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
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
A tiny book (140 pages in small format) gathering trivia and funny stories about 50 famous videogames: Pac-Man, Mario, Zelda, GTA... Each game is presented over two pages by several pictures and a short text. While this book reads easily, most of its information is far from being unique. Most of them are now part of the common knowledge of the average videogame player, or can be easily found in Wikipedia and similar sources. Anyway, this book remains a good gift idea for anyone discovering video
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Keywords : history, anecdote, simple
This book gathers about 200 "design patterns" aimed to ease the creation of games. It's a formalized and analytical list of the various elements that composes games, ordered in different categories. For example, in the "Game Elements" category you'll find the patterns "lives", "power-ups" and "avatar", while the "Social Interaction" category gathers patterns like "trading", "competition" and "player killin
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Keywords : game design, design patterns, theoretical, reference
A book introducing a unique and thought-provoking approach to Game Design. Through a concept they call "Zen Game Design", the two authors emphasize over the fact that many game design methodologies exist, and that these methodologies are many because they suit different needs. The authors thus start form the "needs", and dedicate the first part of the book to a detailed analysis of the different player profiles. This analysis is based on a theoretical model called "Demog
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Keywords : game design, players typology, DGD1, zen game design, psychology, methodology
In this one-of-a-kind book, each text-written page is accompanied by an illustration that ease the understanding of the text. Besides its unique shape, this book is also brilliant content-wise. Raph Koster, a famous American Game Designer specialized in MMORPGs (Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies, Everquest 2), presents a theory to explain why people like to play. According to him, the "theory of fun" is due to the fact that the human brain is happy when he learns, and games happens to
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Keywords : psychologie, theory of fun, drawings, raph koster
An essay written by Gilles Brougère, a researcher specialized about games, dealing with the relations between playing and learning. This book addresses play as a general activity, ranging from kids play in preschools to video games. The author stars with the definition of "game" and "play", before diving into the relationships between play and leisure, education and leisure, and, last but not least, play and education. Through the idea of "informal learning",
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Keywords : essay, learning science, learning, game, play, education, leisure, school
Technocity is a serious game released in March 2006, and freely distributed to the 600 high school and college located in the region around Toulouse City (South-West in France). The purpose of this edumarket game is to promote courses related to industrial and technical jobs towards a 15 to 18 years old audience. This title was created for the french ministry of education. This was a first experiment for the Toulouse section of french ministry of education, who wan
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Keywords : serious game
This large 500 pages book dissects the various aspects of Game Design: brainstorming for ideas, what players are seeking, artificial intelligence, storytelling, writing Game Design Document... Written by industry veteran Richard Rouse III (who designed the action-horror games The Suffering, among others), this book is full of wise and relevant advices for Game Designers, whether they are working alone as indies or in a big team. The originality of this book lies in the in-depth interviews of
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Keywords : game design, analysis, richard rouse III, centipede, sims, ed logg, doug church
The french written reference about the history of videogames. This must-have book has know five different editions between 1997 and 2012. It details the story of many famous videogames thanks to interviews with their designers: Pong, Tomb Raider, Tetris, Doom, Myst, Sim City, etc. The book also have a background story with the life of Philippe Ulrich, famous french game designer and founder of Cryo, who have lived through all the stages of the videogames history. A very interesting read with a l
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Keywords : french, history, phillipe ulrich