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The Greatest Gift
Ray Mazza 2012
The Greatest Gift (as written about in Tabletop) is a card game about figuring out what the other players would most like out of real life, and offering these things as gifts. Players score when their offered gifts are chosen above the others.
The Greatest Gift is interesting and fun because...
· In order to advance, players must give the best gifts to each other.
· Learn that some players genuinely would rather have a pair of roller skates than their very own island.
· “Promise” cards prompt players to interact in entertaining or emotional ways that extend beyond the borders of normal games.
· Players get to learn the values of their friends in difficult or moral decisions.
· Many cards tailored towards sarcastic and humor-driven players.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 License
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Missions for Thoughtful Gamers
Andrew Cutting 2011
Who am I? How do I live a good life? What is reality? Such perennial questions may seem remote from the pleasures of playing videogames for entertainment and fantasy. Yet gamers too, in the midst of having fun, are potentially embarked upon a quest for understanding and for meaning. Missions for Thoughtful Gamers presents a sequence of 40 challenges, ranging from thought experiments to design exercises, each one inviting players to become more creatively curious and self-aware.
DEMO / The Gamer’s Oath
TUTORIAL / Playthinking
EPISODE 1: HIDDEN LANDS / Videogames as enquiry
BOSS FIGHT / Exploring ‘violence’
EPISODE 2: THE INNERMOST CAVE / Gnōthi sauton (know thyself )
SIDE QUESTS AND MINI-GAMES / Scholarly gaming
EPILOGUE / Gaming’s highest ideals
This is a ground-breaking book, providing inspiration for a new generation of
designers, critics and educators as well as an humane introduction for non-gamers
to why videogames matter.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 License
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Transmedia Storytelling: Imagery, Shapes and Techniques
Max Giovagnoli 2011
Telling stories simultaneously in multiple media is like creating a new “geography of the tale”, and it requires the author and the audience to find new, interactive spaces for sharing in publishing projects for cinema, tv-series, advertising campaigns, videogames, mobile apps, cartoons & comics, books and performative events, respecting the features and the language of all the media, even if they are part of a single system of integrated communications. But, as they say, It all starts with Story.
Transmedia Storytelling explores the theories and describes the use of the imagery and techniques shared by producers, authors and audiences of the entertainment, information and brand communication industries as they create and develop their stories in this new, interactive ecosystem.
From Star Wars to The Dark Knight, from Lost to Heroes and Dexter, from Assassin’s Creed to Lord of the Rings and Avatar, using more than 50 examples of successful projects from all over the world, and with the contribution of some of the most important producers and international researchers, Max Giovagnoli shows how to create products, works, tales and ad campaigns for audiences, and looking at the new narrative universes and the international franchises of the “transmedia culture”, with their storytelling paradigms, their rules and their great opportunities.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 License
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Tabletop: Analog Game Design
Greg Costikyan and Drew Davidson et al. 2011
Even as the digital revolution has progressed apace, tabletop games -- board and card, roleplaying and miniatures -- have grown and attracted many new fans. Indeed, in tabletop gaming there is far more diversity and design innovation than in digital games, and tabletop games have become of increasing interest to videogame designers, game design instructors, and people who study games of all forms.
In this volume, people of diverse backgrounds -- tabletop game designers, digital game designers, and game studies academics -- talk about tabletop games, game culture, and the intersection of games with learning, theater, and other forms. Some have chosen to write about their design process, others about games they admire, others about the culture of tabletop games and their fans. The results are various and individual, but all cast some light on what is a multivarious and fascinating set of game styles.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 License
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Well Played 3.0: Video Games, Value and Meaning
Drew Davidson et al. 2011
Following on Well Played 1.0 and 2.0, this book is full of in-depth close readings of video games that parse out the various meanings to be found in the experience of playing a game. Contributors analyze sequences in a game in detail in order to illustrate and interpret how the various components of a game can come together to create fulfilling a playing experience unique to this medium. Contributors again look at video games, some that were covered in Well Played 1.0 and 2.0 as well as new ones, in order to provide a variety of perspectives on more great games.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 License
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Virtual Body Language
Jeffrey Ventrella. 2011
Why does the tail wag the brain? What is virtual autism? Why can't our avatars walk hand-in-hand? Will a nonverbal Babel fish save the world? Jeffrey Ventrella, a seasoned virtual worlds programmer and visual language expert, reviews the history of avatars, smileys, and other expressive forms, and considers a future of spectacular creativity. This book combines thoughtful scholarship with amusing anecdotes from the trenches of Silicon Valley. Virtual Body Language presents a thorough analysis of the neurological, linguistic, aesthetic, and technical aspects of how nonverbal communication can be distributed over the internet. Based on nearly a decade of avatar development, Ventrella has the practical foundation on which to justify even the most outrageous claims, regarding what "avatar" might mean in the future.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 License
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The Cultural Gutter
Carol Borden, Ian Driscoll, Jim Munroe, James Schellenberg and Chris Szego. 2011
Science fiction, fantasy, comics, romance, genre movies, games all drain into the Cultural Gutter, a website dedicated to thoughtful articles about disreputable art—media and genres that are a little embarrassing. Irredeemable. Worthy of Note, but rolling like errant pennies back into the gutter. But the writers at the Cultural Gutter (http://theculturalgutter.com) know that being canonized isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Maligned genres and media allow for vital new ways of using old conventions and have more in common with high art, as itchy as that term makes us, than with respectable, middlebrow art. High art is often disdained as something a child could do, as mocking the audience, as degenerate, as trash. Gutter genres and media aren't known for their subtlety. In fact, their obviousness and their barenakedness is why they're destined to remain beneath the radar of serious culture -- and why they continue to thrive. The Cultural Gutter is dangerous because we have a philosophy. We try to balance enthusiasm with clear-eyed, honest engagement with the material and with our readers. This book expands on our mission with 10 articles each from science fiction/fantasy editor James Schellenberg, comics editor and publisher Carol Borden, romance editor Chris Szego, screen editor Ian Driscoll and founding editor and former games editor Jim Munroe.
This work is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License
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