This book details the captivating story of the scandalous game series "Grand Theft Auto". Over 300 pages, the author tells us about the most epic moments of this saga: humble beginnings as a small arcade game made in Scotland by DMA Design; hiring Max Clifford to use media scandal as a marketing campaign; the hijacking of the series leadership by the Houser brothers and their studio Rockstar during the creation of GTA III; the first legal actions against the game series and the rise of
[...]
Keywords : grand theft auto, history, dma design, rockstar, jack thompson, david jones, sam houser, esrb
This book analyses the game Grant Theft Auto IV in order to highlight the social critic (of the American dream) it embeds. Over a hundred pages, the author begins with a study of the means video games can use to broadcast meaning, before going deeper inside the missions and game system of this title to reveal its political message.
Keywords : politics, social critic, analysis, gta iv
This book highlights the potential of video games for education purposes. Over 250 pages, 10 chapters are dealing with a different topic each. For example, one chapter relies on the Final Fantasy series to demonstrate the artistic potential of video games, while another chapter presents a classroom experiment conducted over the Harry Potter games and movies to make the students work on storytelling. While the book subject is very interesting, the quality of its chapters varies heavily. The best
[...]
Keywords : education, video game, classroom, theoretical
This tiny 50 pages books aims to tell the history of the Grand Theft Auto (1997-2015) series of games. While the book offers many beautiful pictures, the text is unfortunately not up to the task. First of all, the books "forgets" about the first two episodes (barely mentioned), and begins his story with Grand Theft Auto III (Rockstar Games, 2001). Each title is then presented over a few pages. But the text only presents some numbers and a summary of each episodes features, without ever
[...]
Keywords : history, grand theft auto, gta, rockstar
This directory lists over 270 french companies working on video games. Each company is introduced by a short text and several images of their games, alongside with full contact details. A vital resource for any student looking for an internship, or for professionals looking for studios to hire!Besides the physical copy of the book, an electronic version is freely available here.
Keywords : france, videogames, directory, company, industry
Since 2005, we have been providing courses on video game design to students from several university courses and training centers (INSA and several departments of the University of Toulouse, France). The educational objective is to get learners to design and carry out small video game projects with a message. The themes are oriented for example on awareness of food hygiene, or the discovery of industrial or engineering professions. From 2010, we are focusing on the creation of Newsgames with engi
[...]
Keywords : newsgames, critical thinking, project-based learning, Serious game
In a video game design teaching course, we chose to replace the creation of entertainment videogames by the creation of Newsgames (i.e. Serious Games about news topics). Thanks to this change, our course seems to be able to enhance the critical thinking skills of students while still teaching them how to design videogames. For example, several students designed different videogames about the same news topic. This project required them to exchange their own opinions and discuss about the news top
[...]
Keywords : newsgame, design, project based learning, Serious game
To develop a complex learning game, it is necessary to use an iterative design methodology, since the design task is particularly challenging. Within an ongoing project that uses such a methodology, for each iteration and for each part of the game, four dimensions are analyzed: ludic, epistemic, ergonomic and contextual. Some questions regarding assessment in this context are raised, especially regarding the balance
[...]
Keywords : Learning video game, Instructional game design, Evaluation, Iterative design
A book chapter (in french) about the relations between the "Free Software" philosophy and the history of videogames. The book is an "open-book" (as in "open source"), freely available on its official website.
Keywords : free software, open source, video games, history
This article presents a selection of "formal game design tools" that may be able to bring game design and software engineering closer. Nowadays, game designers can rely on a set of theoretical tools to create video games. These tools are first intended to facilitate the design phase. However, some of them have a strong potential to communicate designers' ideas to the rest of the team, especially to developers. We will study four examples of such tools, before discussing how they
[...]
Keywords : game design tools, communication, industry