Innovation and creativity seem to be mere buzzwords, but the quest for innovation and creativity by game companies is very real. This Ph.D. dissertation suggests adopting a new perspective on these concepts by abandoning a managerial attitude and favoring a design approach. The design process of video games is under-studied, and this research aims to create a model of video game design activity, using the already existing literature in the field of design, and the observation of actual game desi
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Keywords : Innovation, Design, Video game industry, Designers
In order to contribute to the analysis of the “disseminations of video games”, this article attempts to examine the “Serious Game” designation itself. Our study relies on a corpus of texts aiming to define what a “Serious Game” is, alongside with a corpus of video games matching its definition. We will begin with a study of the historical origins of the “Serious Game” designation, in order to identify what it refers to, and why it is used tod
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Keywords : serious game, video game, definition, history, purpose, impact
AbstractThis article analyzes Free Rice within the context of “the rise of the ludic sublime,” where video games are hailed as the solution to highly sophisticated political problems. As part of what we call practices of “philitainment,” Free Rice, we argue, functions within the political domain of what Jodi Dean has termed “communicative capitalism” and therefore both captures resistance and actually solidifies global capitalism. Ultimately, th
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Keywords : Digital Games, Critical Theory, Governmentality, Philitainment, Development
Carmageddon. A video game known by people even if they never played it, thanks to its scandalous reputation. However, this game is far from solely being the "nasty racing game where you have to crush pedestrians" that many media and politicians wanted to ban. Carmageddon is first and foremost an excellent game, featuring many technological and gameplay innovations that deeply influenced the racing game genre. We interviewed Neil Barnden, co-founder of Stainless Software gam
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Keywords : history, carmageddon, stainless software, violence, scandal, censorship, fun
Carmageddon (Broacasting our studies)
An article about the history of Carmageddon, based on interviews with creators of the game.
Keywords : carmageddon, history, video game
This book focuses on a little known and hardly discussed period from the history of video games: the ends of the 70's, and more specifically the 1976-1980 years of the home consoles. The books explains how, after Ralph Baer's pioneer invention of the Magnavox Odyssey, and the success of Pong in arcades, home video games takes over TV sets around the world thanks to... General Instrument. Indeed, the introduction of a new integrated chip, copying Pong and sold for a few dollars only, allowed many
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Keywords : pong, globalization, economic history, home console, 70's, japan, france, usa
The accelerated progress being made with interactive devices (such as screens, cameras, joysticks and tangible objects) has triggered the develop- ment of new interaction methods for applications (e.g., body language, haptic feedback, etc.). Video games and Serious Games are being played on increa- singly innovative peripherals (e.g., Kinect, Wii Balance Board). These devices have generated new, intuitive forms of Human-Computer Interaction that are completely changing our usages. The purpose of
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Keywords : Tangible objects, screens, devices, video game, serious game, characterization
"Data mining" is the science dedicated to the creation of knowledge through the analysis of large quantities of data, such as establishing customers habits by tracking how they use their loyalty cards. A few time ago, we were contacted by a computer science student, Axel RB, who desired to perform such analysis over video games, using the data about 38.000 video games collected on our website GameClassification. Thus, we gave him a dataset, and he just published his first findings on h
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Keywords : data mining, game classification, research, computer science, video games
As the title implies, The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers is a documentary about Japanese game developers. Originally, John Szczepaniak, a video game journalist, went to Japan in order to write a book about this topic (still in the works). During this trip he also filmed his interviews and encounters, which gave birth to a 4 hours long video documentary now available on DVD: This documentary follows John Szczepaniak's journey, with video segments featuring different materi
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Keywords : japan, history, documentary
ABSTRACT This thesis addresses the problems of the development of serious games, focusing particularly on bridging the gap between of two separate communities: developers and domain experts, that is, educators. Nowadays, students are used to “consume” a large number of games for different purposes (mainly for leisure), and they are expecting a certain quality level in the games (e.g. media assets, story, effects, etc.) and affecting the attitude of playing the game if it does no
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Keywords : Educational video games, Serious games, Game design, Human-Computer interaction, Game engine