Excerpted in Google Books, Published November 2012."Join videogame industry veteran Michael Thornton Wyman on a series of detailed, behind-the-scenes tours with the teams that have made some of the most popular and critically acclaimed videogames of the modern era. Drawing on insider's perspectives from a wide variety of teams, learn about the creation of a tiny, independent game project (World of Goo), casual game classics (Diner Dash, Bejeweled Twist), the world's most popular social game (FarmVille) as well as the world's most popular MMORPG (World of Warcraft), PC titles (Half Life 2) to AAA console games (Madden NFL 10), and modern-day masterpieces (Little Big Planet, Rock Band, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves). Hear directly from the creators about how these games were made, and learn from their stories from the trenches of videogames production. This book is an excellent resource for those working directly on game design or production, for those aspiring to work in the field, or for anyone who has wondered how the world's greatest videogames get made."
"You have access to the content as long as you are a subscriber but when you are no longer a member, the content then disappears." beta in October, launch around end of 2011
abstract: "This paper examines video game sales by platform in the North American
market from a period spanning 2006 through 2011. As the home video game industry
has rapidly matured and become established as a forefront facet of interactive
entertainment in the home, we seek to determine what aspects of the video game market
seem to most impact sales. This question is particularly poignant as the maturation
of the video game industry has witnessed efforts at both vertical integration and
horizontal expansion on the part of the top game publishers and developers in hopes of
solidly grounding the industry. This study employs a Kruskal-Wallis test to compare
eight different gaming platforms. The results indicate Nintendo's Wii and DS are the
top selling game platforms, Xbox 360 is in a second tier, multiple Sony PlayStation
platforms are in the third tier, personal computer games are in tier four, and the retired
sixth generation Nintendo GameCube is the lowest sales tier."
Abstract: "As computational capability continues to increase, the tools
available to designers of digital games have become more robust, allowing
high fidelity graphics and sound to become common, and resulting
in a market saturated with kinetic-based games. However, consumers
and educators are eschewing such games for more complex and
immersive stories, the creation of which has proven a difficult mountain
for designers to climb. A central reason is that story-immersive
games rely on dialogue between the player character (PC) and nonplayer
characters (NPCs), the writing and coding of which is time consuming
and inefficient. This paper documents the author's experiences
with complex, branching dialogue systems, and examines the possibility
of system automation through natural language processing (NLP)."
"In November, Nintendo will release Wii U, the first update to the groundbreaking motion-controlled gaming console that took the industry by storm in 2006. Pundits and developers presume Sony and Microsoft will quickly follow suit with their own updated game consoles - also the first in years - though neither have confirmed it."
"Arkadium has survived for the past decade by making casual games for the web and Facebook. But with the arms race going in games, that approach may not cut it anymore. So the New York game publisher is announcing today that it has hired industry veteran Stephen Jarrett as its vice president of game design. ...
The new hire goes with the strategy of moving up in games and making big investments in game platforms such as the upcoming Windows 8 operating system from Microsoft."
"A Comprehensive Study of Sound in Computer Games: How Audio Affects Player ActionJørgensen, Kristine This study examines the functionality of sound in computer games, a topic which has received little attention in game studies and media studies." Especially focuses on player experience of sound