Playing Utopia

Playing Utopia PDF Author: Benjamin Beil
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3839450500
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
Media narratives inform our ideas of the future - and Games are currently making a significant contribution to this medial reservoir. On the one hand, Games demonstrate a particular propensity for fantastic and futuristic scenarios. On the other hand, they often serve as an experimental field for the latest media technologies. However, while dystopias are part of the standard gaming repertoire, Games feature utopias much less frequently. Why? This anthology examines playful utopias from two perspectives. It investigates utopias in digital Games as well as utopias of the digital game; that is, the role of ludic elements in scenarios of the future.

Playing Utopia

Playing Utopia PDF Author: Benjamin Beil
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3839450500
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 333

Get Book Here

Book Description
Media narratives inform our ideas of the future - and Games are currently making a significant contribution to this medial reservoir. On the one hand, Games demonstrate a particular propensity for fantastic and futuristic scenarios. On the other hand, they often serve as an experimental field for the latest media technologies. However, while dystopias are part of the standard gaming repertoire, Games feature utopias much less frequently. Why? This anthology examines playful utopias from two perspectives. It investigates utopias in digital Games as well as utopias of the digital game; that is, the role of ludic elements in scenarios of the future.

Game

Game PDF Author: Tom Tyler
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452964610
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
A playful reflection on animals and video games, and what each can teach us about the other Video games conjure new worlds for those who play them, human or otherwise: they’ve been played by cats, orangutans, pigs, and penguins, and they let gamers experience life from the perspective of a pet dog, a predator or a prey animal, or even a pathogen. In Game, author Tom Tyler provides the first sustained consideration of video games and animals and demonstrates how thinking about animals and games together can prompt fresh thinking about both. Game comprises thirteen short essays, each of which examines a particular video game, franchise, aspect of gameplay, or production in which animals are featured, allowing us to reflect on conventional understandings of humans, animals, and the relationships between them. Tyler contemplates the significance of animals who insert themselves into video games, as protagonists, opponents, and brute resources, but also as ciphers, subjects, and subversive guides to new ways of thinking. These animals encourage us to reconsider how we understand games, contesting established ideas about winning and losing, difficulty settings, accessibility, playing badly, virtuality, vitality and vulnerability, and much more. Written in a playful style, Game draws from a dizzying array of sources, from children’s television, sitcoms, and regional newspapers to medieval fables, Shakespearean tragedy, and Edwardian comedy; from primatology, entomology, and hunting and fishing manuals to theological tracts and philosophical treatises. By examining video games through the lens of animals and animality, Tyler leads us to a greater humility regarding the nature and status of the human creature, and a greater sensitivity in dealings with other animals.

Dystopian States of America

Dystopian States of America PDF Author: Matthew B. Hill
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 528

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Book Description
Dystopian States of America is a crucial resource that studies the impact of dystopian works on American society-including ways in which they reflect our deep and persistent fears about environmental calamities, authoritarian governments, invasive technologies, and human weakness. Dystopian States of America provides students and researchers with an illuminating resource for understanding the impact and relevance of dystopian and apocalyptic works in contemporary American culture. Through its wide survey of dystopian works in numerous forms and genres, the book encourages readers to connect with these works of fiction and understand how the catastrophically grim or disquieting worlds they portray offer insights into our own current situation. In addition to providing more than 150 encyclopedia articles on a large and representative sample of dystopian/apocalyptic narratives in fiction, film, television, and video games (including popular works that often escape critical inquiry), Dystopian States of America features a suite of critical essays on five themes-war, pandemics, totalitarianism, environmental calamity, and technological overreach-that serve as the foundation for most dystopian worlds of the imagination. These offerings complement one another, enabling readers to explore dystopian conceptions of America and the world from multiple perspectives and vantage points.

Games and Narrative: Theory and Practice

Games and Narrative: Theory and Practice PDF Author: Barbaros Bostan
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030815382
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
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.

