Author: Rebecca Levene Publisher: Aurum ISBN: 1781311072 Category : Computers Languages : en Pages : 376
Book Description
Gaming: it’s the greatest British invasion of them all. Lara Croft is an international icon and the British-born Grand Theft Auto and its spin-offs have sold more than 100 million copies worldwide. The UK’s games industry is now bigger than either its cinema or its music. Yet the medium’s birth in Thatcher’s Britain was almost accidental. While politicians championed computers like the BBC Micro and the ZX Spectrum as engines of learning, it was left to a grassroots culture of amateur programmers to unlock their true potential. And from bedrooms and classrooms across the country, a brilliant profusion of innovative and idiosyncratic games soon emerged – propelling their young creators to fame, riches and, eventually, a place on the world stage. This is the story of those teenage coders – tracing their journey from the first home computers to the age of the smartphone. A mix of oddball characters, programming miracles and moral panics, Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders reveals how the unique history of British computing led to some of the greatest games of all time.
Author: Mark J. P. Wolf Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 0262328496 Category : Games & Activities Languages : en Pages : 715
Book Description
Thirty-nine essays explore the vast diversity of video game history and culture across all the world's continents. Video games have become a global industry, and their history spans dozens of national industries where foreign imports compete with domestic productions, legitimate industry contends with piracy, and national identity faces the global marketplace. 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. Some of these national histories appear for the first time in English, and some for the first time in any language. Readers will learn, for example, about the rapid growth of mobile games in Africa; how a meat-packing company held the rights to import the Atari VCS 2600 into Mexico; and how the Indonesian MMORPG Nusantara Online reflects that country's cultural history and folklore. Every country or region's unique conditions provide the context that shapes its national industry; for example, the long history of computer science in the United Kingdom and Scandinavia, the problems of piracy in China, the PC Bangs of South Korea, or the Dutch industry's emphasis on serious games. As these essays demonstrate, local innovation and diversification thrive alongside productions and corporations with global aspirations. Africa • Arab World • Argentina • Australia • Austria • Brazil • Canada • China • Colombia • Czech Republic • Finland • France • Germany • Hong Kong • Hungary • India • Indonesia • Iran • Ireland • Italy • Japan • Mexico • The Netherlands • New Zealand • Peru • Poland • Portugal • Russia • Scandinavia • Singapore • South Korea • Spain • Switzerland • Thailand • Turkey • United Kingdom • United States of America • Uruguay • Venezuela
Author: Alex Wade Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA ISBN: 1628924861 Category : Games & Activities Languages : en Pages : 182
Book Description
Through interviews with developers, gamers, and journalists examining the phenomena of bedroom coding, arcade gaming, and format wars, mapped onto enquiry into the seminal genres of the time including driving, shooting, and maze chase, Playback: A Genealogy of 1980s British Videogames examines how 1980s Britain has become the culture of work in the 21st century and considers its meaning to contemporary society. This crucial and timely work fills a lacuna for students and researchers of sociology, media, and games studies and will be of interest to employees of the videogames and media industries. Research into videogames have never been greater, but exploration of their historic drivers is as elided as the technology is influential, giving rise to a range of questions. What were the social and economic conditions that gave rise to a billion dollar industry? What were the motivations of the early 'bedroom coders'? What are the legacies of the seminal videogames of the 1980s and how do they inform the current social, political and cultural landscape? With a focus on the characteristics of the UK videogame industry in the 1980s, Wade explores these questions from perspectives of consumption, production and leisure, outlining the construction of a habitus unique to this time.
