The Art of Videogames

The Art of Videogames
Author: Grant Tavinor
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2009-11-19
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 9781444310184

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

Game Art

Game Art
Author: Matt Sainsbury
Publisher: No Starch Press
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2015-09-01
Genre: Games & Activities
ISBN: 1593276656

Game Art is a collection of breathtaking concept art and behind-the-scenes interviews from videogame developers, including major players like Square Enix, Bioware, and Ubisoft as well as independent but influential studios like Tale of Tales and Compulsion Games. Immerse yourself in fantastic artwork and explore the creative thinking behind over 40 console, mobile, and PC games. A lone independent developer on a tiny budget can create an experience as powerful and compelling as a triple-A blockbuster built by a team of 1,000. But like all works of art, every game begins with a spark of inspiration and a passion to create. Let Game Art take you on a visual journey through these beautiful worlds, as told by the minds that brought them to life.

Videogames and Art

Videogames and Art
Author: Andy Clarke
Publisher: Intellect Books
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2007
Genre: Art
ISBN:

Videogame art is developing as an area of burgeoning interest, departing from embryonic roots into a flourishing division of scholarly study. The collection provides both an overview of the field, positioning it within a social and commercial context with reference to other forms of digital and pictorial art, and to the mainstream videogames industry.

The Art of Video Games

The Art of Video Games
Author: Chris Melissinos
Publisher:
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2012
Genre: Art
ISBN: 159962110X

"Published in cooperation with the Smithsonian American Art Museum."

The Greatest Art Form

The Greatest Art Form
Author: Brett E. Mullaney
Publisher: CreateSpace
Total Pages: 134
Release: 2013-06-25
Genre: Video games
ISBN: 9781490541532

During the last half century, and for only the second time in over two thousand years, technology has given way to a new groundbreaking and limitless form of artistic expression: the video game. While our society is barely beginning to digest this new medium and redefine our understanding of artistic expression, video games are continuing to evolve and define the medium as the art world's most expressive, dynamic, and evolved art form. All art forms provoke us to reflect, to ponder, to feel, to engage in ideas, to challenge or invoke our strongly held beliefs and biases. They ask us to share and experience the lives, thoughts, and sentiments of others. With video games, for the first time in the history of artistic expression, we are now asked to choose, to explore, to make determinations, to take decisive action, and to follow our choices to their conclusions. We are now world explorers and decision makers, individuals acting on, with, and against the art itself. In The Greatest Art Form: Video Games and the Evolution of Artistic Expression, ideas are explored through the ways in which the video game form's most groundbreaking attribute, interaction, has allowed the video game to become the most malleable, dynamic, expressive, organic, and authentic art form in human history.As part exposition, part summary, and part critical analysis, The Greatest Art Form provides a detailed analysis and conversation about the countless ways video games have come to communicate with audiences through new and profound methods, in order to provide a new lens by which to digest and understand this new medium so full of wonder and potential. It contains content that includes critical analysis and dissection of some of the video game medium's most treasured game titles and series, including:* Silent Hill 2* Red Dead Redemption* BioShock* BioShock Infinite* Dishonored* Ico* Shadow of the Colossus* Flower* Journey* The Elder Scrolls Series* Fallout 3Explore the ways in which video games, more than any other art form, hold the most limitless potential to ask us to reflect, not only on the art itself, but ourselves.

The Art of Failure

The Art of Failure
Author: Jesper Juul
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 173
Release: 2013-02-22
Genre: Games & Activities
ISBN: 0262313138

A gaming academic offers a “fascinating” exploration of why we play video games—despite the unhappiness we feel when we fail at them (Boston Globe) We may think of video games as being “fun,” but in The Art of Failure, Jesper Juul claims that this is almost entirely mistaken. When we play video games, our facial expressions are rarely those of happiness or bliss. Instead, we frown, grimace, and shout in frustration as we lose, or die, or fail to advance to the next level. Humans may have a fundamental desire to succeed and feel competent, but game players choose to engage in an activity in which they are nearly certain to fail and feel incompetent. So why do we play video games even though they make us unhappy? Juul examines this paradox. In video games, as in tragic works of art, literature, theater, and cinema, it seems that we want to experience unpleasantness even if we also dislike it. Reader or audience reaction to tragedy is often explained as catharsis, as a purging of negative emotions. But, Juul points out, this doesn't seem to be the case for video game players. Games do not purge us of unpleasant emotions; they produce them in the first place. What, then, does failure in video game playing do? Juul argues that failure in a game is unique in that when you fail in a game, you (not a character) are in some way inadequate. Yet games also motivate us to play more, in order to escape that inadequacy, and the feeling of escaping failure (often by improving skills) is a central enjoyment of games. Games, writes Juul, are the art of failure: the singular art form that sets us up for failure and allows us to experience it and experiment with it. The Art of Failure is essential reading for anyone interested in video games, whether as entertainment, art, or education.

