The autobiography of Nicolas Gaume, founder of the french game studio Kalisto, which created some of the finest videogames during the 90's: Pac-in-time, Nightmare Creatures, Ultim@te Race Pro, Dark Earth, etc. Praised for the quality of its creations, this studio unfortunately closed its door in the 2000's, mainly due to the financial crisis caused by the burst of the ".com economy" bubble. This rare book is a detailed legacy of the quick transformation of the AAA videogames industry f
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Keywords : biography, nicolas gaume, kalisto, french touch
A scientific book that gathers contributions from 18 researchers who are studying different sides of videogames (design, use, interactivity, storytelling, emotions, gender, etc.).
Keywords : science, humanities
A 700 pages introductory bible to the many concepts of Game Design. This book is an updated and revised edition of "Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design", and it's still divided in two parts. The first one is explaining the fundamental concepts of video game design: game design process, game mechanics, balancing, storytelling, characters, level design, etc. The second part of the book presents the main video game genres (action, adventure, simulation, sports, etc.) and their
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Keywords : game design, introduction, genre, beginner
This book details the history of Commode, a company who built legendary computers such as the Commodore PET, theVIC-20, the Commodore 64 and the Amiga. Over more than 550 pages, this book presents the full history of the company, with incredible details and a lot of unique information obtained through interviews with former employees. The story begins in 1976 with Chuck Peddle, an engineer working for MOS Technology, who designed a microprocessor called 6502. It was the first one to be cheap eno
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Keywords : commodore, commodore 64, amiga, jack tramiel, computer
A small book (150 pages) laying down a general introduction to the universe of videogames. The author details the history of videogames (with the contribution of the Le Diberder brothers and their "cycles theory" on this topic), the various jobs of the videogames industry and the process of game design, and in a last chapter try to analyze the future of videogames as a communicational tool. It's the English translation of a french book published in 2004 under the title "Jeux
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Keywords : introduction, jobs, history, schools
A book aiming to guide you through the different steps of the Serious Game creation process. Unfortunately, and despite its more than 450 pages, this book fails to deeply explore this topic. On one hand, the author wastes too many pages covering topics not directly related to the creation of Serious Games, such the various computer standards or an overview of the technological trends in 2006. On the other hand, the author doesn't go enough into the details when covering the central topics of the
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Keywords : serious games, examples, design
With nearly 1000 pages, this heavy book was baked for you by two of best videogames researchers. I gathers many articles that anyone serious about the study of games must (or at least should) have read. The articles gathers are quite different, ranging from scientific essays about the definition of videogames (Huinzingua, Caillois, Suits, etc.) to players gaming diaries and professional game developers postmortems (Valve Software on how they created Half-Life, Lucasart on their pioneering MMO &q
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Keywords : research, game studies, history, definition
One of the flagship book of the current wave of Serious Games, focused on videogames. This 350 pages book start with a definition of Serious Games, through a comparative analysis with entertainment videogames. It then features a lot of games examples for each of the main Serious Games application domains in 2005: defense, government, corporate, education, healthcare, politics, religion and art. This book also gives some Serious Games design advices related to each of these domains. This bo
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Keywords : serious game, definition, examples
A great videogame analysis book written by one of the founders of the scientific study of games: the ludology. In this book, Jesper Juul explores the connections between videogames and fictional worlds, and he highlights the special features of videogames when it comes to "tell stories." The first part of the book features an essay about the definitions of "games" and "video games" which were heavily quoted (both endorsed or criticized) by most of the following scie
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Keywords : ludology, game studies, fiction, definition
This book gives a portrayal of several famous video game creators: Cliff Bleszinski (Unreal Tournament, Gears of War), Shigeru Miyamoto (Mario, Zelda...), Will Wright (Sim City, The Sims...), John Romero and John Carmack, alongside with three bonus chapters dedicated to the first video games, to military Serious Games (America's Army) and to MMORPG players (Anarchy Online, Star Wars Galaxies). Overall, the book is very pleasant to read and filled with interesting information. The portraits of c
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Keywords : history, cliff bleszinski, will wright, america's army, star wars galaxies, anarchy online