Featuring interviews with the creators of 43 popular video games-including Spyro the Dragon, Syphon Filter, NFL GameDay 98 and Final Fantasy VII - this book gives a behind-the-scenes look at some of the most influential (and sometimes forgotten) titles of the original PlayStation era. Interviewees recall the painstaking development, challenges of working with mega publishers and uncertainties of public reception, and discuss the creative processes that produced some of gaming's all-time classics.

Game AI Pro2: Collected Wisdom of Game AI Professionals presents cutting-edge tips, tricks, and techniques for artificial intelligence (AI) in games, drawn from developers of shipped commercial games as well as some of the best-known academics in the field. It contains knowledge, advice, hard-earned wisdom, and insights gathered from across the community of developers and researchers who have devoted themselves to game AI. In this book, 47 expert developers and researchers have come together to bring you their newest advances in game AI, along with twists on proven techniques that have shipped in some of the most successful commercial games of the last few years. The book provides a toolbox of proven techniques that can be applied to many common and not-so-common situations. It is written to be accessible to a broad range of readers. Beginners will find good general coverage of game AI techniques and a number of comprehensive overviews, while intermediate to expert professional game developers will find focused, deeply technical chapters on specific topics of interest to them. Covers a wide range of AI in games, with topics applicable to almost any game Touches on most, if not all, of the topics necessary to get started in game AI Provides real-life case studies of game AI in published commercial games Gives in-depth, technical solutions from some of the industry's best-known games Includes downloadable demos and/or source code, available at http://www.gameaipro.com

More than any other entertainment medium, video games offer the chance for us to participate in a world beyond the ordinary. Whether you are playing as a supersonic hedgehog, an athletic archeologist, or a moustachioed Italian plumber, video games allow their players to inhabit spaces where the usual parameters of existence do not apply. The medium's history is chronicled through the individual stories of 151 of the most iconic video games. Beginning in the early 1970s, the book charts five decades of the pixel revolution. The story of each game is accompanied by trivia and quotations, and illustrated with photographs, screenshots and artwork. This celebratory reference, and up-to-date history, will enthral any video games aficionado. - Chronicles the history of gaming through an analysis of151 of the world's most-iconic and best-loved games - Expert analysis of the story of each game, accompanied . by fascinating trivia, memorable quotes, and information on the year of publication and where the game can be played today - Includes titles across all platforms, including arcade, console, PC, online and handheld games - Charts five decades of video game evolution, from Computer Space to Fortnite - Compulsively illustrated with over 1000 action screenshots, game artworks and photographs

When viewed through the context of an interactive play, a video game player fulfills the roles of both actor and spectator, watching and influencing a game's story in real time. This book presents video gaming as a virtual medium for performance, scrutinizing the ways in which a player's interaction with the narrative informs personal, historical, social and cultural understanding. Centering the author's own experiences as both video game player and performance scholar, the book thoroughly applies concepts from theatre and performance studies. Chapters argue that the posthuman player position now challenges what can be contextualized as a lived experience, and how video games can change players' relationships with historical events and contemporary concerns, ultimately impacting how they develop a sense of self. Using the author's own gaming experiences as a framework, the book focuses on the intersection between player and narrative, exploring what engagement with a storyline reveals about identity and society.

Analyses a variety of approaches to development and publishing, across a multitude of platforms and genres, to provide a new vision for the next twenty years of game development. Considers technical advances in adjacent markets and how they will impact the games industry over the next twenty years. Includes insightful interviews from leading game and entertainment industry figures.

This book covers the distinguishing characteristics and tropes of visual novels (VNs) as choice-based games and analyzes VNs like 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors; Hatoful Boyfriend; and Monster Prom, some of the best examples of the genre as illustrations. The author covers structuring branching narrative and plot, designing impactful and compelling choices, writing entertaining relationships and character interactions, understanding the importance of a VN's prose, and planning a VN's overall narrative design and story delivery. The book contains exercises at the end of chapters to practice the techniques discussed. By the end of the book, if the reader finishes all the exercises, they may have several portfolio pieces or a significant portion of their own VN project designed. Features: Discusses different aspects and genres of VNs, what makes them enjoyable, and successful techniques developers can incorporate into their own games Analyzes various VNs and choice-based games that use these successful techniques Shares tips from developers on portfolio pieces, hiring a team to work on VNs, and plotting and outlining VNs Branching Story, Unlocked Dialogue: Designing and Writing Visual Novels is a valuable resource for developers and narrative designers interested in working on VNs. The book will show them how they can design their own VN projects, design branching narratives, develop entertaining plots and relationships, design impactful and compelling choices, and write prose that's a pleasure to read.