Making Videogames

Making Videogames
Author: Duncan Harris
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2022-06-28
Genre: Games & Activities
ISBN: 050002314X

An in-depth visual guide presenting the detailed creative journeys behind the development of the world’s leading videogames. Making Videogames is an extraordinary snapshot of modern interactive entertainment, with insight from pioneers about the most important games in the industry. Illustrated with some of the most arresting in-game images ever seen in print, this book explores the unique alchemy of a technical and artistic endeavor striking a captivating balance between insider insight and accessibility. Across twelve chapters, each focusing on a specific game from AAA blockbusters such as Control and Half-Life: Alyx to cult breakthrough games including No Man’s Sky and Return of the Obra Dinn, this volume documents the incredible craft of videogame worldbuilding. These chapters present masterful visual storytelling via the world’s most popular, but seldom fully understood, entertainment medium. Demonstrating the magic and method behind each studio’s work, the book includes enlightening text by Alex Wiltshire complementing specially created imagery “photographed” in-engine by screen capture artist Duncan Harris. A book for die-hard videogame fanatics, aspiring designer-creatives, video game developers, and the visually curious alike, Making Videogames will showcase the boundless creativity of this thrilling industry.

Works of Game

Works of Game
Author: John Sharp
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 157
Release: 2015-03-06
Genre: Games & Activities
ISBN: 0262029073

An exploration of the relationship between games and art that examines the ways that both gamemakers and artists create game-based artworks. Games and art have intersected at least since the early twentieth century, as can be seen in the Surrealists' use of Exquisite Corpse and other games, Duchamp's obsession with Chess, and Fluxus event scores and boxes—to name just a few examples. Over the past fifteen years, the synthesis of art and games has clouded for both artists and gamemakers. Contemporary art has drawn on the tool set of videogames, but has not considered them a cultural form with its own conceptual, formal, and experiential affordances. For their part, game developers and players focus on the innate properties of games and the experiences they provide, giving little attention to what it means to create and evaluate fine art. In Works of Game, John Sharp bridges this gap, offering a formal aesthetics of games that encompasses the commonalities and the differences between games and art. Sharp describes three communities of practice and offers case studies for each. “Game Art,” which includes such artists as Julian Oliver, Cory Arcangel, and JODI (Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans) treats videogames as a form of popular culture from which can be borrowed subject matter, tools, and processes. “Artgames,” created by gamemakers including Jason Rohrer, Brenda Romero, and Jonathan Blow, explore territory usually occupied by poetry, painting, literature, or film. Finally, “Artists' Games”—with artists including Blast Theory, Mary Flanagan, and the collaboration of Nathalie Pozzi and Eric Zimmerman—represents a more synthetic conception of games as an artistic medium. The work of these gamemakers, Sharp suggests, shows that it is possible to create game-based artworks that satisfy the aesthetic and critical values of both the contemporary art and game communities.

The Art of Game Design

The Art of Game Design
Author: Jesse Schell
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 604
Release: 2014-11-06
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1466598646

Good game design happens when you view your game from as many perspectives as possible. Written by one of the world's top game designers, The Art of Game Design presents 100+ sets of questions, or different lenses, for viewing a game’s design, encompassing diverse fields such as psychology, architecture, music, visual design, film, software engineering, theme park design, mathematics, puzzle design, and anthropology. This Second Edition of a Game Developer Front Line Award winner: Describes the deepest and most fundamental principles of game design Demonstrates how tactics used in board, card, and athletic games also work in top-quality video games Contains valuable insight from Jesse Schell, the former chair of the International Game Developers Association and award-winning designer of Disney online games The Art of Game Design, Second Edition gives readers useful perspectives on how to make better game designs faster. It provides practical instruction on creating world-class games that will be played again and again.

Games

Games
Author: C. Thi Nguyen
Publisher:
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2020
Genre: Games & Activities
ISBN: 0190052082

Games are a unique art form. They do not just tell stories, nor are they simply conceptual art. They are the art form that works in the medium of agency. Game designers tell us who to be in games and what to care about; they designate the player's in-game abilities and motivations. In other words, designers create alternate agencies, and players submerge themselves in those agencies. Games let us explore alternate forms of agency. The fact that we play games demonstrates something remarkable about the nature of our own agency: we are capable of incredible fluidity with our own motivations and rationality. This volume presents a new theory of games which insists on games' unique value in human life. C. Thi Nguyen argues that games are an integral part of how we become mature, free people. Bridging aesthetics and practical reasoning, he gives an account of the special motivational structure involved in playing games. We can pursue goals, not for their own value, but for the sake of the struggle. Playing games involves a motivational inversion from normal life, and the fact that we can engage in this motivational inversion lets us use games to experience forms of agency we might never have developed on our own. Games, then, are a special medium for communication. They are the technology that allows us to write down and transmit forms of agency. Thus, the body of games forms a "library of agency" which we can use to help develop our freedom and autonomy. Nguyen also presents a new theory of the aesthetics of games. Games sculpt our practical activities, allowing us to experience the beauty of our own actions and reasoning. They are unlike traditional artworks in that they are designed to sculpt activities - and to promote their players' aesthetic appreciation of their own activity.