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Video Game Narrative and Criticism by T. Thabet Pdf
The book provides a comprehensive application of narrative theory to video games, and presents the player-response paradigm of game criticism. Video Game Narrative and Criticism explains the nature of gameplay - a psychological experience and a meaning-making process in the fictional world of video games.
Videogames! Aren’t they the medium of the twenty-first century? The new cinema? The apotheosis of art and entertainment, the realization of Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk? The final victory of interaction over passivity? No, probably not. Games are part art and part appliance, part tableau and part toaster. In How to Talk about Videogames, leading critic Ian Bogost explores this paradox more thoroughly than any other author to date. Delving into popular, familiar games like Flappy Bird, Mirror’s Edge, Mario Kart, Scribblenauts, Ms. Pac-Man, FarmVille, Candy Crush Saga, Bully, Medal of Honor, Madden NFL, and more, Bogost posits that videogames are as much like appliances as they are like art and media. We don’t watch or read games like we do films and novels and paintings, nor do we perform them like we might dance or play football or Frisbee. Rather, we do something in-between with games. Games are devices we operate, so game critique is both serious cultural currency and self-parody. It is about figuring out what it means that a game works the way it does and then treating the way it works as if it were reasonable, when we know it isn’t. Noting that the term games criticism once struck him as preposterous, Bogost observes that the idea, taken too seriously, risks balkanizing games writing from the rest of culture, severing it from the “rivers and fields” that sustain it. As essential as it is, he calls for its pursuit to unfold in this spirit: “God save us from a future of games critics, gnawing on scraps like the zombies that fester in our objects of study.”
Video Game Narrative and Criticism by T. Thabet Pdf
The book provides a comprehensive application of narrative theory to video games, and presents the player-response paradigm of game criticism. Video Game Narrative and Criticism explains the nature of gameplay - a psychological experience and a meaning-making process in the fictional world of video games.
Narrative Mechanics by Beat Suter,René Bauer,Mela Kocher Pdf
What do stories in games have in common with political narratives? This book identifies narrative strategies as mechanisms for meaning and manipulation in games and real life. It shows that the narrative mechanics so clearly identifiable in games are increasingly used (and abused) in politics and social life. They have »many faces«, displays and interfaces. They occur as texts, recipes, stories, dramas in three acts, movies, videos, tweets, journeys of heroes, but also as rewarding stories in games and as narratives in society - such as a career from rags to riches, the concept of modernity or market economy. Below their surface, however, narrative mechanics are a particular type of motivational design - of game mechanics.
What Is a Game? by Gaines S. Hubbell,Matthew Wilhelm Kapell Pdf
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.
The Play Versus Story Divide in Game Studies by Matthew Wilhelm Kapell Pdf
Since the emergence of digital game studies, a number of debates have engaged scholars. The debate between ludic (play) and narrative (story) paradigms remains the one that famously "never happened." This collection of new essays critically frames that debate and urges game scholars to consider it central to the field. The essayists examine various digital games, assessing the applicability of play-versus-narrative approaches or considering the failure of each. The essays reflect the broader history while applying notions of play and story to recent games in an attempt to propel serious analysis.
Games and Narrative: Theory and Practice by Barbaros Bostan Pdf
This book provides an introduction and overview of the rapidly evolving topic of game narratives, presenting the new perspectives employed by researchers and the industry, highlighting the recent empirical findings that illustrate the nature of it. The first section deals with narrative design and theory, the second section includes social and cultural studies on game narrative, the third section focuses on new technologies and approaches for the topic, the fourth section presents practices and case studies, and the final section provides industry cases from professionals.
The Composition of Video Games by Johansen Quijano Pdf
Video games are a complex, compelling medium in which established art forms intersect with technology to create an interactive text. Visual arts, architectural design, music, narrative and rules of play all find a place within, and are constrained by, computer systems whose purpose is to create an immersive player experience. In the relatively short life of video game studies, many authors have approached the question of how games function, some focusing on technical aspects of game design, others on rules of play. Taking a holistic view, this study explores how ludology, narratology, visual rhetoric, musical theory and player psychology work (or don't work) together to create a cohesive experience and to provide a unified framework for understanding video games.
