Playback ? A Genealogy of 1980s British Videogames PDF Download

Author: Alex Wade
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1628924896
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
"Locates, explains, and analyses the origins of the British gaming industry, examining the production and consumption of games in an historical, social, and economic context"--

Author: Clash of Realities
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3839440319
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 639

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Book Description
Digital games as transmedia works of art - Games as social environments - The aesthetics of play - Digital games in pedagogy - Cineludic aesthetics - Ethics in games - these were some of the important and fascinating topics addressed during the international research conference "Clash of Realities" in 2015 and 2016 by more than a hundred international speakers, academics as well as artists. This volume represents the best contributions - by, inter alia, Janet H. Murray, David OReilly, Eric Zimmerman, Thomas Elsaesser, Lorenz Engell, Susana Tosca, Miguel Sicart, Frans Mäyrä, and Mark J.P. Wolf.

Author: Melanie Swalwell
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030664228
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
This book brings together essays on game history and historiography that reflect on the significance of locality. Game history did not unfold uniformly and the particularities of space and place matter, yet most digital game and software histories are silent with respect to geography. Topics covered include: hyper-local games; temporal anomalies in platform arrival and obsolescence; national videogame workforces; player memories of the places of gameplay; comparative reception studies of a platform; the erasure of cultural markers; the localization of games; and perspectives on the future development of ‘local’ game history. Chapters 1 and 12 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Author: Andrei Nae
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000440656
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
This book investigates the narrativity of some of the most popular survival horror video games and the gender politics implicit in their storyworlds. In a thorough analysis of the genre that draws upon detailed comparisons with the mainstream action genre, Andrei Nae places his analysis firmly within a political and social context. In comparing survival horror games to the dominant game design norms of the action genre, the author differentiates between classical and postclassical survival horror games to show how the former reject the norms of the action genre and deliver a critique of the conservative gender politics of action games, while the latter are more heterogeneous in terms of their game design and, implicitly, gender politics. This book will appeal not only to scholars working in game studies, but also to scholars of horror, gender studies, popular culture, visual arts, genre studies and narratology.

Author: Alan Meades
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262544709
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
The story of the British amusement arcade from the 1800s to the present. Amusement arcades are an important part of British culture, yet discussions of them tend to be based on American models. Alan Meades, who spent his childhood happily playing in British seaside arcades, presents the history of the arcade from its origins in traveling fairs of the 1800s to the present. Drawing on firsthand accounts of industry members and archival sources, including rare photographs and trade publications, he tells the story of the first arcades, the people who made the machines, the rise of video games, and the legislative and economic challenges spurred by public fears of moral decline. Arcade Britannia highlights the differences between British and North American arcades, especially in terms of the complex relationship between gambling and amusements. He also underlines Britain’s role in introducing coin-operated technologies into Europe, as well as the industry’s close links to America and, especially, Japan. He shows how the British arcade is a product of centuries of public play, gambling, entrepreneurship, and mechanization. Examining the arcade’s history through technological, social, cultural, biographic, and legislative perspectives, he describes a pendulum shift between control and liberalization, as well as the continued efforts of concerned moralists to limit and regulate public play. Finally, he recounts the impact on the industry of legislative challenges that included vicious taxation, questions of whether copyright law applied to video-game code, and the peculiar moment when every arcade game in Britain was considered a cinema.

Author: Nick Basannavar
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030831485
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
This book investigates the changes and continuities in the ways in which sexual violence has been interpreted and represented in Britain since 1965. It explores the representational trail of the Moors murders and subsequent trial of 1966, the emergence of age of consent abolitionism in the 1970s, Cleveland’s child sexual abuse crisis of 1987-8, and 2010 and 20s contemplations on the Jimmy Savile scandal. Harnessing research into popular media forms and a huge range of personal, political and professional records, Nick Basannavar carefully parses and illustrates the ways in which journalists, medical workers, politicians, lobbyists and other groups assembled and animated their narratives, revealing complex rhetorical and emotional processes. This book challenges problematic conceptual dichotomies such as silence/noise or ignorance/knowledge. It shows instead that although categories such as ‘child sexual abuse’ and ‘paedophilia’ may be relatively recent linguistic value-constructs, sexual violence against children has existed and been represented across historical moments, in changeable and challenging ways.

Author: Eddie Lohmeyer
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501364898
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
Throughout the 1990s, artists experimented with game engine technologies to disrupt our habitual relationships to video games. They hacked, glitched, and dismantled popular first-person shooters such as Doom (1993) and Quake (1996) to engage players in new kinds of embodied activity. In Unstable Aesthetics: Game Engines and the Strangeness of Art Modding, Eddie Lohmeyer investigates historical episodes of art modding practices-the alteration of a game system's existing code or hardware to generate abstract spaces-situated around a recent archaeology of the game engine: software for rendering two and three-dimensional gameworlds. The contemporary artists highlighted throughout this book-Cory Arcangel, JODI, Julian Oliver, Krista Hoefle, and Brent Watanabe, among others –- were attracted to the architectures of engines because they allowed them to explore vital relationships among abstraction, technology, and the body. Artists employed a range of modding techniques-hacking the ROM chips on Nintendo cartridges to produce experimental video, deconstructing source code to generate psychedelic glitch patterns, and collaging together surreal gameworlds-to intentionally dissect the engine's operations and unveil illusions of movement within algorithmic spaces. Through key moments in game engine history, Lohmeyer formulates a rich phenomenology of video games by focusing on the liminal spaces of interaction among system and body, or rather the strangeness of art modding.

Author: Alex Wade
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1628924888
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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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: Aphra Kerr
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135114641
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
In the last decade our mobile phones have been infiltrated by angry birds, our computers by leagues of legends and our social networks by pleas for help down on the farm. As digital games have become networked, mobile and casual they have become a pervasive cultural form. Based on original empirical work, including interviews with workers, virtual ethnographies in online games and analysis of industry related documents, Global Games provides a political, economic and sociological analysis of the growth and restructuring of the digital games industry over the past decade. Situating the games industry as both cultural and creative and examining the relative growth of console, PC, online and mobile, Aphra Kerr analyses the core production logics in the industry, and the expansion of circulation processes as game services have developed. In an industry dominated by North American and Japanese companies, Kerr explores the recent success of companies from China and Europe, and the emergent spatial politics as countries, cities, companies and communities compete to reshape digital games in the networked age.

Author: Jaroslav Svelch
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 026254928X
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
How amateur programmers in 1980s Czechoslovakia discovered games as a medium, using them not only for entertainment but also as a means of self-expression. Aside from the exceptional history of Tetris, very little is known about gaming culture behind the Iron Curtain. But despite the scarcity of home computers and the absence of hardware and software markets, Czechoslovakia hosted a remarkably active DIY microcomputer scene in the 1980s, producing more than two hundred games that were by turns creative, inventive, and politically subversive. In Gaming the Iron Curtain, Jaroslav Švelch offers the first social history of gaming and game design in 1980s Czechoslovakia, and the first book-length treatment of computer gaming in any country of the Soviet bloc. Švelch describes how amateur programmers in 1980s Czechoslovakia discovered games as a medium, using them not only for entertainment but also as a means of self-expression. Sheltered in state-supported computer clubs, local programmers fashioned games into a medium of expression that, unlike television or the press, was neither regulated nor censored. In the final years of Communist rule, Czechoslovak programmers were among the first in the world to make activist games about current political events, anticipating trends observed decades later in independent or experimental titles. Drawing from extensive interviews as well as political, economic, and social history, Gaming the Iron Curtain tells a compelling tale of gaming the system, introducing us to individuals who used their ingenuity to be active, be creative, and be heard.