Virtual Lobby Display: Video Games

In 1975, design engineer Dave Nutting completed work on a new arcade machine. One of the first successful early arcade titles, Gun Fight helped introduce an entire nation to video-gaming and sold more than 8,000 units. In Gamer Nation, John Wills examines how video games co-opt national landscapes, livelihoods, and legends.

All aspects of video games and gaming culture are covered inside this engaging reference, including the leading video game innovators, the technological advances that made the games of the late 1970s and those of today possible, the corporations that won and lost billions of dollars pursing this lucrative market, arcade culture, as well as the demise of free-standing video consoles and the rise of home-based and hand-held gaming devices.

Atari's 1981 arcade hit Tempest was a "tube shooter" built around glowing, vector-based geometric shapes. Tempest was one of the most aesthetically impactful games of the twentieth century, lending its crisp, vector aesthetic to many subsequent movies, television shows, and video games.

In December 1993, gaming changed forever. id Software's seminal shooter DOOM was released, and it shook the foundations of the medium. Daniel Pinchbeck brings together the complete story of DOOM for the first time.

In Respawn Colin Milburn examines the connections between video games, hacking, and science fiction that galvanize technological activism and technological communities. Discussing a wide range of games, from Portal and Final Fantasy VII to Super Mario Sunshine and Shadow of the Colossus, Milburn illustrates how they impact the lives of gamers and non-gamers alike.

This volume describes video game history and culture across every continent, with essays covering areas as disparate and far-flung as Argentina and Thailand, Hungary and Indonesia, Iran and Ireland. Most of the essays are written by natives of the countries they discuss, many of them game designers and founders of game companies, offering distinctively firsthand perspectives.

The widely varying experiences of players of digital games challenge the notions that there is only one correct way to play a game. In Cheating, Mia Consalvo investigates how players choose to play games, and what happens when they can't always play the way they'd like.

To disregard the computer game is to refuse to engage fully with contemporary popular culture. This is the first academic work dedicated to the study of computer games in terms of the stories they tell and the manner of their telling. It considers the computer game as a new and emerging mode of contemporary storytelling in a fashion that is accessible and readable.

Video games have been viewed as causing social problems, but what if they actually helped solve them? This question drives Karen Schrier's Knowledge Games, which seeks to uncover the potentials and pitfalls of using games to make discoveries, solve real-world problems, and better understand our world.

This book examines the complexity of World of Warcraft from a variety of perspectives, exploring the cultural and social implications of the proliferation of ever more complex digital gameworlds. The contributors have immersed themselves in the World of Warcraft universe, spending hundreds of hours as players, conducting interviews, and studying the game design.

A game designer considers the experience of play, why games have rules, and the relationship of play and narrative. The impulse toward play is very ancient, not only pre-cultural but pre-human; zoologists have identified play behaviors in turtles and in chimpanzees. In this book, Brian Upton analyzes the experience of play - how playful activities unfold from moment to moment and how the rules we adopt constrain that unfolding.