A Player's Guide to Deminar

A Player's Guide to Deminar PDF Author: Matthew Kane
Publisher: Infinity Publishing
ISBN: 0741424959
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description


Playing with Sound

Playing with Sound PDF Author: Karen Collins
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262312301
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
An examination of the player's experience of sound in video games and the many ways that players interact with the sonic elements in games. In Playing with Sound, Karen Collins examines video game sound from the player's perspective. She explores the many ways that players interact with a game's sonic aspects—which include not only music but also sound effects, ambient sound, dialogue, and interface sounds—both within and outside of the game. She investigates the ways that meaning is found, embodied, created, evoked, hacked, remixed, negotiated, and renegotiated by players in the space of interactive sound in games. Drawing on disciplines that range from film studies and philosophy to psychology and computer science, Collins develops a theory of interactive sound experience that distinguishes between interacting with sound and simply listening without interacting. Her conceptual approach combines practice theory (which focuses on productive and consumptive practices around media) and embodied cognition (which holds that our understanding of the world is shaped by our physical interaction with it). Collins investigates the multimodal experience of sound, image, and touch in games; the role of interactive sound in creating an emotional experience through immersion and identification with the game character; the ways in which sound acts as a mediator for a variety of performative activities; and embodied interactions with sound beyond the game, including machinima, chip-tunes, circuit bending, and other practices that use elements from games in sonic performances.

Fictional Games

Fictional Games PDF Author: Stefano Gualeni
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135027710X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
What roles do imaginary games have in story-telling? Why do fiction authors outline the rules of a game that the audience will never play? Combining perspectives from philosophy, literary theory and game studies, this book provides the first in-depth investigation into the significance of fictional games within fictional worlds. Drawing from contemporary cinema and literature, from The Hunger Games to the science fiction of Iain M. Banks, Stefano Gualeni and Riccardo Fassone introduce five key functions that different types of imaginary games have in worldbuilding. First, fictional games can emphasize the dominant values and ideologies of the fictional society they belong to. Second, some imaginary games function in fictional worlds as critical, utopian tools, inspiring shifts in the thinking and political orientation of the fictional characters. Third, a few fictional games are conducive to the transcendence of a particular form of being, such as the overcoming of human corporeality. Fourth, imaginary games within works of fiction can deceptively blur the boundaries between the contingency of play and the irrevocable seriousness of “real life”, either camouflaging life as a game or disguising a game as something with more permanent consequences. And fifth, they can function as meta-reflexive tools, suggesting critical and/or satirical perspectives on how actual games are designed, played, sold, manipulated, experienced, understood and utilized as part of our culture. With illustrations in every chapter bringing the imaginary games to life, Gualeni and Fassone creatively inspire us to consider fictional games anew: not as moments of playful reprieve in a storyline, but as significant and multi-layered expressive devices.

Dystopia

Dystopia PDF Author: Dave Golder
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781783613212
Category : Apocalypse in art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
We have an obsession with broken societies set in futuristic worlds, curious but terrifying new technologies and post-apocalyptic dusty wastelands where survivors grow more desperate every day. Dystopian themes are becoming ever more popular and this is the book to show the art, fiction and movies.

End-Game

End-Game PDF Author: Lorenzo DiTommaso
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110752867
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
Video games are a global phenomenon, international in their scope and democratic in their appeal. This is the first volume dedicated to the subject of apocalyptic video games. Its two dozen papers engage the subject comprehensively, from game design to player experience, and from the perspectives of content, theme, sound, ludic textures, and social function. The volume offers scholars, students, and general readers a thorough overview of this unique expression of the apocalyptic imagination in popular culture, and novel insights into an important facet of contemporary digital society.

Playing the Field

Playing the Field PDF Author: Sascha Pöhlmann
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110659409
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
American Studies has only gradually turned its attention to video games in the twenty-first century, even though the medium has grown into a cultural industry that is arguably the most important force in American and global popular culture today. There is an urgent need for a substantial theoretical reflection on how the field and its object of study relate to each other. This anthology, the first of its kind, seeks to address this need by asking a dialectic question: first, how may American Studies apply its highly diverse theoretical and methodological tools to the analysis of video games, and second, how are these theories and methods in turn affected by the games? The eighteen essays offer exemplary approaches to video games from the perspective of American cultural and historical studies as they consider a broad variety of topics: the US-American games industry, Puritan rhetoric, cultural geography, mobility and race, urbanity and space, digital sports, ludic textuality, survival horror and the eighteenth-century novel, gamer culture and neoliberalism, terrorism and agency, algorithm culture, glitches, theme parks, historical guilt, visual art, sonic meaning-making, and nonverbal gameplay.