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The Game Design Reader A Rules Of Play Anthology Pdf 14



Written for game scholars, game developers, and interactive designers, Rules of Play is a textbook, reference book, and theoretical guide. It is the first comprehensive attempt to establish a solid theoretical framework for the emerging discipline of game design.




The Game Design Reader A Rules Of Play Anthology Pdf 14




Eric Zimmerman is a game designer, game design theorist, and co-founder and CEO of gameLab. He has taught at universities including MIT, the University of Texas, Parsons School of Design, New York University, Rhode Island School of Design, and the School of Visual Arts.


Readings are taken from the course text and other sources, listed by session in the table below. Lab sessions also include a list of games that may be played in class. All assignments must be turned in at the beginning of class.


The course is designed to help students think critically about how games and play in a broad sense can be understood in a psychological framework; but also, how specific game elements might or might not influence players.


The students will be tasked with not only learning about various psychological approaches to human play, games, and motivation in general, but also to implement these in playful interactions. How might one approach a design task based on the tenants of e.g. behavioral psychology as opposed to humanistic psychology?


Poels, K., Hoogen, W. V. D., Ijsselsteijn, W., & de Kort, Y. (2012). Pleasure to play, arousal to stay: The effect of player emotions on digital game preferences and playing time. Cyberpsychology, behavior, and social networking, 15(1), 1-6.


Game studies, also known as ludology (from ludus, "game", and -logia, "study", "research"), is the study of games, the act of playing them, and the players and cultures surrounding them. It is a field of cultural studies that deals with all types of games throughout history. This field of research utilizes the tactics of, at least, folkloristics and cultural heritage, sociology and psychology, while examining aspects of the design of the game, the players in the game, and the role the game plays in its society or culture. Game studies is oftentimes confused with the study of video games, but this is only one area of focus; in reality game studies encompasses all types of gaming, including sports, board games, etc.


There are now a number of strands within game studies: "social science" approaches explore how games function in society, and their interactions with human psychology, often using empirical methods such as surveys and controlled lab experiments. "Humanities-based" approaches emphasise how games generate meanings and reflect or subvert wider social and cultural discourses. These often use more interpretative methods, such as close reading, textual analysis, and audience theory, methods shared with other media disciplines such as television and film studies. Social sciences and humanities approaches can cross over, for example in the case of ethnographic or folkloristic studies, where fieldwork may involve patiently observing games to try to understand their social and cultural meanings. "Game design" approaches are closely related to creative practice, analysing game mechanics and aesthetics in order to inform the development of new games. Finally, "industrial" and "engineering" approaches apply mostly to video games and less to games in general, and examine things such as computer graphics, artificial intelligence, and networking.[3]


One of the earliest social science theories (1971) about the role of video games in society involved violence in video games, later becoming known as the catharsis theory. The theory suggests that playing video games in which you perform violent acts might actually channel latent aggression, resulting in less aggression in the players real lives.[6] However, a meta-study performed by Craig A. Anderson and Brad J. Bushman, in 2001, examined data starting from the 1980s up until the article was published. The purpose of this study was to examine whether or not playing violent video games led to an increase in aggressive behaviors.[7] They concluded that exposure to violence in video games did indeed cause an increase in aggression. However, it has been pointed out, and even stressed, by psychologist Jonathan Freedman that this research was very limited and even problematic since overly strong claims were made and the authors themselves seemed extremely biased in their writings. More recent studies, such as the one performed by Christopher J. Ferguson at Texas A&M International University have come to drastically different conclusions. In this study, individuals were either randomly assigned a game, or allowed to choose a game, in both the randomized and the choice conditions exposure to violent video games caused no difference in aggression. A later study (performed by the same people) looked for correlations between trait aggression, violent crimes, and exposure to both real life violence and violence in video games, this study suggests that while family violence and trait aggression are highly correlated with violent crime, exposure to video game violence was not a good predictor of violent crime, having little to no correlation, unless also paired with the above traits that had a much higher correlation.[8] Over the past 15 years, a large number of meta-studies have been applied to this issue, each coming to its own conclusion, resulting in little consensus in the ludology community. It is also thought that even nonviolent video games may lead to aggressive and violent behaviour. Anderson and Dill seem to believe that it may be due to the frustration of playing video games that could in turn result in violent, aggressive behaviour.[9]