Author: Neal Roger Tringham Publisher: CRC Press ISBN: 1040074618 Category : Computers Languages : en Pages : 540
Book Description
Understand Video Games as Works of Science Fiction and Interactive Stories Science Fiction Video Games focuses on games that are part of the science fiction genre, rather than set in magical milieux or exaggerated versions of our own world. Unlike many existing books and websites that cover some of the same material, this book emphasizes critical a
Author: Alison Gazzard Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 0262552027 Category : Computers Languages : en Pages : 219
Book Description
The story of a pioneering microcomputer: its beginnings as part of a national Computer Literary Project, its innovative hardware, and its creative uses. In 1982, the British Broadcasting Corporation launched its Computer Literacy Project, intended “to introduce interested adults to the world of computers and computing.” The BBC accompanied this initiative with television programs, courses, books, and software—an early experiment in multi-platform education. The BBC, along with Acorn Computers, also introduced the BBC Microcomputer, which would be at the forefront of the campaign. The BBC Micro was designed to meet the needs of users in homes and schools, to demystify computing, and to counter the general pessimism among the media in Britain about technology. In this book, Alison Gazzard looks at the BBC Micro, examining the early capabilities of multi-platform content generation and consumption and the multiple literacies this approach enabled—not only in programming and software creation, but also in accessing information across a range of media, and in “do-it-yourself” computing. She links many of these early developments to current new-media practices. Gazzard looks at games developed for the BBC Micro, including Granny's Garden, an educational game for primary schools, and Elite, the seminal space-trading game. She considers the shift in focus from hardware to peripherals, describing the Teletext Adapter as an early model for software distribution and the Domesday Project (which combined texts, video, and still photographs) as a hypermedia-like experience. Gazzard's account shows the BBC Micro not only as a vehicle for various literacies but also as a user-oriented machine that pushed the boundaries of what could be achieved in order to produce something completely new.
Author: Lorna Piatti-Farnell Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 1793624607 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 323
Book Description
The Superhero Multiverse focuses on the evolving meanings of the superhero icon in 21st-century film and popular media, with an emphasis on re-adapting, re-imagining, and re-making. With its focus on multimedia and transmedia transformations, The Superhero Multiverse pivots on two important points: firstly, it reflects on the core concerns of the superhero narrative—including the relationship between ‘superhero comics’ and ‘superhero films’, the comics roots of superhero media, matters of canon and hybridity, and issues of recycling and stereotyping in superhero films and media texts. Secondly, it considers how these intersecting textual and cultural preoccupations are intrinsic to the process of remaking and re-adapting superheroes, and brings attention to multiple ways of materializing these iconic figures in our contemporary context.
Author: Tom Lean Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1472918355 Category : Computers Languages : en Pages : 297
Book Description
How did computers invade the homes and cultural life of 1980s Britain? Remember the ZX Spectrum? Ever have a go at programming with its stretchy rubber keys? How about the BBC Micro, Acorn Electron, or Commodore 64? Did you marvel at the immense galaxies of Elite, master digital kung-fu in Way of the Exploding Fist or lose yourself in the surreal caverns of Manic Miner? For anyone who was a kid in the 1980s, these iconic computer brands are the stuff of legend. In Electronic Dreams, Tom Lean tells the story of how computers invaded British homes for the first time, as people set aside their worries of electronic brains and Big Brother and embraced the wonder-technology of the 1980s. This book charts the history of the rise and fall of the home computer, the family of futuristic and quirky machines that took computing from the realm of science and science fiction to being a user-friendly domestic technology. It is a tale of unexpected consequences, when the machines that parents bought to help their kids with homework ended up giving birth to the video games industry, and of unrealised ambitions, like the ahead-of-its-time Prestel network that first put the British home online but failed to change the world. Ultimately, it's the story of the people who made the boom happen, the inventors and entrepreneurs like Clive Sinclair and Alan Sugar seeking new markets, bedroom programmers and computer hackers, and the millions of everyday folk who bought in to the electronic dream and let the computer into their lives.
