociomusicology, colonial studies and cultural studies.

Reimagining Adult Education as World Building

Author: Aliki Nicolaides
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100386015X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 155

Book Description
Reimagining Adult Education as World Building offers a new way of thinking about adult education by re-envisaging how adult education works. It explores how the process of world building, or the invention of a new world or a set of concepts, can be translated into actual and feasible action when turning towards complex, real-life problems. Cultivating contexts where adult educators can become change agents, who recognize that the individual and community are intricately entangled, demands that educators grow new capacities, make new tools, develop thicker networks, and cultivate intentional links amongst each other to foster ecologies of transformation. This book shows how educators can create an ecology or environment for transformative thinking where students can learn to collaborate and use world building tools to create new responses to current issues. It begins by explaining the philosophical underpinnings of world building and the tools that translate pragmatic imagination into scaffolds for individual and collective capacity building. It also illustrates how the worldbuilding protocol makes a difference in adult learning and how this pedagogical tool introduces the ecological approach to adult education. Each chapter explores a practical case study, showing how learners have applied worldbuilding tools to complex challenges. Showing how to apply the world building protocol in a classroom setting, this edited collection will be valuable to Adult Education scholars, researchers, practitioners, and learning facilitators.

Familiar Talks on Science: World-Building and Life; Earth, Air and Water.

Author: Elisha Gray
Publisher: Litres
ISBN: 5040853726
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description

The Ultimate RPG Game Master's Worldbuilding Guide

Author: James D’Amato
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1507215517
Category : Crafts & Hobbies
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description
Level up your Game Master skills with these fun, interactive prompts and activities to help your worldbuilding from RPG expert James D’Amato. Make your next campaign truly unique with the help of this interactive guide to world building! From RPG expert James D’Amato comes a fun new guide that teaches beginner and experienced gamers alike how to build and create their own game elements for customizing existing adventures or creating new stories from scratch. The Ultimate RPG Game Master’s Worldbuilding Guide includes dozens of activities for a wide range of genres from fantasy and sci-fi to horror and x-punk. This lively and interactive book helps Game Masters create dynamic destinations, powerful items, shadowy organizations, compelling villains, and more. Make the most of your gaming experience with these unique and personalized ideas for your gaming group’s next adventures!

Cinema as a Worldbuilding Machine in the Digital Era

Author: Alain Boillat
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0861969812
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 456

Book Description
This essay examines the primacy of worldbuilding in the age of CGI, transmedia practices and "high concept" fiction by studying the principles that govern the creation of a multiverse in a wide range of film and TV productions. Emphasis is placed on Hollywood sci-fi movies and their on-screen representation of imaginary machines that mirror the film medium, following in the tradition of Philip K. Dick's writings and the cyberpunk culture. A typology of worlds is established, as well as a number of analytical tools for assessing the impact of the coexistence of two or more worlds on the narrative structure, the style (uses of color, editing practices), the generic affiliation (or hybridity), the seriality and the discourse produced by a given film (particularly in fictions linked to post-9/11 fantasies). Among the various titles examined, the reader is offered a detailed analysis of the Resident Evil film series, Total Recall and its remake, Dark City, the Matrix trilogy, Avatar, Source Code and other time-loop films, TRON and its sequel, Christopher Nolan's Tenet, and several TV shows – most notably HBO's Westworld, but also Sliders, Lost, Fringe and Counterpart.