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
Abstract Learning about software modeling languages from documentation can be a difficult and confusing process, and many of the currently existing modeling language tutorials are only marginally better. At the same time, players of video games spend hours upon hours learning to play games that require mastering complex strategies and concepts, without losing motivation or interest. This success for motivating learning effort seen in many games, is in turn supporting an emerging trend of ed
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Keywords : Learning, Games, Modeling
Abstract The aim of this thesis is to investigate whether it is possible for a teacher (as a non-game developer) to create educational computer games that could be considered fun‟ to play. The influences of game genre and graphical fidelity on this process are also investigated, along with the practicalities and barriers that constrain the (mainstream) use of computer games within the education system.A literature review was conducted into the motivations for using educational games,
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Keywords : Video games, Educational games
This tiny 80 pages books tells the history of the Mario Kart series of games, from Super Mario Kart (Nintendo, 1992) to Mario Kart 8 (Nintendo, 2014), also including spin-offs like Mario Kart Arcade GP (Namco, 2005). This book features a lot of images and is very pleasant to read. It also offers many trivia related to the various series episodes, obtained through a direct interview with the main designers. As it can go into details due to lack of pages, this book is recommended to anyone who hav
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Keywords : mario kart, history
Following the first book in the series, this book continues to explore the history of controversial video games. This second volume focuses on games about "torture" (Mortal Kombat, Night Trap, Chiller, Manhunt, Mad World...) and horror-themed games (Resident Evil, Silent Hill, The House of the Dead, Sanitarium, Rule of Rose...). Each game and the media controversy that accompanied it are presented using a variable number of pages. Here, this book tends to suffer from the same flaw as t
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Keywords : violence, torture, horror, controversy, addiction, media
This book deals with the war opposing Sega to Nintendo during the 90's, in the USA, for the control of the home console market. Over 550 pages, it follows the story of Tom Kalinske, who ran Sega US branch from 1990 to 1996. The book tells the many efforts the man and his team made to push the Genesis / Megadrive onto the US market, to try to make a dent in Nintendo's near monopoly over this market. This war is made of many battles, such as an offensive marketing campaign around the game Sonic (1
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Keywords : sega, nintendo, 16 bits, usa, marketing, sony , tom kalinske, genesis