Sports Videogames

Sports Videogames
Author: Mia Consalvo
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2013-07-18
Genre: Games & Activities
ISBN: 1136191992

From Pong to Madden NFL to Wii Fit, Sports Videogames argues for the multiple ways that sports videogames—alongside televised and physical sports—impact one another, and how players and viewers make sense of these multiple forms of play and information in their daily lives. Through case studies, ethnographic explorations, interviews and surveys, and by analyzing games, players, and the sports media industry, contributors from a wide variety of disciplines demonstrate the depth and complexity of games that were once considered simply sports simulations. Contributors also tackle key topics including the rise of online play and its implications for access to games, as well as how regulations surrounding player likenesses present challenges to the industry. Whether you’re a scholar or a gamer, Sports Videogames offers a grounded, theory-building approach to how millions make sense of videogames today.

Encyclopedia of Video Games [2 volumes]

Encyclopedia of Video Games [2 volumes]
Author: Mark J. P. Wolf
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 991
Release: 2012-08-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN:

This encyclopedia collects and organizes theoretical and historical content on the topic of video games, covering the people, systems, technologies, and theoretical concepts as well as the games themselves. This two-volume encyclopedia addresses the key people, companies, regions, games, systems, institutions, technologies, and theoretical concepts in the world of video games, serving as a unique resource for students. The work comprises over 300 entries from 97 contributors, including Ralph Baer and Nolan Bushnell, founders of the video game industry and some of its earliest games and systems. Contributing authors also include founders of institutions, academics with doctoral degrees in relevant fields, and experts in the field of video games. Organized alphabetically by topic and cross-referenced across subject areas, Encyclopedia of Video Games: The Culture, Technology, and Art of Gaming will serve the needs of students and other researchers as well as provide fascinating information for game enthusiasts and general readers.

Video Games

Video Games
Author: Kevin Hile
Publisher: Greenhaven Publishing LLC
Total Pages: 106
Release: 2009-10-26
Genre: Young Adult Nonfiction
ISBN: 1420503065

The evolution of the video game is incredible; from a two-colored screen with paddle and pong to fully immersive alternate playing worlds, it is one technology that seems to be constantly evolving. This volume explains the history of video games, the considerations of their impact on players and society, and how they can be used as educational tools. Readers will learn about the future of video games as well.

Vintage Games

Vintage Games
Author: Bill Loguidice
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 409
Release: 2012-08-21
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1136137580

Vintage Games explores the most influential videogames of all time, including Super Mario Bros., Grand Theft Auto III, Doom, The Sims and many more. Drawing on interviews as well as the authors' own lifelong experience with videogames, the book discusses each game's development, predecessors, critical reception, and influence on the industry. It also features hundreds of full-color screenshots and images, including rare photos of game boxes and other materials. Vintage Games is the ideal book for game enthusiasts and professionals who desire a broader understanding of the history of videogames and their evolution from a niche to a global market.

Video Games

Video Games
Author: Arthur Asa Berger
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 163
Release: 2017-07-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351299948

From their inception, video games quickly became a major new arena of popular entertainment. Beginning with very primitive games, they quickly evolved into interactive animated works, many of which now approach film in terms of their visual excitement. But there are important differences, as Arthur Asa Berger makes clear in this important new work. Films are purely to be viewed, but video involves the player, moving from empathy to immersion, from being spectators to being actively involved in texts. Berger, a renowned scholar of popular culture, explores the cultural significance of the expanding popularity and sophistication of video games and considers the biological and psychoanalytic aspects of this phenomenon.Berger begins by tracing the evolution of video games from simple games like Pong to new, powerfully involving and complex ones like Myst and Half-Life. He notes how this evolution has built the video industry, which includes the hardware (game-playing consoles) and the software (the games themselves), to revenues comparable to the American film industry.

The Video Game Debate

The Video Game Debate
Author: Rachel Kowert
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2015-08-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 131756717X

Do video games cause violent, aggressive behavior? Can online games help us learn? When it comes to video games, these are often the types of questions raised by popular media, policy makers, scholars, and the general public. In this collection, international experts review the latest research findings in the field of digital game studies and weigh in on the actual physical, social, and psychological effects of video games. Taking a broad view of the industry from the moral panic of its early days up to recent controversies surrounding games like Grand Theft Auto, contributors explore the effects of games through a range of topics including health hazards/benefits, education, violence and aggression, addiction, cognitive performance, and gaming communities. Interdisciplinary and accessibly written, The Video Game Debate reveals that the arguments surrounding the game industry are far from black and white, and opens the door to richer conversation and debate amongst students, policy makers, and scholars alike.