The First World War in Computer Games analyses the depiction of combat, the landscape of the trenches, and concepts of how the war ended through computer games. This book explores how computer games are at the forefront of new representations of the First World War.

Role-play as a Heritage Practice is the first book to examine physically performed role-enactments, such as live-action role-play (LARP), tabletop role-playing games (TRPG), and hobbyist historical reenactment (RH), from a combined game studies and heritage studies perspective. Demonstrating that non-digital role-plays, such as TRPG and LARP, share many features with RH, the book contends that all three may be considered as heritage practices. Studying these role-plays as three distinct genres of playful, participatory and performative forms of engagement with cultural heritage, Mochocki demonstrates how an exploration of the affordances of each genre can be valuable. Showing that a player's engagement with history or heritage material is always multi-layered, the book clarifies that the layers may be conceptualised simultaneously as types of heritage authenticity and as types of in-game immersion. It is also made clear that RH, TRPG and LARP share commonalities with a multitude of other media, including video games, historical fiction and film. Existing within, and contributing to, the fiction and non-fiction mediasphere, these role-enactments are shaped by the same large-scale narratives and discourses that persons, families, communities, and nations use to build memory and identity. Role-play as a Heritage Practice will be of great interest to academics and students engaged in the study of heritage, memory, nostalgia, role-playing, historical games, performance, fans and transmedia narratology.

In this textbook the author takes as inspiration recent breakthroughs in game playing to explain how and why deep reinforcement learning works. In particular he shows why two-person games of tactics and strategy fascinate scientists, programmers, and game enthusiasts and unite them in a common goal: to create artificial intelligence (AI). After an introduction to the core concepts, environment, and communities of intelligence and games, the book is organized into chapters on reinforcement learning, heuristic planning, adaptive sampling, function approximation, and self-play. The author takes a hands-on approach throughout, with Python code examples and exercises that help the reader understand how AI learns to play. He also supports the main text with detailed pointers to online machine learning frameworks, technical details for AlphaGo, notes on how to play and program Go and chess, and a comprehensive bibliography. The content is class-tested and suitable for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses on artificial intelligence and games. It's also appropriate for self-study by professionals engaged with applications of machine learning and with games development. Finally it's valuable for any reader engaged with the philosophical implications of artificial and general intelligence, games represent a modern Turing test of the power and limitations of AI.

Prior to the arrival of the Sega Genesis, video games were still largely considered "kid stuff," but with a far more mature and eclectic range of titles, and an understanding of what gamers wanted, Sega and its Genesis/Mega Drive console began to shift the expectations for what gaming could be. Never scared to innovate, Sega's impact on the industry continues to this day through the games they originally developed and the technology their consoles pushed into the mainstream. Featuring interviews with the creators of over 40 games on the Sega Genesis console including Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Altered Beast, Aladdin, Earthworm Jim and NHL 95, this book gives a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of some of the influential, iconic, and sometimes forgotten games on Sega's most important contribution to the game industry. The interviewees reveal the challenges of working with mega publishers, the uncertainties of public reception, and the creative processes that produced some of the 16-bit era's classic titles.

The Paradox of Transgression in Games looks at transgressive games as an aesthetic experience, tackling how players respond to game content that shocks, disturbs, and distresses, and how contemporary video games can evoke intense emotional reactions. The book delves into the commercial success of many controversial videogames: although such games may appear shocking for the observing bystander, playing them is experienced as deeply rewarding for the player. Drawing on qualitative player studies and approaches from media aesthetics theory, the book challenges the perception of games as innocent entertainment, and examines the range of emotional, moral, and intellectual experiences of players. As they explore what players consider transgressive, the authors ask whether there is something about the gameplay situation that works to mitigate the sense of transgression, stressing gameplay as an aesthetic experience. Anchoring the aesthetic game experience both in play studies as well as in aesthetic theory, this book will be an essential resource for scholars and students of game studies, aesthetics, media studies, philosophy of art, and emotions.

