A new year means a new section to the Ludoscience website! To celebrate 2014, we offer you a new "bibliography" section, dedicated to the books about videogames. This big list already features more than 80 books dealing with various topics: history of videogames, game creators biographies, Game Design, Serious Games, videogames studies & analysis... Each book is presented through a personal abstract and opinion, all purely subjective. But please note that we have read
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Keywords : site update, books, videogames, history, game design, serious games
The first part of a non-official biography of Shigeru Miyamoto, famous creator of Mario and Zelda. William Audureau, a keen expert of his works, invites us to a journey through his life, from his childhood to the release of the first Zelda episode in 1986. In the absence of a direct involvement from Miyamoto in the book, the author relies on more than 150 of his interviews published in press, alongside with a trip to Japan. Very easy and pleasant to read, this book manages to go beyond "ins
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Keywords : biography, shigeru miyamoto, nintendo, mario, zelda
This book tells the story of 13 famous video games: Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty, Angry Birds, Les Sims, Assassin's Creed, Uncharted, World of Warcraft, Tomb Raider, Metal Gear Solid, Doom, Alone in the Dark, Prince of Persia and Tetris. Each chapter of this 300 pages book is dedicated to one of those games, and presents some information about it. While the book is pleasant to read, the amount of unique information is very variable from one game to another. The book chapters range from exc
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Keywords : history, angry birds, tetris, uncharted, assassin's cred, tomb raider
This book is part of a series titled "the world explained to grown-ups." Hence, with its 160 pages, it aims to explain, in a simple and accessible manner, the world of video games to people who don't know anything about it. Despite its reduced size, this books successfully manages to achieve his goal, as it talks about many topics: history of video games, their art and cultural aspect, their industry, their controversies (addiction & violence), alongside with more recent topics lik
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Keywords : video game, introduction, history, art, industry, addiction, violence, gamification
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
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Keywords : grand theft auto, history, dma design, rockstar, jack thompson, david jones, sam houser, esrb
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
Games History is a series of magazines in a book-like format (similar to Pix'n Love and IG), with 200 pages dedicated to a defined genre of video games. This third issue is focused on the history of racing games on home consoles. The book starts with a brief general history of racing games on arcade cabinets (70-80's) and on 90's home consoles. It then goes into more details about popular series such as Gran Turismo, Forza Motorsport, Ridge Racer, Need for Speed, Burnout, Formula One, Colin M
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Keywords : history, racing, console, video game, car, images
This book unveils the story of a very important home console: the Sony PlayStation. Thanks to the interviews of more than twenty people who worked on this project, the author, also a member of the team, invites us to a journey behind the scenes of the creation process of this console. By mixing these various interviews, each chapter of the book details the different stages of the PlayStation project: an awkward beginning when Sony partnered with Nintendo to create a CD-Rom drive for the Super NE
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Keywords : playstation, revolution, sony, men in the shadows, industry, home console
This book unveils the story of a very important home console: the Sony PlayStation. It focuses on Ken Kutaragi, the key person in this project, who is today acknowledged as the "father of the Playstation." The author tells us how this visionary engineer lead Sony to tackle the home video game console market, in spite of the vigorous opposition shown by many other people in the company. Each chapter of the book details the different stages of the PlayStation project: the initial inspi
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Keywords : playstation, revolution, sony, ken kutaragi, industry, home console