Author: Alwyn W. Turner Publisher: Aurum ISBN: 1781311420 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 624
Book Description
"Superb" NICK COHEN, author of What's Left? "Tremendously entertaining" DOMINIC SANDBROOK, Sunday Times "Like his previous histories of the Seventies and Eighties, A Classless Society is an extraordinarily comprehensive work. Turner writes brilliantly, creating a compelling narrative of the decade, weaving contrasting elements together with a natural storyteller’s aplomb… engaging and unique" IRVINE WELSH, Daily Telegraph "Ravenously inquisitive, darkly comical and coolly undeceived... Turner is a master of the telling detail" CRAIG BROWN, Mail on Sunday When Margaret Thatcher was ousted from Downing Street in November 1990 after eleven years of bitter social and economic conflict, many hoped that the decade to come would be more 'caring'; others hoped that the more radical policies of her revolution might even be overturned. Across politics and culture there was an apparent yearning for something the Iron Lady had famously dismissed: society. The 'New Britain' to emerge would be a contradiction: economically unequal but culturally classless. Whilst Westminster agonised over sleaze and the ERM, the country outside became the playground of the Ladette. It was also a period that would see old moral certainties swept aside, and once venerable institutions descend into farce - followed, in the case of the Royal Family, by tragedy. Opening with a war in the Gulf and ending with the attacks of 11 September 2001, A Classless Society goes in search of the decade when modern Britain came of age. What it finds is a nation anxiously grappling with new technologies, tentatively embracing new lifestyles, and, above all, forging a new sense of what it means to be British. "Deserves to become a classic" EDWINA CURRIE "Rich and encyclopaedic" ROGER LEWIS, Daily Mail "Excellent" D.J. TAYLOR, Independent
Author: Iain A. Taylor Publisher: Intellect Books ISBN: 1789388198 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 425
Book Description
Provides new perspectives on the increasingly complex relationships between media forms and formats, materiality, and meaning. Drawing on a range of qualitative methodologies, our consideration of the materiality of media is structured around three overarching concepts: form – the physical qualities of objects and the meanings which extend from them; format – objects considered in relation to the protocols which govern their use, and the meanings and practices which stem from them; and ephemeral meaning – the ways in which media artefacts are captured, transformed, and redefined through changing social, cultural, and technological values. Each section includes empirical chapters which provide expansive discussions of perspectives on media and materiality. It considers a range of media artefacts such as 8mm film, board games maps, videogames, cassette tapes, transistor radios and Twitter, amongst others. These are punctuated with a number of short takes – less formal, often personal takes exploring the meanings of media in context. We seek to consider the materialities which emerge across the broad and variegated range of the term’s use, and to create spaces for conversation and debate about the implications that this plurality of material meanings might have for the study of study of media, culture, and society.
Author: Dominic Sandbrook Publisher: Penguin UK ISBN: 0141979313 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 688
Book Description
SPECTATOR BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2015 Britain's empire has gone. Our manufacturing base is a shadow of its former self; the Royal Navy has been reduced to a skeleton. In military, diplomatic and economic terms, we no longer matter as we once did. And yet there is still one area in which we can legitimately claim superpower status: our popular culture. It is extraordinary to think that one British writer, J. K. Rowling, has sold more than 400 million books; that Doctor Who is watched in almost every developed country in the world; that James Bond has been the central character in the longest-running film series in history; that The Lord of the Rings is the second best-selling novel ever written (behind only A Tale of Two Cities); that the Beatles are still the best-selling musical group of all time; and that only Shakespeare and the Bible have sold more books than Agatha Christie. To put it simply, no country on earth, relative to its size, has contributed more to the modern imagination. This is a book about the success and the meaning of Britain's modern popular culture, from Bond and the Beatles to heavy metal and Coronation Street, from the Angry Young Men to Harry Potter, from Damien Hirst toThe X Factor.
Author: Rebecca Levene
Author: Mark J. P. Wolf
Author: Alex Wade
Author: Neal Roger Tringham
Author: Alison Gazzard
Author: Lorna Piatti-Farnell
Author: Tom Lean
Author: Alwyn W. Turner
Author: Iain A. Taylor
Author: Dominic Sandbrook