Wandering Games

Wandering Games PDF Author: Melissa Kagen
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262370972
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 215

Book Description
An analysis of wandering within different game worlds, viewed through the lenses of work, colonialism, gender, and death. Wandering in games can be a theme, a formal mode, an aesthetic metaphor, or a player action. It can mean walking, escaping, traversing, meandering, or returning. In this book, game studies scholar Melissa Kagen introduces the concept of “wandering games,” exploring the uses of wandering in a variety of game worlds. She shows how the much-derided Walking Simulator—a term that began as an insult, a denigration of games that are less violent, less task-oriented, or less difficult to complete—semi-accidentally tapped into something brilliant: the vast heritage and intellectual history of the concept of walking in fiction, philosophy, pilgrimage, performance, and protest. Kagen examines wandering in a series of games that vary widely in terms of genre, mechanics, themes, player base, studio size, and funding, giving close readings to Return of the Obra Dinn, Eastshade, Ritual of the Moon, 80 Days, Heaven’s Vault, Death Stranding, and The Last of Us Part II. Exploring the connotations of wandering within these different game worlds, she considers how ideologies of work, gender, colonialism, and death inflect the ways we wander through digital spaces. Overlapping and intersecting, each provides a multifaceted lens through which to understand what wandering does, lacks, implies, and offers. Kagen’s account will attune game designers, players, and scholars to the myriad possibilities of the wandering ludic body.

The Elusive Shift

The Elusive Shift PDF Author: Jon Peterson
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262360942
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 332

Book Description
How the early Dungeons & Dragons community grappled with the nature of role-playing games, theorizing a new game genre. When Dungeon & Dragons made its debut in the mid-1970s, followed shortly thereafter by other, similar tabletop games, it sparked a renaissance in game design and critical thinking about games. D&D is now popularly considered to be the first role-playing game. But in the original rules, the term "role-playing" is nowhere to be found; D&D was marketed as a war game. In The Elusive Shift, Jon Peterson describes how players and scholars in the D&D community began to apply the term to D&D and similar games--and by doing so, established a new genre of games.

Traveling through Video Games

Traveling through Video Games PDF Author: Tom van Nuenen
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003827179
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 98

Book Description
This book unlocks an understanding of video games as virtual travel. It explains how video game design increasingly takes cues from the promotional language of tourism, and how this connection raises issues of power and commodification. Bridging the disciplinary gap between game and tourism studies, the book offers a comprehensive account of touristic gazing in games such as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Minecraft, and Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020. Traveling through video games involves a mythological promise of open-ended opportunity, summarized in the slogan you can go there. Van Nuenen discusses the scale of game worlds, the elusive nature of freedom and control, and the pivotal role of work in creating a sense of belonging. The logic of tourism is fundamentally consumptive—but through design choices, players can also be invited to approach their travels more critically. This is the difference between moving through a game world, and being moved by it. This interdisciplinary and innovative study will interest students and scholars of digital media studies, game studies, tourism and technology, and the Digital Humanities.

Wanderhome

Wanderhome PDF Author: Jay Dragon
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781954097025
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description
Wanderhome is a pastoral fantasy role-playing game about traveling animal-folk, the world they inhabit, and the way the seasons change. It is a game filled with grassy fields, mossy shrines, herds of chubby bumblebees, opossums in sundresses, salamanders with suspenders, starry night skies, and the most beautiful sunsets you can imagine.

Playing with Religion in Digital Games

Playing with Religion in Digital Games PDF Author: Heidi A. Campbell
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253012635
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 314

Book Description
Shaman, paragon, God-mode: modern video games are heavily coded with religious undertones. From the Shinto-inspired Japanese video game Okami to the internationally popular The Legend of Zelda and Halo, many video games rely on religious themes and symbols to drive the narrative and frame the storyline. Playing with Religion in Digital Games explores the increasingly complex relationship between gaming and global religious practices. For example, how does religion help organize the communities in MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft? What role has censorship played in localizing games like Actraiser in the western world? How do evangelical Christians react to violence, gore, and sexuality in some of the most popular games such as Mass Effect or Grand Theft Auto? With contributions by scholars and gamers from all over the world, this collection offers a unique perspective to the intersections of religion and the virtual world.

