The biography of Markus "Notch" Persson, and his world famous creation: Minecraft (2011). This books details the birth of this legendary game, and it begins with the end of the story: the MineCon convention held up in 2011 to celebrate the official release of the 1.0 version of the game. At this date, the game was already played by 16 millions people in the world, making both Markus Persson and his company, Mojang, millionaires. The book then goes back to Notch's childhood, from his pa
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Keywords : minecraft, notch, markus persson, mojang, indie, biography
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
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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
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Keywords : history, grand theft auto, gta, rockstar
An overall presentation of the various jobs related to videogames, splitted in two parts: - The professionnals of game design:The AAA videogame industryThe small and average sized studios (AA budget games) The "indies" - Others videogames related jobs:Journalist / YoutuberSalesmanProfessionnal player (pro-gamer) Events organizer -= Presentation slides (in french) =- (Flash file - click inside the left or right side of the window to browse through the slides)
Keywords : videogames, jobs, industry, work, indies
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
CALL FOR PAPERS for a Special Issue of the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning (JCAL) on Learning Analytics in Massively Multiuser Virtual Environments and CoursesThere has been much interest of late in ‘big data’ and the role it can play in decision making in diverse areas of business, science and entertainment. By employing a combination of modern artificial intelligence, machine learning and statistics techniques, extremely large and complex data sets can be &lsquo
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Keywords : call for papers, journal
Abstract Serious games have been receiving a lot of interest in the recent years and have been increasingly used for educational, military and business purposes. One of the positive sides of serious games is the fact of being tools that allow the creation of an environment where players are immersed in a playful activity, and are much more receptive to knowledge acquisition. Through serious games players are more likely to retain information for a longer period of time. The terrain instabil
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Bilingual workshop (french / english) on the topic: "How to create better and cheaper Serious Games: Serious Gaming, Modding, Gamification, software authoring… ?"
Keywords : serious game, gamification, serious gaming, design
ABSTRACT From the perspective of educators, games are viewed as a medium in which the younger generation both thrive and excel. Students navigate game environments with ease and regularly solve problems, engage in advanced collaborative efforts, and communicate complex concepts and strategies to one another during their private gaming sessions at home. Games invite the player to form an understanding of intricate systems and mechanics based on participation and experimentation rather than m
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Keywords : Education, Serious Game
ABSTRACT In this thesis, I will research into how player motivation is achieved and how it can be a powerful factor in creating a bonding between the player and the game world and how that can be achieved in an educational title in order to stimulate learning for the player. This thesis will also present the development of a prototype and its evolution into a game based on user feedback, all to have young children learn and understand mathematics, more specifically arithmetics, much easier.
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Keywords : Learning