This book explores hybrid play as a site of interdisciplinary activity-one that is capable of generating new forms of mobility, communication, subjects, and artistic expression as well as new ways of interacting with and understanding the world. The chapters in this collection explore hybrid making, hybrid subjects, and hybrid spaces, generating interesting conversations about the past, current and future nature of hybrid play. Together, the authors offer important insights into how place and space are co-constructed through play; how, when, and for what reasons people occupy hybrid spaces; and how cultural practices shape elements of play and vice versa. A diverse group of scholars and practitioners provides a rich interdisciplinary perspective, which will be of great interest to those working in the areas of games studies, media studies, communication, gender studies, and media arts.

Analyses a variety of approaches to development and publishing, across a multitude of platforms and genres, to provide a new vision for the next twenty years of game development. Considers technical advances in adjacent markets and how they will impact the games industry over the next twenty years. Includes insightful interviews from leading game and entertainment industry figures.

Locating Imagination in Popular Culture offers a multi-disciplinary account of the ways in which popular culture, tourism and notions of place intertwine in an environment characterized by ongoing processes of globalization, digitization and an increasingly ubiquitous nature of multi-media. Centred around the concept of imagination, the authors demonstrate how popular culture and media are becoming increasingly important in the ways in which places and localities are imagined, and how they also subsequently stimulate a desire to visit the actual places in which people's favourite stories are set. With examples drawn from around the globe, the book offers a unique study of the role of narratives conveyed through media in stimulating and reflecting desire in tourism. This book will have appeal in a wide variety of academic disciplines, ranging from media and cultural studies to fan- and tourism studies, cultural geography, literary studies and cultural sociology.

Artificial Intelligence Techniques in IoT Sensor Networks is a technical book which can be read by researchers, academicians, students and professionals interested in artificial intelligence (AI), sensor networks and Internet of Things (IoT). This book is intended to develop a shared understanding of applications of AI techniques in the present and near term. The book maps the technical impacts of AI technologies, applications and their implications on the design of solutions for sensor networks. This text introduces researchers and aspiring academicians to the latest developments and trends in AI applications for sensor networks in a clear and well-organized manner. It is mainly useful for research scholars in sensor networks and AI techniques. In addition, professionals and practitioners working on the design of real-time applications for sensor networks may benefit directly from this book. Moreover, graduate and master's students of any departments related to AI, IoT and sensor networks can find this book fascinating for developing expert systems or real-time applications. This book is written in a simple and easy language, discussing the fundamentals, which relieves the requirement of having early backgrounds in the field. From this expectation and experience, many libraries will be interested in owning copies of this work.

This book offers critical perspectives on the digital 'iconic', exploring how the notion of the iconic is re-appropriated and re-made online, and the consequences for humanity and society. Examining cross-cultural case studies of iconic images in digital spaces, the author offers original and critical analyses, theories and perspectives on the notion of the 'iconic', and on its movement, re-appropriation and meaning making on digital platforms. A carefully curated selection of case studies illustrates topics such as phantom memory; martyrdom; denigration and pornographic recoding; digital games as simulacra; and memes as 'artification'. Situating the notion of the iconic firmly within contemporary cultures, the author takes a thematic approach to investigate the iconic as an unstable and unfinished phenomenon online as it travels through platforms temporally and spatially. The book will be an important resource for academics and students in the areas of media and communications, digital culture, cultural studies, visual communication, visual culture, journalism studies and digital humanities.