Game designers Amy Jo Kim and Jane McGonigal have suggested that platforms which leverage the powerful qualities of video games in non-game contexts can maximize learning.[10][11] Known as the gamification of learning, using game elements in non-game contexts extracts the properties of games from within the game context, and applies them to a learning context such as the classroom.


Another positive aspect of video games is its conducive character towards the involvement of a person in other cultural activities. The probability of game playing increases with the consumption of other cultural goods (e.g., listening to music or watching television) or active involvement in artistic activities (e.g., writing or visual arts production).[12] Video games by being complementary towards more traditional forms of cultural consumption, inhibit thus value from a cultural perspective.


A major focus in game studies is the debate surrounding narratology and ludology. Many ludologists believe that the two are unable to exist together,[15] while others believe that the two fields are similar but should be studied separately. Many narratologists believe that games should be looked at for their stories, like movies or novels. The ludological perspective says that games are not like these other mediums due to the fact that a player is actively taking part in the experience and should therefore be understood on their own terms. The idea that a videogame is "radically different to narratives as a cognitive and communicative structure"[16] has led the development of new approaches to criticism that are focused on videogames as well as adapting, repurposing and proposing new ways of studying and theorizing about videogames.[17][18] A recent approach towards game studies[which?] starts with an analysis of interface structures and challenges the keyboard-mouse paradigm with what is called a "ludic interface".


Jesper Juul, another notable ludologist, argues for a stricter separation of ludology and narratology. Juul argues that games "for all practicality can not tell stories."[15] This argument holds that narratology and ludology cannot exist together because they are inherently different. Juul claims that the most significant difference between the two is that in a narrative, events "have to" follow each other, whereas in a game the player has control over what happens.[15]


Garry Crawford and Victoria K. Gosling argue in favor of narratives being an essential part of games as these will contribute to, and be informed by, a gamer's personal life and identity narratives. As they write "it is impossible to isolate play from the social influences of everyday life, and in turn, play will have both intended and unintended consequences for the individual and society."[20]


In light of population ageing, there has been an interest into the use of games to improve the overall health and social connectedness of ageing players. For example, Adam Gazzaley and his team have designed NeuroRacer (a game that improves cognitive tasks outside of the game among its 60+ year old participants[25]), while the AARP has organized a game jam to improve older people's social connections.[26] Researchers such as Sarah Mosberg Iversen have argued that most of the academic work on games and ageing has been informed by notions of economical productivity,[27] while Bob De Schutter and Vero Vanden Abeele have suggested a game design approach that is not focused on age-related decline but instead is rooted in the positive aspects of older age.[28]


Massive multiplayer online games can give economists clues about the real world. Markets based on digital information can be fully tracked as they are used by players, and thus real problems in the economy, such as inflation, deflation and even recession. The solutions the game designers come up with can therefore be studied with full information, and experiments can be performed where the economy can be studied as a whole. These games allow the economists to be omniscient, they can find every piece of information they need to study the economy, while in the real world they have to work with presumptions.


The psychological research into games has yielded theories on how playing video games may be advantageous for both children and for adults. Some theories claim that video games in fact help improve cognitive abilities rather than impede their development. These improvement theories include the improvement of visual contrast sensitivity.[33] Other developments include the ability to locate something specific among various impediments. This is primarily done in first-person shooter games where the protagonist must look at everything in a first person view while playing. By doing this they increase their spatial attention due to having to locate something among an area of diversions.[33] These games place the player in a high intensity environment where the player must remain observant of their surroundings in order to achieve their goal, e.g., shooting an enemy player, while impediments obstruct their gameplay in the virtual world.[33] 2ff7e9595c


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