Handbook of Digital Games

A thorough discussion of the present and future of digital gaming

People play digital games for many reasons, from entertainment to professional training, but all games share the same basic characteristics. From those basic parameters, gaming professionals manage to create the enormous variety of games on the market today. The Handbook of Digital Games explores the many considerations and variables involved in game creation, including gaming techniques and tools, game play, and game design and development.

A team of recognized gaming experts from around the world shares their thoughts on the different aspects of game creation, providing readers with a deep understanding and insider perspective on the cross-disciplinary aspects of the industry. The fundamentals are discussed, but the emphasis is on emerging theory and technology with topics including:

• Player experience and immersion, including emotion
• Automatic content generation and storytelling techniques
• Collaboration and social information exchange
• Game aesthetics
• Simulation of game play and crowds
• Collision detection
• Networking issues such as synchronization

The book also includes retrospective and ontological examinations of gaming, as well as discussions about mobile game play, spatial game structures, and education-centric gaming. In-game advertising, gender stereotyping, and independent game production are also considered. The Handbook of Digital Games is a robust compilation of the latest information across the entire industry, and a major resource for any gaming professional.

Table of Contents

Part I: Gaming Techniques and Tools
Chapter 1: Toward the Adaptive Generation of Bespoke Game Content
Chapter 2: Procedural Content Generation
Chapter 3: Content Generation in a Collaborative Browser-Based Game Environment
Chapter 4: Automatic Narratives in MMORPGs
Chapter 5: Collision Detection with Navigation Meshes
Chapter 6: Mass Population: Plausible and Practical Crowd Simulation
Chapter 7: Synchronization in Multiplayer Online Games
Chapter 8: Exchanging Social Information in Online Social Games
Chapter 9: Collaboration through Gaming
Chapter 10: AI for General Strategy Game Playing
Chapter 11: Rated A for Advertising: A Critical Reflection on In-Game Advertising
Part II: Game Play
Chapter 12: Immersion in Digital Games: Review of Gaming Experience Research
Chapter 13: Know Thy Player: An Integrated Model of Player Experience for Digital Games Research
Chapter 14: At the Core of Player Experience: Continuation Desire in Digital Games
Chapter 15: Empirical Game Aesthetics
Chapter 16: Mobile Game Play and Everyday Life
Chapter 17: Video Games, Machinima, and Classic Cinema: Meaningful Gaming
Chapter 18: Video Games in Educational Settings: Developing Skills for New Media Learning
Chapter 19: Retro-Computing Community Sites and the Museum
Chapter 20: From the Deceptively Simple to the Pleasurably Complex: The Rise of Cooperative Address in the History of Video Games
Part III: Game Design and Development
Chapter 21: Emotion in Games
Chapter 22: Task Deployment in Three Types of Game Spatial Structures
Chapter 23: Social Ontology of Digital Games
Chapter 24: Gaming with Purpose: Heuristic Understanding of Ubiquitous Game Development and Design for Human Computation
Chapter 25: Beyond Stereotypes of Gender and Gaming: Video Games Made by Middle School Students
Chapter 26: Decade of Game Making for Learning: From Tools to Communities
Chapter 27: Designing Interactive Tangible Games for Diverse Forms of Play
Chapter 28: Artisanal Local Networks: Game Work and Culture in Independent Game Production