The Queer Games Avant-Garde: How LGBTQ Game Makers are Reimagining the Medium of Video Games by
The volume foregrounds the voices of queer game-makers as they speak about their influences, their goals, and the challenges they face, as well as the meanings, messages, and even problems with the games they've created.
How to Play Video Games by
How to Play Video Games brings together forty original essays from today's leading scholars on video game culture, writing about the games they know best and what they mean in broader social and cultural contexts.
Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games by
Gaming Representation examines portrayals of race, gender, and sexuality in a range of games, from casuals like Diner Dash, to indies like Journey and The Binding of Isaac, to mainstream games from the Grand Theft Auto, BioShock, Spec Ops, The Last of Us, and Max Payne franchises.
The Game Culture Reader by
This volume gathers together a host of scholars from different countries, institutions, disciplines, departments, and ranks, in order to present original and evocative scholarship on digital game culture.
Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals by
Building an aesthetics of interactive systems, Salen and Zimmerman define core concepts like "play," "design," and "interactivity." They look at games through a series of eighteen "game design schemas," or conceptual frameworks, including games as systems of emergence and information, as contexts for social play, as a storytelling medium, and as sites of cultural resistance.
A Brief History of Video Games by
A Brief History of Video Games" offers a global perspective on gaming s past and its cutting-edge future with the evolution of virtual reality, 3D graphics, and thought-interface technology. It also addresses the design process from concept to packaging, considers the influence of manga and anime, and explores the relationship between video games and movies.
Playing at the World: a history of simulating wars, people and fantastic adventures, from chess to role-playing games by
The invention of role-playing games serves as a touchstone for exploring the ways that the literary concept of character, the lure of fantastic adventure and the principles of gaming combined into the signature cultural innovation of the late twentieth century
The Games We Played: The Golden Age of Board & Table Games by
As families are rediscovering the joys and virtues of staying and entertaining at home, board games have surged in popularity indeed, sales doubled in the last year alone. this mirrors a trend in the late nineteenth century the heyday of American boards and table games when, fueled by the introduction of games coincided with a growing need for middle-class social entertainment. Then, like now, the games that best captured players imaginations mimicked, and sometimes poked fun at, the culture that produced them Organized around themes such as courtship, commerce, travel, sports, and city life, The Games We Played brings together over one hundred eye-catching examples of Americas rare and popular board games, such as The Game of Playing Department Store, which encourage players to accumulate the greatest quantity of goods while spending their money as economically as possible, and Bulls and Bears: The Great Wall St. Game, in which players try their hand as speculators, bankers, and brokers, yelling each other down as if in a trading pit. This playful visual survey of its thematic essays will cause board and table game aficionados to share in the revelry of togetherness.