This article describes the innovative approach taken by the French Ministry of Education, which is using video gamesto convey a message to the 15-18 age group in order to promote its industrial sectors.Taking a scientific approach to communication and sociology, we begin by exploring the strategy putin place to develop games designed to convey the desired message, followed by a study of the very firstreceptions in the field. Read paper on Research Gate Read paper on HAL &n
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Keywords : Pedagogy, Video Game, Serious Game, Education
In this one-of-a-kind book, each text-written page is accompanied by an illustration that ease the understanding of the text. Besides its unique shape, this book is also brilliant content-wise. Raph Koster, a famous American Game Designer specialized in MMORPGs (Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies, Everquest 2), presents a theory to explain why people like to play. According to him, the "theory of fun" is due to the fact that the human brain is happy when he learns, and games happens to
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Keywords : psychologie, theory of fun, drawings, raph koster
The autobiography of Ralph Baer, the inventor of home video game consoles. Released in 1972, the Magnavox Odyssey is one of the starting points of the history of video games. First of all, it's the first video console solely dedicated to games. Moreover, one of its titles, Ping-Pong, was a direct source of inspiration for Atari to create Pong. Through a book featuring many pictures, Ralph Baer details us the process he followed to invent this first console ever. As a natural-born engineer, he ke
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Keywords : ralph baer, magnavox odyssey, first video game, simon, lawsuit, biography
A tiny 60 pages book released by the french national postal services alongside with a videogames-themed stamps collection. The book presents some of the most famous videogames thanks to a lot of images. And here the series of stamps released alongside with this book (the stamps were packaged within the book):
Keywords : pictures, histoire, french national postal service
Technocity is a serious game released in March 2006, and freely distributed to the 600 high school and college located in the region around Toulouse City (South-West in France). The purpose of this edumarket game is to promote courses related to industrial and technical jobs towards a 15 to 18 years old audience. This title was created for the french ministry of education. This was a first experiment for the Toulouse section of french ministry of education, who wan
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Keywords : serious game
This large 500 pages book dissects the various aspects of Game Design: brainstorming for ideas, what players are seeking, artificial intelligence, storytelling, writing Game Design Document... Written by industry veteran Richard Rouse III (who designed the action-horror games The Suffering, among others), this book is full of wise and relevant advices for Game Designers, whether they are working alone as indies or in a big team. The originality of this book lies in the in-depth interviews of
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Keywords : game design, analysis, richard rouse III, centipede, sims, ed logg, doug church
This book provides insightful thoughts and design advices for interactive storytelling applications, e.g. video games. Written by the legendary American game designer Chris Crawford, it's the result of 10 years of experimentation from the author in this area. He first draws a theoretical analysis of interactivity and storytelling structures, to then introduce an efficient yet easy to understand approach: thinking in "action verbs" to analyze and improve games interactivity. The book is
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Keywords : interactive storytelling, video game, story, design, theory, example, reference
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. An English translation of this book was published in 2006 under the title "Video Games And
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Keywords : introduction, jobs, history, schools
This book is written by Jobe Makar, a veteran Flash game developer working for the ElectroTank studio, and aims to teach you how to create videogames with Macromedia Flash MX 2004. Unlike most other books on this topic, this one doesn't limit itself to explaining the source code of the examples games featured on the companion CD. While one half of the book is indeed dedicated to these examples games, the 250 remaining pages explain with great details, but easy to understand text, the working pri
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Keywords : flash, action, programming, videogames, algorithm
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 with a l
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Keywords : french, history, phillipe ulrich