Video Games & Addiction

Video Games & Addiction
Author: Byron Rizzo
Publisher: Byron Rizzo
Total Pages: 176
Release:
Genre: Games & Activities
ISBN:

How many hours have you spent playing? Do you know how many times you stayed up late to finish a level? What is the sum of money you have invested in games, consoles, equipment? Most people will not be able to answer any of these questions accurately. It is likely, in fact, that those inquiries have never been raised. When this happens in the most thriving digital industry of the moment, such as the video games one is, the reasons for such ignorance should be considered. Video Games & Addiction, tells a series of logical stories about the evolution, progress, and revolution of digital playful entertainment. However, instead of just a mere historicist analysis, it puts the most important people, the players, first. Narrating, in turn, numerous real-life anecdotes. Reflecting in perspective the difference between passion and vice, taste and necessity, choice and escapism. Confessional at parts, with its good dose of thought, more than one reader will be thinking about the final conclusions or recognizing attitudes common to all video gamers. When not, feeling identified in the anecdotes. Or at least informed about the changes, for better and worse, from pixel to polygon over the past 50 years. And how addictive components have always been there through different names and mechanics, including: Continue?, the perpetuation of the game through uninterrupted attempts. Player 2, going from playing in the living room to the massive rooms of online competitiveness. Inventory, our digital and physical equipment, brands, and gaming inequalities. Replay, the gamer culture consumed on platforms, videos, streamers. Insert Coin, the industry understood as a validation and a game format from the very arcades. Game Over, when the game doesn't end and ceases to be one. Insert a coin and go through this book-made-deconstruction, which analyzes at what level we like, and how much we get entertained or trapped in that world behind screens.

Communication and Sport

Communication and Sport
Author: Andrew C. Billings
Publisher: SAGE Publications, Incorporated
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2021-02-02
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 1544393156

Communication and Sport: Surveying the Field provides students with an understanding of sports media, rhetoric, culture, and organizations through an examination of a wide range of topics. Authors Andrew C. Billings and Michael L. Butterworth address everything from youth to amateur to professional sports through varied lenses, including mythology, community, and identity. A comprehensive focus on communication scholarship gives attention to the ways that sports produce, maintain, or resist cultural attitudes about race, gender, sexuality, class, and politics. The Fourth Edition includes new interviews with prominent figures in the field and new discussions on current events like the Black Lives Matter movement and the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Composition of Video Games

The Composition of Video Games
Author: Johansen Quijano
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2019-10-11
Genre: Games & Activities
ISBN: 1476637156

Video games are a complex, compelling medium in which established art forms intersect with technology to create an interactive text. Visual arts, architectural design, music, narrative and rules of play all find a place within, and are constrained by, computer systems whose purpose is to create an immersive player experience. In the relatively short life of video game studies, many authors have approached the question of how games function, some focusing on technical aspects of game design, others on rules of play. Taking a holistic view, this study explores how ludology, narratology, visual rhetoric, musical theory and player psychology work (or don't work) together to create a cohesive experience and to provide a unified framework for understanding video games.

Intellivision

Intellivision
Author: Tom Boellstorff
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 429
Release: 2024-11-05
Genre: Games & Activities
ISBN: 0262380544

The engaging story of Intellivision, an overlooked videogame system from the late 1970s and early 1980s whose fate was shaped by Mattel, Atari, and countless others who invented the gaming industry. Astrosmash, Snafu, Star Strike, Utopia—do these names sound familiar to you? No? Maybe? They were all videogames created for the Intellivision videogame system, sold by Mattel Electronics between 1979 and 1984. This system was Atari’s main rival during a key period when videogames were moving from the arcades into the home. In Intellivision, Tom Boellstorff and Braxton Soderman tell the fascinating inside story of this overlooked gaming system. Along the way, they also analyze Intellivision’s chips and code, games, marketing and business strategies, organizational and social history, and the cultural and economic context of the early US games industry from the mid-1970s to the great videogame industry crash of 1983. While many remember Atari, Intellivision has largely been forgotten. As such, Intellivision fills a crucial gap in videogame scholarship, telling the story of a console that sold millions and competed aggressively against Atari. Drawing on a wealth of data from both institutional and personal archives and over 150 interviews with programmers, engineers, executives, marketers, and designers, Boellstorff and Soderman examine the relationship between videogames and toys—an under-analyzed aspect of videogame history—and discuss the impact of home computing on the rise of videogames, the gendered implications of play and videogame design at Mattel, and the blurring of work and play in the early games industry.