Esports have attracted considerable attention over the past few years and become an industry that is projected to continue to increase rapidly. Intersecting with the esports industry are organizations and businesses that develop and support the esports game experience. Included is the entrepreneurial spirit of gamers, who are interested in creating their own career paths through capturing and posting gaming microassists on different public venues that are driven by advertising dollars, invitational competition monetary winnings, and other forms of marketing their expertise for financial gain. All these organizations and industries form satellites of career opportunities as well as opportunities for research and enhanced forward-leaning study. Such career opportunities can be explicitly addressed within the structure of university degree and micro-credential certificate programs, some of which have begun to offer esports-directed degrees, but most of which have not yet moved from esports clubs into a recognition of the business and industry monetization of esports. The Handbook of Research on Pathways and Opportunities Into the Business of Esports addresses the intersection of esports gaming and the business and industry of esports, rather than an exploration of the video games themselves. It is the supporting and intersecting industry driven by esports and the vast opportunities this brings that are the foci of this book. Covering topics including digital learning, esport marketing curriculum, and gaming culture, this text is essential for business professionals, industry analysts, entrepreneurs, managers, coaches, marketers, advertisers, brand managers, university and college administrators, faculty and researchers, students, professors, and academicians.

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.

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.

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

Perhaps no arcade game is so nostalgically remembered, yet so critically bemoaned, as Dragon's Lair. A bit of a technological neanderthal, the game implemented a unique combination of videogame components and home video replay, garnering great popular media and user attention in a moment of contracted economic returns and popularity for the videogame arcade business. But subsequently, writers and critics have cast the game aside as a cautionary tale of bad game design. In Dragon's Lair and the Fantasy of Interactivity, MJ Clarke revives Dragon's Lair as a fascinating textual experiment interlaced with powerful industrial strategies, institutional discourse, and textual desires around key notions of interactivity and fantasy. Constructing a multifaceted historical study of the game that considers its design, its makers, its recording medium, and its in-game imagery, Clarke suggests that the more appropriate metaphor for Dragon's Lair is not that of a neanderthal, but a socio-technical network, infusing and advancing debates about the production and consumption of new screen technologies. Far from being the gaming failure posited by evolutionary-minded lay critics, Clarke argues, Dragon's Lair offers a fascinating provisional solution to still-unsettled questions about screen media.

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.

Explores the basics of indie game marketing Helps the reader with how to communicate to talk to investors, pbulishers, and major platforms Illustrates different negotiation tactics

Combining theory and practice, this updated new edition provides a complete overview of how to create deep and meaningful quests for games. It uses the Unity game engine in conjunction with Fungus and other free plugins to provide an accessible entry into quest design. The book begins with an introduction to the theory and history of quests in games, before covering four theoretical components of quests: their spaces, objects, actors, and challenges. Each chapter also includes a practical section, with accompanying exercises and suggestions for the use of specific technologies for four crucial aspects of quest design: * level design * quest item creation * NPC and dialogue construction * scripting This book will be of great interest to all game designers looking to create new, innovative quests in their games. It will also appeal to new media researchers, as well as humanities scholars in the fields of mythology and depth-psychology that want to bring computer-assisted instruction into their classroom in an innovative way. The companion website includes lecture and workshop slides, and can be accessed at: www.designingquests.com

Do demons and devils have free will? Does justice exist in Menzoberranzan? What's the morality involved with player characters casting necromancy and summoning spells?

"Dungeons & Dragons and Philosophy" probes the rich terrain of philosophically compelling concepts and ideas that underlie "Dungeons & Dragons," the legendary fantasy role-playing game that grew into a world-wide cultural phenomenon. A series of accessible essays reveals what the imaginary worlds of "D&D" can teach us about ethics, morality, metaphysics and more.Illustrates a wide variety of philosophical concepts and ideas that arise in "Dungeons & Dragons" gameplay and presents them in an accessible and entertaining mannerReveals how the strategies, tactics, improvisations, and role-play employed by "D&D" enthusiasts have startling parallels in the real world of philosophyExplores a wide range of philosophical topics, including the nature of free will, the metaphysics of personal identity, the morality of crafting fictions, sex and gender issues in tabletop gameplay, and friendship and collaborative storytellingProvides gamers with deep philosophical insights that can lead to a richer appreciation of "D&D" and any gaming experience

Fully detailed game projects from scratch. Beginners can do the steps and create games right away. No coding experience is necessary. Numerous examples take a raw beginner towards professional coding proficiency in C# and Unity. Includes a thorough introduction to Unity 2020 All required software is professional quality and completely free to use for any purpose including commercial applications and games.

How can we make sure that our children are learning to be creative thinkers in a world of global competition - and what does that mean for the future of education in the digital age? David Williamson Shaffer offers a fresh and powerful perspective on computer games and learning. How Computer Games Help Children Learn shows how video and computer games can help teach children to build successful futures - but only if we think in new ways about education itself. Shaffer shows how computer and video games can help students learn to think like engineers, urban planners, journalists, lawyers, and other innovative professionals, giving them the tools they need to survive in a changing world. Based on more than a decade of research in technology, game science, and education, How Computer Games Help Children Learn revolutionizes the ongoing debate about the pros and cons of digital learning.