With annual gross sales surpassing 100 billion U.S. dollars each of the last two years, the digital games industry may one day challenge theatrical-release movies as the highest-grossing entertainment media in the world. In their examination of the tremendous cultural influence of digital games, Daniel Reardon and David Wright analyze three companies that have shaped the industry: Bethesda, located in Rockville, Maryland, USA; BioWare in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada; and CD Projekt Red in Warsaw, Poland. Each company has used social media and technical content in the games to promote players' belief that players control the companies' game narratives. The result has been at times explosive, as empowered players often attempted to co-op the creative processes of games through discussion board forum demands, fund-raising campaigns to persuade companies to change or add game content, and modifications ("modding") of the games through fan-created downloads. The result has changed the way we understand the interactive nature of digital games and the power of fan culture to shape those games.

- The first book dedicated to exploring key video games from the 1970s to present day. - Provides a highly accessible overview of the history of video games from PONG, Pac-Man and Tetris to Minecraft, Animal Crossing and Assassin's Creed. - The selection covers a range of historical periods and platforms, genres, commercial impact, artistic choices, contexts of play, typical and atypical representations, uses of games for specific purposes, uses of materials or techniques, specific subcultures, repurposing, transgressive aesthetics, interfaces, moral or ethical impacts, and more.

Welcome to the second volume of Game Audio Programming: Principles and Practices - the first series of its kind dedicated to the art of game audio programming! This volume features more than 20 chapters containing advanced techniques from some of the top game audio programmers and sound designers in the industry. This book continues the tradition of collecting more knowledge and wisdom about game audio programming than any other volume in history. Both audio programming beginners and seasoned veterans will find content in this book that is valuable, with topics ranging from extreme low-level mixing to high-level game integration. Each chapter contains techniques that were used in games that have shipped, and there is a plethora of code samples and diagrams. There are chapters on threading, DSP implementation, advanced middleware techniques in FMOD Studio and Audiokinetic Wwise, ambiences, mixing, music, and more. This book has something for everyone who is programming audio for a game: programmers new to the art of audio programming, experienced audio programmers, and those souls who just got assigned the audio code. This book is for you!

Expert advice from several industrial professionals who have worked for some of the world's biggest tech and interactive companies. Best practices that not only prepare writers on how to apply their craft to new fields, but also prepare them for the common ambiguity they will find in corporate and start-up environments. Breakdown of platforms that shows how tech capabilities can fulfill content expectations and how content can fulfill tech expectations. Basic storytelling mechanics customized to today's popular technologies and traditional gaming platforms.

Expert advice from several industrial professionals who have worked for some of the world's biggest tech and interactive companies. Best practices that not only prepare writers on how to apply their craft to new fields, but also prepare them for the common ambiguity they will find in corporate and start-up environments. Breakdown of platforms that shows how tech capabilities can fulfill content expectations and how content can fulfill tech expectations. Basic storytelling mechanics customized to today's popular technologies and traditional gaming platforms.

a balanced blend of theoretical and practical information that enables readers to develop 3D worlds quickly and efficiently.

This book looks closely at the endings of narrative digital games, examining their ways of concluding the processes of both storytelling and play in order to gain insight into what endings are and how we identify them in different media. While narrative digital games share many representational strategies for signalling their upcoming end with more traditional narrative media - such as novels or movies - they also show many forms of endings that often radically differ from our conventional understanding of conclusion and closure. From vast game worlds that remain open for play after a story's finale, to multiple endings that are often hailed as a means for players to create their own stories, to the potentially tragic endings of failure and "game over", digital games question the traditional singularity and finality of endings. Using a broad range of examples, this book delves deeply into these and other forms and their functions, both to reveal the closural specificities of the ludonarrative hybrid that digital games are, as well as to find the core elements that characterise endings in any medium. It examines how endings make themselves known to players and raises the question of how well-established closural conventions blend with play and a player's effort to achieve a goal. As an interdisciplinary study that draws on game studies as much as on transmedial narratology, Forms and Functions of Endings in Narrative Digital Games is suited for scholars and students of digital games as well as for narratologists yet to become familiar with this medium.

A uniquely cross-disciplinary and cross-experience book written as an accessible guide for people new to storytelling in games, new to games as a practice, and those eager to develop their existing practices & knowledge around storytelling in games. Offers careful, clear, and practical advice for understanding creative writing, in the context of games, and in discovering and developing your own games writing practice. Focuses on writing, not narrative design, as an area underdeveloped in the context of games storytelling.