As the videogame industry has grown up, the need for better stories and characters has dramatically increased, yet traditional screenwriting techniques alone cannot equip writers for the unique challenges of writing stories where the actions and decisions of a diverse range of players are at the centre of every narrative experience. Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames was the first book to demystify the emerging field of game writing by identifying and explaining the skills required for creating videogame narrative. Through the insights and experiences of professional game writers, this revised edition captures a snapshot of the narrative skills employed in today's game industry and presents them as practical articles accompanied by exercises for developing the skills discussed. The book carefully explains the foundations of the craft of game writing, detailing all aspects of the process from the basics of narrative to guiding the player and the challenges of nonlinear storytelling. Throughout the book there is a strong emphasis on the skills developers and publishers expect game writers to know. This second edition brings the material up to date and adds four new chapters covering MMOs, script formats, narrative design for urban games, and new ways to think about videogame narrative as an art form. Suitable for both beginners and experienced writers, Game Writing is the essential guide to all the techniques of game writing. There's no better starting point for someone wishing to get into this exciting field, whether they are new game writers wishing to hone their skills, or screenwriters hoping to transfer their skills to the games industry.
Violence | Perception | Video Games by Federico Alvarez Igarzábal,Michael S. Debus,Curtis L. Maughan Pdf
This volume compiles papers from the Young Academics Workshop at the Clash of Realities conferences of 2017 and 2018. The 2017 workshop - Perceiving Video Games - explored the video game medium by focusing on perception and meaning-making processes. The 2018 workshop - Reframing the Violence and Video Games Debate - transcended misleading claims that link video games and violent behavior by offering a range of fresh topical perspectives. From BA students to postdoctoral researchers, the young academics of this anthology stem from a spectrum of backgrounds, including game studies, game design, and phenomenology. This volume also features an entry by renowned psychologist Christopher J. Ferguson.
In Unit Operations, Ian Bogost argues that similar principles underlie both literary theory and computation, proposing a literary-technical theory that can be used to analyze particular videogames. Moreover, this approach can be applied beyond videogames: Bogost suggests that any medium—from videogames to poetry, literature, cinema, or art—can be read as a configurative system of discrete, interlocking units of meaning, and he illustrates this method of analysis with examples from all these fields. The marriage of literary theory and information technology, he argues, will help humanists take technology more seriously and hep technologists better understand software and videogames as cultural artifacts. This approach is especially useful for the comparative analysis of digital and nondigital artifacts and allows scholars from other fields who are interested in studying videogames to avoid the esoteric isolation of "game studies." The richness of Bogost's comparative approach can be seen in his discussions of works by such philosophers and theorists as Plato, Badiou, Zizek, and McLuhan, and in his analysis of numerous videogames including Pong, Half-Life, and Star Wars Galaxies. Bogost draws on object technology and complex adaptive systems theory for his method of unit analysis, underscoring the configurative aspects of a wide variety of human processes. His extended analysis of freedom in large virtual spaces examines Grand Theft Auto 3, The Legend of Zelda, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and Joyce's Ulysses. In Unit Operations, Bogost not only offers a new methodology for videogame criticism but argues for the possibility of real collaboration between the humanities and information technology.
The Art of Videogames explores how philosophy of the artstheories developed to address traditional art works can also beapplied to videogames. Presents a unique philosophical approach to the art ofvideogaming, situating videogames in the framework of analyticphilosophy of the arts Explores how philosophical theories developed to addresstraditional art works can also be applied to videogames Written for a broad audience of both philosophers and videogameenthusiasts by a philosopher who is also an avid gamer Discusses the relationship between games and earlier artisticand entertainment media, how videogames allow for interactivefiction, the role of game narrative, and the moral status ofviolent events depicted in videogame worlds Argues that videogames do indeed qualify as a new and excitingform of representational art
Video Games and Storytelling by Souvik Mukherjee Pdf
The potential of video games as storytelling media and the deep involvement that players feel when they are part of the story needs to be analysed vis-à-vis other narrative media. This book underscores the importance of video games as narratives and offers a framework for analysing the many-ended stories that often redefine real and virtual lives.
In Extra Lives, acclaimed writer and life-long video game enthusiast Tom Bissell takes the reader on an insightful and entertaining tour of the art and meaning of video games. In just a few decades, video games have grown increasingly complex and sophisticated, and the companies that produce them are now among the most profitable in the entertainment industry. Yet few outside this world have thought deeply about how these games work, why they are so appealing, and what they are capable of artistically. Blending memoir, criticism, and first-rate reportage, Extra Lives is a milestone work about what might be the dominant popular art form of our time.
Beginning with the structural features of design and play, this book explores video games as both compelling examples of story-telling and important cultural artifacts. The author analyzes fundamentals like immersion, world building and player agency and their role in crafting narratives in the Mass Effect series, BioShock, The Last of Us, Fallout 4 and many more. The text-focused “visual novel” genre is discussed as a form of interactive fiction.