LudoScience

Phoenix: The Fall & Rise of Home Videogames (Book reference)

This is one of the first, if not the first, book to seriously tackle the history of video game on a global level. The book structure is chronological: each chapter covers the main events of a single year. Moreover, the author chose to mostly focuses his book on the history of consoles in the US. After a first chapter dedicated to early digital games, the book details the main events of the video game industry between 1970 and 1993. Among others things, it presents the various consoles rel [...]

Keywords : history, video game, console, usa

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Homo Ludens (Book reference)

The book that founded (1938) the study of games in the humanities. The author states that games is an essential part of human culture, so he explores the role of game in societies. The concept of "magic circle", nowadays popular among researchers and game designers, comes from this book. Alongside with "Man, Play and Games", this is a book that any researcher working on games should read...This dutch-written book was first translated into English in 1949, and this translation [...]

Keywords : anthropology, sociology, definition

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Les jeux et les hommes (Book reference)

Answering the theories laid down by the pioneering book "Homo Ludens", Roger Caillois, an anthropologist, writes down a wonderful essay about play and game as a human activity. His work about the classification of games and their definition are part of the "founding books" that any researcher should have read...This french-written book was first translated into English in 1961 under the title "Man, Play and Games." 

Keywords : anthropology, sociology, definition, classification

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The New Alexandria Simulation: A Serious Game of State and Local Politics (Book reference)

This book explains how to play a playful simulation of the inner US political system. It details the game rules, and how to play it with students, the game requiring only pens, paper, and several human players. Despite its age, this Serious Game is still used nowadays in Education, thanks to several updates since 2004. Its author, Donal Jansiewicz, chose to kept the game in a "non-digital" format, as he thinks that only human interactions are able to simulate the complexity of a politi [...]

Keywords : serious game, politics, paper, simulation

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