Product Description
The move to 3D graphics represents a dramatic artistic and technical development in the history of video games that suggests an overall transformation of games as media. The experience of space has become a key element of how we understand games and how we play them. In Video Game Spaces, Michael Nitsche investigates what this shift means for video game design and analysis.

Navigable 3D spaces allow us to crawl, jump, fly, or even teleport through fictional worlds that come to life in our imagination. We encounter these spaces through a combination of perception and interaction. Drawing on concepts from literary studies, architecture, and cinema, Nitsche argues that game spaces can evoke narratives because the player is interpreting them in order to engage with them. Consequently, Nitsche approaches game spaces not as pure visual spectacles but as meaningful virtual locations. His argument investigates what structures are at work in these locations, proceeds to an in-depth analysis of the audiovisual presentation of game worlds, and ultimately explores how we use and comprehend their functionality.

Nitsche introduces five analytical layers—rule-based space, mediated space, fictional space, play space, and social space—and uses them in the analyses of games that range from early classics to recent titles. He revisits current topics in game research, including narrative, rules, and play, from this new perspective.

Video Game Spaces provides a range of necessary arguments and tools for media scholars, designers, and game researchers with an interest in 3D game worlds and the new challenges they pose.

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Product Description
The Atari Video Computer System dominated the home videogame market so completely that “Atari” became the generic term for a videogame console. The Atari VCS was affordable and offered the flexibility of changeable cartridges. Nearly a thousand of these were created, the most significant of which established new techniques, mechanics, and even entire genres. This book offers a detailed and accessible study of this influential videogame console from both computational and cultural perspectives.

Studies of digital media have rarely investigated platforms—the systems underlying computing. This book (the first in a series of Platform Studies) does so, developing a critical approach that examines the relationship between platforms and creative expression. Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost discuss the Atari VCS itself and examine in detail six game cartridges: Combat, Adventure, Pac-Man, Yars’ Revenge, Pitfall!, and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. They describe the technical constraints and affordances of the system and track developments in programming, gameplay, interface, and aesthetics. Adventure, for example, was the first game to represent a virtual space larger than the screen (anticipating the boundless virtual spaces of such later games as World of Warcraft and Grand Theft Auto), by allowing the player to walk off one side into another space; and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back was an early instance of interaction between media properties and video games.

Montfort and Bogost show that the Atari VCS—often considered merely a retro fetish object—is an essential part of the history of video games.

Platform Studies series

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Emergence in Games

Product Description
The future direction of game development is towards more flexible, realistic, and interactive game worlds. However, current methods of game design do not allow for anything other than pre-scripted player exchanges and static objects and environments. An emergent approach to game development involves the creation of a globally designed game system that provides rules and boundaries for player interactions, rather than prescribed paths.

Emergence in Games provides a detailed foundation for applying the theory and practice of emergence in games to game design. Emergent narrative, characters and agents, and game worlds are covered and a hands-on tutorial and case study allow the reader to the put the skills and ideas presented into practice.

About the Author
Penny Sweetser completed her Ph.D. in computer science on the topic “An Emergent Approach to Game Design - Development and Play.” She has contributed to various books, journals and international conference on games. She has been working for the game developer, The Creative Assembly, as a game designer for the last two years, recently releasing the AAA title, Medieval 2: Total War. She previously lectured and researched at the University of Queensland, in the areas of game design, artificial intelligence and user-centered design.

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Foundation ASP.NET for Flash

Product Description
ASP.NET 2.0 is the new version of Microsoft’s groundbreaking server-side scripting language. There is currently a huge demand to integrate dynamic content into Flash websites and applications and, as a solid competitor to technologies such as JSP, PHP, and ColdFusion, ASP.NET is one of the most popular choices to achieve this.

Used in conjunction with Flash, ASP.NET can process, store, and create new data, and work as a bridge between the Flash movie and external data sources, enabling web designers to build dynamic, interactive web applications, incorporating information from a host of databases.

Whether you’re a Flash designer or an ASP.NET developer, this highly readable Foundation book will provide a a thorough grounding to integrating Flash , ActionScript 2.0, ASP.NET, and databases. Along the way you’ll study features such as email integration, saving visitor information, dynamic updating, and much more. Foundation ASP.NET 2.0 for Flash will take you through the essentials of ASP.NET/C#, setting up your development environment, sending data to and from Flash, database integration, and then on to advanced topics such as web services, Flash Remoting, XML data, and securing your applications.

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Product Description

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on DNA Based Computers, DNA9, held in Madison, Wisconsin, USA in June 2003.

The 22 revised full papers presented were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement from initially 60 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on new experiments and tools, theory, computer simulation and sequence design, self-assembly and autonomous molecular computation, experimental solutions, and new computing models.

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