This book details the history of Commode, a company who built legendary computers such as the Commodore PET, theVIC-20, the Commodore 64 and the Amiga. Over more than 550 pages, this book presents the full history of the company, with incredible details and a lot of unique information obtained through interviews with former employees. The story begins in 1976 with Chuck Peddle, an engineer working for MOS Technology, who designed a microprocessor called 6502. It was the first one to be cheap eno
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Keywords : commodore, commodore 64, amiga, jack tramiel, computer
A small book (150 pages) laying down a general introduction to the universe of videogames. The author details the history of videogames (with the contribution of the Le Diberder brothers and their "cycles theory" on this topic), the various jobs of the videogames industry and the process of game design, and in a last chapter try to analyze the future of videogames as a communicational tool. It's the English translation of a french book published in 2004 under the title "Jeux
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Keywords : introduction, jobs, history, schools
With nearly 1000 pages, this heavy book was baked for you by two of best videogames researchers. I gathers many articles that anyone serious about the study of games must (or at least should) have read. The articles gathers are quite different, ranging from scientific essays about the definition of videogames (Huinzingua, Caillois, Suits, etc.) to players gaming diaries and professional game developers postmortems (Valve Software on how they created Half-Life, Lucasart on their pioneering MMO &q
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Keywords : research, game studies, history, definition
Following the videogame classification project, Gam.B.A.S is a research project aimed to study the deep nature of videogames through formal deconstruction of their inner structure. Gam.B.A.S. - Prototype #1 The first step of this ongoing project is to try to provide answer to the following question: What is gameplay? Demonstation videos of the two prototypes created (2007): Publications related to this project Many analysis have yet to be done,
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Keywords : game design, game creation software
This learning project intents to raise students awareness on videogame academic research through Project Based Learning (P.B.L.). The students are involved in our different research project through the design of serious game, talks about history or culture related research or even through the creation of original gameplay principles... The students are also invited to share their own points of view through collective debates and group projects relying on their personnal thoughts
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Keywords : game design, education
A research project designed to build a classification system suited to videogames. This projet resulted in a website featuring a collaborative classification system based on multiple criterias. The games are classified according to their gameplay, their purposes, their markets and target audience, alongside with user-contributed keywords. http://www.gameclassification.com The classification of videogames, a complex problem... The classification of videogame
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Keywords : classification, videogames
A serious game created the 100th anniversary celebration of the "Gargas caves", a prehistoric site located in France. Famous for its negative wall-paintings of hands and its overlapping engravings of animal figures, part of this cave is unfortunately no longer visitable. Indeed, public access limited to avoid the deterioration (due to lightning and or CO2 rejected by breathing visitors) of its historical treasures. This virtual version of the caves presents you with a wall roc
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Keywords : serious game, prehistory
A great videogame analysis book written by one of the founders of the scientific study of games: the ludology. In this book, Jesper Juul explores the connections between videogames and fictional worlds, and he highlights the special features of videogames when it comes to "tell stories." The first part of the book features an essay about the definitions of "games" and "video games" which were heavily quoted (both endorsed or criticized) by most of the following scie
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Keywords : ludology, game studies, fiction, definition
This book gives a portrayal of several famous video game creators: Cliff Bleszinski (Unreal Tournament, Gears of War), Shigeru Miyamoto (Mario, Zelda...), Will Wright (Sim City, The Sims...), John Romero and John Carmack, alongside with three bonus chapters dedicated to the first video games, to military Serious Games (America's Army) and to MMORPG players (Anarchy Online, Star Wars Galaxies). Overall, the book is very pleasant to read and filled with interesting information. The portraits of c
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Keywords : history, cliff bleszinski, will wright, america's army, star wars galaxies, anarchy online
Bill Kunkel, usually known as "The Game Doctor", is one of the videogaming press pioneers in the USA. With his lifetime friend Arnie Katz, he started to write down articles about videogames in 1978, for the Video magazine. In 1981, the two pioneers launched Electronic Games, the first magazine dedicated to videogames published in the USA - if not in the world. This autobiographic book gathers numerous trivia and short stories coming from the career of Bill Kunkel: the birth of Electron
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Keywords : biography, bill kunkel, video games, press, usa, electronic games, the game doctor