The evolution of the video game is incredible; from a two-colored screen with paddle and pong to fully immersive alternate playing worlds, it is one technology that seems to be constantly evolving. This volume explains the history of video games, the considerations of their impact on players and society, and how they can be used as educational tools. Readers will learn about the future of video games as well.

From their inception, video games quickly became a major new arena of popular entertainment. Beginning with very primitive games, they quickly evolved into interactive animated works, many of which now approach film in terms of their visual excitement. But there are important differences, as Arthur Asa Berger makes clear in this important new work. Films are purely to be viewed, but video involves the player, moving from empathy to immersion, from being spectators to being actively involved in texts. Berger, a renowned scholar of popular culture, explores the cultural significance of the expanding popularity and sophistication of video games and considers the biological and psychoanalytic aspects of this phenomenon.Berger begins by tracing the evolution of video games from simple games like Pong to new, powerfully involving and complex ones like Myst and Half-Life. He notes how this evolution has built the video industry, which includes the hardware (game-playing consoles) and the software (the games themselves), to revenues comparable to the American film industry.

From the early days of home computers to today's modern consoles, people have played game after game. This book gives you a look at ten of the best.

The rapid growth in popularity of computer and video games, particularly among children and teenagers, has given rise to public concern about the effects they might have on youngsters. The violent themes of many of these games, coupled with their interactive nature, have led to accusations that they may be worse than televised violence in affecting children's antisocial behaviour. Other allegations are that they have an addictive quality and that excessive playing results in a diminished social contact and poorer school performance. But how bad are video games? There are strong methodological reasons for not accepting the evidence for video games effects at face value. There are also positive signs that playing these games can enhance particular mental competencies in children. This book provides an up-to-date review and critique of research evidence from around the world in an attempt to put the issue of video game effects into perspective.

With the growing popularity of “big data”, the potential value of personal data has attracted more and more attention. Applications built on personal data can create tremendous social and economic benefits. Meanwhile, they bring serious threats to individual privacy. The extensive collection, analysis and transaction of personal data make it difficult for an individual to keep the privacy safe. People now show more concerns about privacy than ever before. How to make a balance between the exploitation of personal information and the protection of individual privacy has become an urgent issue. In this book, the authors use methodologies from economics, especially game theory, to investigate solutions to the balance issue. They investigate the strategies of stakeholders involved in the use of personal data, and try to find the equilibrium. The book proposes a user-role based methodology to investigate the privacy issues in data mining, identifying four different types of users, i.e. four user roles, involved in data mining applications. For each user role, the authors discuss its privacy concerns and the strategies that it can adopt to solve the privacy problems. The book also proposes a simple game model to analyze the interactions among data provider, data collector and data miner. By solving the equilibria of the proposed game, readers can get useful guidance on how to deal with the trade-off between privacy and data utility. Moreover, to elaborate the analysis on data collector’s strategies, the authors propose a contract model and a multi-armed bandit model respectively. The authors discuss how the owners of data (e.g. an individual or a data miner) deal with the trade-off between privacy and utility in data mining. Specifically, they study users’ strategies in collaborative filtering based recommendation system and distributed classification system. They built game models to formulate the interactions among data owners, and propose learning algorithms to find the equilibria.

Video games are becoming culturally dominant. But what does their popularity say about our contemporary society? This book explores video game culture, but in doing so, utilizes video games as a lens through which to understand contemporary social life. Video games are becoming an increasingly central part of our cultural lives, impacting on various aspects of everyday life such as our consumption, communities, and identity formation. Drawing on new and original empirical data – including interviews with gamers, as well as key representatives from the video game industry, media, education, and cultural sector – Video Games as Culture not only considers contemporary video game culture, but also explores how video games provide important insights into the modern nature of digital and participatory culture, patterns of consumption and identity formation, late modernity, and contemporary political rationalities. This book will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as postdoctoral researchers, interested in fields such Video Games, Sociology, and Media and Cultural Studies. It will also be useful for those interested in the wider role of culture, technology, and consumption in the transformation of society, identities, and communities.

In the early days of Pong and Pac Man, video games appeared to be little more than an idle pastime. Today, video games make up a multi-billion dollar industry that rivals television and film. The Video Game Theory Reader brings together exciting new work on the many ways video games are reshaping the face of entertainment and our relationship with technology. Drawing upon examples from widely popular games ranging from Space Invaders to Final Fantasy IX and Combat Flight Simulator 2, the contributors discuss the relationship between video games and other media; the shift from third- to first-person games; gamers and the gaming community; and the important sociological, cultural, industrial, and economic issues that surround gaming. The Video Game Theory Reader is the essential introduction to a fascinating and rapidly expanding new field of media studies.