ABSRACT While play marks both the cultural and pre-cultural spheres of human existence, the environmental design disciplines have almost exclusively compartmentalized the notions of play and fun into categories of leisure and children’s playgrounds. The rhetorics of environmental design, to date, have ignored, or at best marginalized, the possibility of play outside of recreational and commercial contexts. Still, we have abundant examples of playful architecture and fun places that st
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Keywords : Design, Architecture, Fun architecture, Game
Keywords : videogames, serious game
Nowadays, videogames are an important part of popular culture. Although videogames are most famous as leisure, the wave of " Serious Games " aims to use them for a wide range of serious purposes: teaching, communication, therapy, professional training, advertising, political propaganda… This thesis focuses on the design of such " Serious Games ". More specifically, we will try to identify means able to ease the creation of Serious Games. To achieve this goal, we will f
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Keywords : Serious Game, Game Design, creation, game creation toolkits, modding, videogames, constructionnism , pedagogy
This autobiography is composed by the personal journal of Jordan Mechner during the creation of his famous game Prince of Persia (1989). The authors tells us about his thoughts, his doubts, his joy, and more specifically about the different steps towards the creation of this classic game. A very interesting read, despite a rather "rough" writing style : this book allows you to literally enter inside the head of Jordan Mechner, a creative genius with a lot more doubts and fears that we
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Keywords : biographie, prince of persia, jordan mechner, artist, creative process
This book presents a personal selection by the author of 1001 noteworthy videogames, coming from every period of the videogames history. Each games is introduced by a small text alongside one or several screenshots.This book is a french translation of an English-written book first published in 2010 and titled "1001 video games you must play before you die." This original English version was updated and republished in 2013 under the same title.
Keywords : encyclopedia, history
An comical essay where the author analyses the "life lessons" embedded in some of the classical videogames from 8 and 16 bits home consoles (namely NES, Super NES, Genesis). For example, the two-players mode in Contra is about having a best friend, while Paperboy will teach you the basics of customer service. The quality of the different book chapters is very variable, but some chapters are excellent and they will undoubtedly makes you smile or laugh (in particular the hilarious chapte
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Keywords : humor, nes, super nes, genesis, life lessons
DownLoad is a magazine dedicated to videogames available solely through online distribution channels, with a clear focus towards indie games. About ten titles are detailed in each issue, with an in-depth interview of the game creators, who provide us with many unique and interesting details about how they made their game. This magazine, which looks more like a book (thick paper, content not directly related to current news but focused on in-depth interviews...), has unfortunately stopped after t
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Keywords : indie games, dematerialized
An excellent book featuring a deep analysis of the experiences offered to players by videogames. Being at the same time a gamer and a scholar, the author provides us with his very thoughtful and stimulating ideas on this topic. The first three chapters are tackling the issue of defining games, video games, and the relation between games and movies / storytelling. As they are full of concepts and references, these chapters are a bit harder to read than the others. The three following chapters are
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Keywords : history, philosophy, sociology, experience, critical, gamification
This scientific book gathers contributions from 12 researchers, coming from different fields, who are studying different sides of videogames: identification of the Game Designer knowledge, using videogames in schools, space in videogames, how to dissect a videogame to analyze it, analysis of MMORPG as social spaces...N.B.: The members of Ludoscience wrote a chapter of this book, about "Serious Games".
Keywords : scientific research, education, sociology, computer science, geography
In association with the multimedia workshop and the game library of the Odyssud cultural centre, located in Blagnac (near Toulouse, in France), we ran a local edition of the international game creation contest called "Global Game Jam". The contestants had 48h to design an experimental videogame on the theme "Extinction". The 17 contestants who participed in our local antena of this huge jam created two videogames: Celestial Equilibrium
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Keywords : game design, contest