Composing Music for Games  is a guidebook for launching and maintaining a successful career as a video game composer. It offers a pragmatic approach to learning, intensified through challenging project assignments and simulations. Author Chance Thomas begins with the foundation of scoring principles applicable to all media, and then progresses serially through core methodologies specific to video game music. This book offers a powerful blend of aesthetic, technique, technology and business, which are all necessary components for a successful career as a video game composer.

Digital Play offers a critical analysis of interactive media. Inspired by the work of Raymond Williams, the book traces the development of video gaming from its humble origins in hacker circles to its current status as a $20 billion global cultural industry.

Gamers at Work presents an inside look at how 18 industry leaders play the odds, seize opportunities, and transform small businesses into great businesses. Here, in Gamers at Work, you will find their stories replete with their personal struggles, corporate intrigue, and insights into strategy, leadership, and management. Gamers at Work: Explores the formation of entertainment software companies from the perspectives of successful founders who played the odds Provides insight into why experienced professionals sacrifice the comfort of gainful employment for the uncertainty and risk of the startup

In Gaming Matters, McAllister and coauthor Judd Ruggill turn from the broader discussion of video game rhetoric to study the video game itself as a medium and the specific features that give rise to games as similar and yet diverse as Pong, Tomb Raider, and Halo. In short, what defines the computer game itself as a medium distinct from all others? Each chapter takes up a different fundamental characteristic of the medium. Games are: * Idiosyncratic, and thus difficult to apprehend using the traditional tools of media study * Irreconcilable, or complex to such a degree that developers, players, and scholars have contradictory ways of describing them * Boring, and therefore obligated to constantly make demands on players' attention * Anachronistic, or built on age-old tropes and forms of play while ironically bound to the most advanced technologies * Duplicitous, or dependent on truth-telling rhetoric even when they are about fictions, fantasies, or lies * Work, or are often better understood as labor rather than play * Alchemical, despite seeming all-too mechanical or predictable Video games are now inarguably a major site of worldwide cultural production.   Gaming Matters will neither flatter game enthusiasts nor embolden game detractors in their assessments. But it will provide a vocabulary through which games can be discussed in academic settings and will create an important foundation for future academic discourse.

The almost 50 essays contained within range freely across subjects that include the potential of virtuality, ethics, virtuality and self, presence and immersion, virtual emotions, image, sound and literature, computer games, AI and A-Life, Augmented Reality and Real Virtuality, law and economics, medical and military applications, religion, and cybersex.Throughout, contributors discuss differences between virtuality, reality, and actuality, in debates filtered through the lenses of the disciplines represented here, and speculate on future directions. It is not at all clear that there are differences and, if such distinctions are to be found, the boundaries between virtuality, reality, and actuality continually shift as ideas, modes of organization, and behaviors constantly flow from one to the other regardless of direction

In "Synthetic Worlds," Edward Castronova offers the first comprehensive look at the online game industry, exploring its implications for business and culture alike. He starts with the players, giving us a revealing look into the everyday lives of the gamers outlining what they do in their synthetic worlds and why. He then describes the economies inside these worlds to show how they might dramatically affect real world financial systems, from potential disruptions of markets to new business horizons. Ultimately, he explores the long-term social consequences of online games: If players can inhabit worlds that are more alluring and gratifying than reality, then how can the real world ever compete?

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.