In the Mind of a Game

Description

Those who write critically about games, develop proposals for games, or provide marketing and other promotional material for games need an encyclopedia from which to draw ideas and starting points for expanding themes. Across the web and in thousands of periodicals, a critical discourse relating to games has been growing. This discourse differs from the "evaluative" discourse still common on many web sites that feature technical ratings of games. Such ratings are based on a narrow set of standard technical categories that serve well to profile new games in purely technical terms, but such discourse has changed extensively as games are creating audiences that consist of large player communities that lack the technical orientation of the first generation of dedicated game players and instead possess a broader, more demanding view of games as media of cultural discourse. This is especially true of the world-creation or Sims games. The current trend reveals that game culture is analogous to film culture, which allows millions of people to participate in it without having, at the same time, a deep technical grounding. The newer approach is characterized by a knowledge of game themes and play characteristics combined with a deep, non-technical appreciation of the artistic aspects of both game creation and game play. Combined with this is the desire to communicate about games through academe, blog, and commercial media.

CONTENTS:

1. Computer Games and Reality
2. The Language(s) of Games
3. Games as Art and Technology
4. Games and Films
5. Developer as Artist
6. Developer as Engineer
7. The Studio: Post-Mortem of a Game, Part 1
8. The Phenomenon: Post-Mortem of a Game, Part 2
9. Society in Games
10. The Game and Me
11. In the Mind of a Game