I would have posted about this earlier, but I read slower than Helen Keller when she's wearing gloves.
Well Played 1.0 is an anthology book of videogame critique, and probably one of the most interesting I've read. A group of twenty-two writers made up of designers, scholars, and bloggers wrote on subjects as wide-ranging as why BioShock's story is a failure, to an indepth analysis of a game you've never heard of called Mines of Minos.
It's got its low points, of course (it must be written somewhere in the halls of academia that any article written about Metal Gear Solid must be so self-important and needlessly complex so as to be completely useless), but overall, I learned quite a bit from this book which alternately attempts to push forward the discussion on games as an aesthetic medium, while not losing sight of that which made them so alluring in the first place.
You can download the entire book here for free (minus images), or purchase a physical copy here.
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Contest:
3:40 PM on 06.23.2009
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It's only 1.8mb! It took me 2 seconds and I'm downloading the Cities XL beta :)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0670018961/ref=ox_ya_oh_product
Don't get deterred by the professional gaming aspect, its really an awesome book. And if you liked King of King, check out FRAG, its really an awesome movie that go's deeper into the world of professional gaming, and go's hand in hand with Game Boys.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngV1abyDGKM
For anyone who is taking part in the Friday Night Fights, and playing Quake Live, FRAG is a great movie to give you a bit of history on Quake, and it also shows you who the big players were and are. Also, it go's into Counter-Strike and a few other games.
Bleh. :c
It's a 1894 KB Pdf document, if you can't download that...how do you even surf the internet?
It sounds like a promising read though, I'll give it a chance later today.
It's a 1894 KB Pdf document, if you can't download that...how do you even surf the internet?
It sounds like a promising read though, I'll give it a chance later today.
Excellent! That's the kind of discussion I'm looking for.
I'll have to check this out, thanks.