Games for Reading

Games for Reading PDF Author: Peggy Kaye
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN: 0307809358
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 319

Book Description
HERE ARE OVER SEVENTY GAMES TO HELP YOUR CHILD LEARN TO READ--AND LOVE IT. Peggy Kaye's Games for Reading helps children read by doing just what kids like best: playing games. There is a "bingo" game that helps children learn vocabulary. There is a rhyming game that helps them hear letter sounds more accurately. There are mazes and puzzles, games that train the eye to see patterns of letters, games that train the ear so a child can sound out words, games that awaken a child's imagination and creativity, and games that provide the right spark to fire a child's enthusiasm for reading. There are games in which your child has to act silly and games--sure to be any child's favorite--in which you do. Easy to follow and easy to play, these games are ideal for busy, working parents. You can read a game in a few minutes and start to play right away. You can play on car trips, while doing the laundry, or while cooking. These games are so much fun for the whole family that you may forget their serious purpose. But they will help all beginning readers--those who have reading problems and those who do not--learn to read and want to read. Games for Reading also includes a list of easy-to-read books and books for reading aloud, and a "Note to Teachers" on how to play these games in their classrooms.

Video Games Have Always Been Queer

Video Games Have Always Been Queer PDF Author: Bo Ruberg
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479859982
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 278

Book Description
Argues for the queer potential of video games While popular discussions about queerness in video games often focus on big-name, mainstream games that feature LGBTQ characters, like Mass Effect or Dragon Age, Bonnie Ruberg pushes the concept of queerness in games beyond a matter of representation, exploring how video games can be played, interpreted, and designed queerly, whether or not they include overtly LGBTQ content. Video Games Have Always Been Queer argues that the medium of video games itself can—and should—be read queerly. In the first book dedicated to bridging game studies and queer theory, Ruberg resists the common, reductive narrative that games are only now becoming more diverse. Revealing what reading D. A. Miller can bring to the popular 2007 video game Portal, or what Eve Sedgwick offers Pong, Ruberg models the ways game worlds offer players the opportunity to explore queer experience, affect, and desire. As players attempt to 'pass' in Octodad or explore the pleasure of failure in Burnout: Revenge, Ruberg asserts that, even within a dominant gaming culture that has proved to be openly hostile to those perceived as different, queer people have always belonged in video games—because video games have, in fact, always been queer.

Music In Video Games

Music In Video Games PDF Author: K.J. Donnelly
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134692110
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 294

Book Description
From its earliest days as little more than a series of monophonic outbursts to its current-day scores that can rival major symphonic film scores, video game music has gone through its own particular set of stylistic and functional metamorphoses while both borrowing and recontextualizing the earlier models from which it borrows. With topics ranging from early classics like Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros. to more recent hits like Plants vs. Zombies, the eleven essays in Music in Video Games draw on the scholarly fields of musicology and music theory, film theory, and game studies, to investigate the history, function, style, and conventions of video game music.

Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2021

Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2021 PDF Author: Carmelo Ardito
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030856135
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 698

Book Description
The five-volume set LNCS 12932-12936 constitutes the proceedings of the 18th IFIP TC 13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, INTERACT 2021, held in Bari, Italy, in August/September 2021. The total of 105 full papers presented together with 72 short papers and 70 other papers in these books was carefully reviewed and selected from 680 submissions. The contributions are organized in topical sections named: Part I: affective computing; assistive technology for cognition and neurodevelopment disorders; assistive technology for mobility and rehabilitation; assistive technology for visually impaired; augmented reality; computer supported cooperative work. Part II: COVID-19 & HCI; croudsourcing methods in HCI; design for automotive interfaces; design methods; designing for smart devices & IoT; designing for the elderly and accessibility; education and HCI; experiencing sound and music technologies; explainable AI. Part III: games and gamification; gesture interaction; human-centered AI; human-centered development of sustainable technology; human-robot interaction; information visualization; interactive design and cultural development. Part IV: interaction techniques; interaction with conversational agents; interaction with mobile devices; methods for user studies; personalization and recommender systems; social networks and social media; tangible interaction; usable security. Part V: user studies; virtual reality; courses; industrial experiences; interactive demos; panels; posters; workshops. The chapter ‘Stress Out: Translating Real-World Stressors into Audio-Visual Stress Cues in VR for Police Training’ is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com. The chapter ‘WhatsApp in Politics?! Collaborative Tools Shifting Boundaries’ is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com.
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