Complicating perspectives on diversity in video games Gamers have been troublemakers as long as games have existed. As our popular understanding of “gamer” shifts beyond its historical construction as a white, straight, adolescent, cisgender male, the troubles that emerge both confirm and challenge our understanding of identity politics. In Gamer Trouble, Amanda Phillips excavates the turbulent relationships between surface and depth in contemporary gaming culture, taking readers under the hood of the mechanisms of video games in order to understand the ways that difference gets baked into its technological, ludic, ideological, and social systems. By centering the insights of queer and women of color feminisms in readings of online harassment campaigns, industry animation practices, and popular video games like Portal and Mass Effect, Phillips adds essential analytical tools to our conversations about video games. She embraces the trouble that attends disciplinary crossroads, linking the violent hate speech of trolls and the representational practices marginalizing people of color, women, and queers in entertainment media to the dehumanizing logic undergirding computation and the optimization strategies of gameplay. From the microcosmic level of electricity and flicks of a thumb to the grand stages of identity politics and global capitalism, wherever gamers find themselves, gamer trouble follows. As reinvigorated forms of racism, sexism, and homophobia thrive in games and gaming communities, Phillips follows the lead of those who have been making good trouble all along, agitating for a better world.

The complex material histories of the Nintendo Entertainment System platform, from code to silicon, focusing on its technical constraints and its expressive affordances. In the 1987 Nintendo Entertainment System videogame Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, a character famously declared: I AM ERROR. Puzzled players assumed that this cryptic mesage was a programming flaw, but it was actually a clumsy Japanese-English translation of “My Name is Error,” a benign programmer's joke. In I AM ERROR Nathan Altice explores the complex material histories of the Nintendo Entertainment System (and its Japanese predecessor, the Family Computer), offering a detailed analysis of its programming and engineering, its expressive affordances, and its cultural significance. Nintendo games were rife with mistranslated texts, but, as Altice explains, Nintendo's translation challenges were not just linguistic but also material, with consequences beyond simple misinterpretation. Emphasizing the technical and material evolution of Nintendo's first cartridge-based platform, Altice describes the development of the Family Computer (or Famicom) and its computational architecture; the “translation” problems faced while adapting the Famicom for the U.S. videogame market as the redesigned Entertainment System; Nintendo's breakthrough console title Super Mario Bros. and its remarkable software innovations; the introduction of Nintendo's short-lived proprietary disk format and the design repercussions on The Legend of Zelda; Nintendo's efforts to extend their console's lifespan through cartridge augmentations; the Famicom's Audio Processing Unit (APU) and its importance for the chiptunes genre; and the emergence of software emulators and the new kinds of play they enabled.

Combining research-based perspectives and current examples including Minecraft and Animal Crossing : New Horizons, We the Gamers shows how games can be used in ethics, civics, and social studies education to inspire learning, critical thinking, and civic change.

As experienced teachers of novice game designers, the authors have discovered patterns in the way that students grasp game design - the mistakes they make as well as the methods to help them to create better games. Each exercise requires no background in programming or artwork, releasing beginning designers from the intricacies of electronic game production and allowing them to learn what works and what doesn't work in a game system. Additionally, these exercises teach important skills in system design: the processes of prototyping, playtesting, and redesigning.

An eleven-year-old boy strangled an elderly woman for the equivalent of five dollars in 2007, then buried her body under a thin layer of sand. He told the police that he needed the money to play online videogames. Just a month later, an eight-year-old Norwegian boy saved his younger sister's life by threatening an attacking moose and then feigning death when the moose attacked him--skills he said he learned while playing World of Warcraft. As these two instances show, videogames affect the minds, bodies, and lives of millions of gamers, negatively and positively. This book approaches videogame addiction from a cross-disciplinary perspective, bridging the divide between liberal arts academics and clinical researchers. The topic of addiction is examined neutrally, using accepted research in neuroscience, media studies, and developmental psychology.

The objective of this conference was to foster a healthy exchange of ideas and experience in the domain of multiple criteria problem solving. This conference was an outgrowth of an earlier conference I organized with Herve Thiriez at CESA, Jouy-en-Josas, France in 1975 during my stay at the European Institute in Brussels. When I re joined the State University of New York at Buffalo that year, I be gan to search for potential sponsors for this conference. Approxi mately one year later when the prospects began to look promising, I contacted several individuals to act as an informal coordinating committee for the conference. I wanted to avoid biasing the con ference completely to my way of thinking! The members of this committee were Jim Dyer, Peter Fishburn, Ralph Kee. ney, Bernard Roy (Universite de Paris IX Dauphine who was unable to participate in the conference), and Milan Zeleny. Though the committee did not meet, per se, their inputs regarding format, possible participants, number of participants, length of the conference, and so on were of great value to me in planning and organizing the conference. I wish to acknowledge the contributions of this group. We were most fortunate in obtaining the financial support of the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management, Brussels ·(one of the sponsors of the Jouy-en-Josas conference), the Office of Naval Research, and the State University of New York at Buffalo.

This book explores how troubled lives and damaging relationships lead to the trap of problem gambling, the anxiety whilst locked inside, and then offers realistic hope of a way out.

In The Game Culture Reader, editors Jason C. Thompson and Marc A. Ouellette propose that Game Studies—that peculiar multi-, inter-, and trans-disciplinary field wherein international researchers from such diverse areas as rhetoric, computer science, literary studies, culture studies, psychology, media studies and so on come together to study the production, distribution, and consumption of games—has reached an unproductive stasis. Its scholarship remains either divided (as in the narratologists versus ludologists debate) or indecisive (as in its frequently apolitical stances on play and fandom). Thompson and Ouellette firmly hold that scholarship should be distinguished from the repetitively reductive commonplaces of violence, sexism, and addiction. In other words, beyond the headline-friendly modern topoi that now dominate the discourse of Game Studies, what issues, approaches, and insights are being, if not erased, then displaced? This volume gathers together a host of scholars from different countries, institutions, disciplines, departments, and ranks, in order to present original and evocative scholarship on digital game culture. Collectively, the contributors reject the commonplaces that have come to define digital games as apolitical or as somehow outside of the imbricated processes of cultural production that govern the medium itself. As an alternative, they offer essays that explore video game theory, ludic spaces and temporalities, and video game rhetorics. Importantly, the authors emphasize throughout that digital games should be understood on their own terms: literally, this assertion necessitates the serious reconsideration of terms borrowed from other academic disciplines; figuratively, the claim embeds the embrace of game play in the continuing investigation of digital games as cultural forms. Put another way, by questioning the received wisdom that would consign digital games to irrelevant spheres of harmless child’s play or of invidious mass entertainment, the authors productively engage with ludic ambiguities.

Examines Indian gaming in detail: what it is, how it became on of the most politically charged phenomena for tribes and states today, and the legal and political compromises that shape its present and will determine its future.