Game design has shifted from the development of games for entertainment to the creation of games with a more meaningful purpose. Game principles and theories can be applied to interactive programs in a variety of fields and professions. Researchers continue to examine the many ways games can be applied to real-world settings. Emerging Research and Trends in Gamification brings together innovative and scholarly research on the use of game-based design and technology in a variety of settings. Including discussions from both industry and academic perspectives, this publication explores the growing research in this interesting and dynamic field, serving as an essential reference source for academicians, professionals, researchers, and upper level students interested in the applications of game-thinking and gaming dynamics across various disciplines including marketing, journalism, education, and human resources. This publication presents timely, research-based chapters on the development of games and the real-world applications of game-thinking and game dynamics, as well as additional topics including, but not limited to, digital development, game design, human resource processes, market research, online journalism, social change, and video game learning.

This is a timely and relevant volume, considering the many manipulations and enhancements upon our ideas of reality in the 21st century The book explores how and why we deny, manipulate, convert, or enhance reality The book argues that examining the many ways in which we manipulate, deny, convert or enhance our realities can give us an idea of how to deal with reality, which in turn can provide us with a blueprint for how to live responsibly The book brings together an international team of contributors to discuss contemporary issues such as fake news, propaganda, virtual reality, theatre as real life and reality TV This book draws on examples from vast fields such as film studies, sociology, the social sciences and medicine This volume will appeal to scholars and upper-level students in the areas of communication and media studies, comparative literature, film studies, economics, English, international affairs, journalism, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and theatre

Japanese Role-playing Games: Genre, Representation, and Liminality in the JRPG examines the origins, boundaries, and transnational effects of the genre, addressing significant formal elements as well as narrative themes, character construction, and player involvement. Contributors from Japan, Europe, North America, and Australia employ a variety of theoretical approaches to analyze popular game series and individual titles, introducing an English-speaking audience to Japanese video game scholarship while also extending postcolonial and philosophical readings to the Japanese game text. In a three-pronged approach, the collection uses these analyses to look at genre, representation, and liminality, engaging with a multitude of concepts including stereotypes, intersectionality, and the political and social effects of JRPGs on players and industry conventions. Broadly, this collection considers JRPGs as networked systems, including evolved iterations of MMORPGs and card collecting "social games" for mobile devices. Scholars of media studies, game studies, Asian studies, and Japanese culture will find this book particularly useful.

Data structures and tools from computational geometry help to solve problems in computer graphics; these methods have been widely adopted by the computer graphics community yielding elegant and efficient algorithms. This book focuses on algorithms and data structures that have proven to be versatile, efficient, fundamental, and easy to implement. The book familiarizes students, as well as practitioners in the field of computer graphics, with a wide range of data structures. The authors describe each data structure in detail, highlight fundamental properties, and present algorithms based on the data structure. A number of recent representative and useful algorithms from computer graphics are described in detail, illuminating the utilization of the data structure in a creative way.

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.

Fully detailed game projects from scratch. Beginners can do the steps and create games right away. No coding experience is necessary. Numerous examples take a raw beginner towards professional coding proficiency in C# and Unity. Includes a thorough introduction to Unity 2020 All required software is professional quality and completely free to use for any purpose including commercial applications and games.

The last half-decade has seen the rapid and expansive development of video game music studies. As with any new area of study, this significant sub-discipline is still tackling fundamental questions concerning how video game music should be approached. In this volume, experts in game music provide their responses to these issues. This book suggests a variety of new approaches to the study of game music. In the course of developing ways of conceptualizing and analyzing game music it explicitly considers other critical issues including the distinction between game play and music play, how notions of diegesis are complicated by video game interactivity, the importance of cinema aesthetics in game music, the technicalities of game music production and the relationships between game music and art music traditions. This collection is accessible, yet theoretically substantial and complex. It draws upon a diverse array of perspectives and presents new research which will have a significant impact upon the way that game music is studied. The volume represents a major development in game musicology and will be indispensable for both academic researchers and students of game music.

Told over a series of daily journal logs, One-Week Dungeons: Diaries of a Seven-Day Roguelike Challenge chronicles the journeys of eleven 7DRL participants as they race to build their dream games before the clock expires.

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.

Do you have creative ideas that you wish you could transform into code? Do you want to boost your problem solving and logic skills? Do you want to enhance your career by adopting an algorithmic mindset? In our increasingly digital world, coding is an essential skill. Communicating an algorithm to a machine to perform a set of tasks is vital. Beginner's Guide to Code Algorithms: Experiments to Enhance Productivity and Solve Problems written by Deepankar Maitra teaches you how to think like a programmer. The author unravels the secret behind writing code - building a good algorithm. Algorithmic thinking leads to asking the right question and enables a shift from issue resolution to value creation. Having this mindset will make you more marketable to employers. This book takes you on a problem-solving journey to expand your mind and increase your willingness to experiment with code. You will: Learn the art of building an algorithm through hands-on exercises Understand how to develop code for inspiring productivity concepts Build a mentality of developing algorithms to solve problems Develop, test, review, and improve code through guided experimentation This book is designed to develop a culture of logical thinking through intellectual stimulation. It will benefit students and teachers of programming, business professionals, as well as experienced users of Microsoft Excel who wish to become proficient with macros.

Key Features: This work aims to be the most approachable book about UX. Many books on the topic are highly specialized and are not easy to read for people who just want to understand it better. This book is easy to read and aims to popularize the UX mindset while debunking its main misconceptions. Small format size makes it easy to carry around. Includes content relatable and meaningful to the readers by taking many examples from everyday life with a conversational and light writing style. It tackles the psychology, design, research, process, strategy, and ethics behind offering the best experience with products, systems, or services. Includes a glossary.