Alongside with "The Ultimate History of Videogames" and "La Saga des Jeux vidéo", here is without a doubt the third must-read book for anyone who want to have a global view on the history of videogames. The authors starts from the early games up to nowadays, and tells the story of the most important games and machines thanks to interviews with their creators. The added value of this book compared to the two previous ones is the fact that, in addition to tackling
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Keywords : history, united kindgom, france, europe
This book deals with the rich history of videogames and cinema, and more specifically their relations with American movies. The author details with a high level of precision the various links between the movie and videogame industries, such as the numerous movies-games and games-movies adaptions. But the author doesn't remain at a surface level, he pursues his analysis at a deep level: he studies the evolution of games-movies relations according to the different economical eras of the videogames
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Keywords : cinema, videogames, hollywood, thesis, mario, donkey kong, warner
This book focuses on the design of "Casual Games", i.e. video games aimed to people playing them casually. The three first chapters deals with the definition of casual games, their professional creation process, and a broader study of the various play from they can offer. The nine following chapters are then dedicated to each sub-category of casual games: management, match-3, puzzles, hidden objects, construction, social games, etc. While the text is easy to read and understand, this b
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Keywords : game design, casual games, examples, analysis, industry
A book explaining in a clear and illustrated way how to use the videogame creation software RPG Maker (XP and VX versions). This software tool allows to easily create role-playing and adventure computer games without requiring any kind of computer programming skills. The author details the different aspects of this tool, from the simplest ones (software installation, level edition, visual events creation system...) to the more complex ones (Ruby scripts programming, creation of a real-tim
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Keywords : rpg maker xp, rpg maker vx, introduction, manual, programmation, simple, role playing game
This books tells the history of Player One, a French magazine dedicated to home videogames and manga, alongside with its various spin-offs such as Nintendo Player, Ultra Player, Manga Player and Player Station. Thanks to the interviews with most of the journalists who wrote for it, this 300 pages books gathers a lot of unique information. It starts with an introduction detailing the arrival of Manga and Anime in France, a context in which a company called Média Système Edition firs
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Keywords : player one, history, france, press, manga
This book aims to deconstruct the "positive discourses about video games", that helped it to be regarded in a less negative way as the time went by. While the topic is very interesting, the extremely small size of this book (96 pages in very small A6 format) prevents him to reach this goal. Instead of a rigorous analysis that such a topic requires, the authors limit themselves to some broad and bold critics (such as the french university being under the order of the video game industry
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Keywords : critic, video game, positive discourse, media
This book is dedicated to level design, i.e. the design of levels, maps and other "playing spaces" for video games. Written as an introductory book, it first details the basis of level design, before discussing how it can be used to "embody" the mechanisms defined by game rules, to tell a story, or even to spark off emotions in player's mind. An interesting book for beginners discovering this topic.
Keywords : level design, introduction
A book introducing the so-called "game theory", which explains the numerous aspects of this research domain halfway between maths and economy. The author presents different kinds of "games", i.e. problems that allow him to introduce the various components of the game theory: zero-sum games and non zero-sum games, games with rational or irrational players, with or without collaboration, etc. While this book is exhaustive and while the author seems to master this topic, this bo
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Keywords : game theory, introduction, maths, economy, expert
Over a series of 7 books, Florent Gorges wrote the most complete history of Nintendo. The texts are easy to read and full of unique information, and are illustrated with many pictures of all the games and toys created by the company. This second book in the series is focused on the "Game & Watch", a series of portable electronic games that all kids over the worlds used to enjoy. An absolute must-read book.This book was translated into English in 2012 under the title "The Hi
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Keywords : history, nintendo, game & watch
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 wi
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Keywords : history, france, world of warcraft