This book a call for all amateurs creators around the world to use videogames as means for their personal expression. The authors states that most commercial videogames are guided by market analysis more than creativity, as she concludes that this trend results in locking the expressive potential of videogames. But for Anna Anthropy, an American game designer recognized for its unique creations, there is still some hope left: what the industry can't or don't want to produce, the amateur game des
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Keywords : amateur, indie
On the french version of this blog , I posted an in-depth critic of a (french-written) book about the history of Mario. Far from being a simple "illustrated books for fans" filled with nostalgia, l'Histoire de Mario by William Audureau and published by Pix N'Love is one on the most interesting books about the genesis of Mario. It's not an history book, it's an analytical book that tries to answer one simple question : "Why Mario?". After all, when Nintendo picked a masc
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Keywords : mario, history, nintendo, analysis
An analysis book dedicated to the "Metal Gear" game series. This text-only book is divided in two main parts. The first one, which represents about 3/4 of the book pages, begins with a quick presentation of each title in the series (from "Metal Gear" to "Metal Gear Solid : Peace Walker"). It then tells you the scenario of the whole series, rewritten as a one-piece story. This story is very interesting, and is greatly rewritten to be as entertaining as any good thril
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Keywords : metal gear solid, analysis, story, hideo kojima
In this paper, we present a new model to analyse therapeutic games. The goal of the model is to describe and analyse the relations between the three aspects of a therapeutic game: the player, the game, and the therapy. The model is intended to game designers. It is a tool to improve the communication between health experts and game designers, and to evaluate the game design coherency of therapeutic games. It also helps to analyse existing games to discover relevant features. The model is built w
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Keywords : Video games, Evaluation, Analysis, Model, Game design, Serious games, Therapeutic
Nowadays, videogames are an important part of popular culture. Although videogames are most famous as leisure, the wave of " Serious Games " aims to use them for a wide range of serious purposes: teaching, communication, therapy, professional training, advertising, political propaganda… This thesis focuses on the design of such " Serious Games ". More specifically, we will try to identify means able to ease the creation of Serious Games. To achieve this goal, we will f
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Keywords : Serious Game, Game Design, creation, game creation toolkits, modding, videogames, constructionnism , pedagogy
An analysis book dedicated to "The Legend of Zelda" game series. This text-only book is divided in two main parts. The first one, which represents about 2/3 of the book pages, begins with a quick presentation of each title in the series (from "The Legend of Zelda" to "The Legend of Zelda : Spirit Tracks"). The story of each episode is detailled in one or two pages, before analyzing the special features of its game design compared to the other episodes. But
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Keywords : the legend of zelda, analysis, psychology, story
This article studies the interface between, on the one hand, the identity of a student who is currently doing research on video games and, on the other hand, the identity of a woman gamer. This analysis will be carried out through a specific case: the elaboration of an experimental methodology to study issues of gender, of representation, and of roles within video games through a classification of female protagonists. This process needs to take into account both the demands of academic writing a
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Keywords : serious games, classification, quantitative analysis
An excellent book featuring a deep analysis of the experiences offered to players by videogames. Being at the same time a gamer and a scholar, the author provides us with his very thoughtful and stimulating ideas on this topic. The first three chapters are tackling the issue of defining games, video games, and the relation between games and movies / storytelling. As they are full of concepts and references, these chapters are a bit harder to read than the others. The three following chapters are
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Keywords : history, philosophy, sociology, experience, critical, gamification
Without a doubt, this book is the most interesting story about the birth of Mario available! Written in the spirit of a PhD thesis (analysis of references in order to build and prove an hypothesis) while remaining easy to read, this book finally answers to a fundamental question: why Mario? In other words, this book will tell you how and why this character became the icon of Nintendo instead of a then more popular character: Donkey Kong. A book that any Mario fan should read as they will discove
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Keywords : history, mario, donkey kong