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Apr 16, 2002 | The wall went down last month. From now on in computer gaming, there were to be no real barriers between creator and audience, or producer and consumer. They would be collaborators in the same imaginative space, and working as equals, they'd create a new medium, together. That announcement was made, if you listened closely enough, at the annual Game Developers Conference in San Jose, when Valve Software founder Gabe Newell unveiled Steam, a broadband distribution network that would offer instant updates to recent Valve games and new titles from Valve and other companies. Listed among the new titles was "Day of Defeat," a multiplayer add-on to Valve's best-selling first-person shooter (FPS), "Half-Life." Read more...

By Edge
Ten years in, and machinima is still gaining momentum. As the genre has swollen, it’s also become increasingly difficult to define, variously intersecting with film, animation and puppetry. Its connection with videogames, however, has been fairly consistent during the 11 or so years since its inception.

While video games have been analyzed in comparison to other new media forms by scholars like Lev Manovich, and to older media like novels and plays by scholars like Janet Murray and Brenda Laurel, few studies have examined the influence of older toys on video games. Despite this neglect, however, the connections between older toys and video games point to several important issues in hurnanities-based game studies, including those that investigate the place of game studies in academia and the archiving and preservation of games. By connecting video games to a variety of nonelectronic predecessors, this article raises several questions linked to video game classification, the hybridity of video games, and the problems that hybrid forms must negotiate. Toward this end, we specifically address movable books and toy theaters in relation to video games like Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door (2004) to show how video games both draw on and change earlier interactive entertainment formats. Overall, this article explicates the relationship between games and older forms like movable books to show how comparative studies of older forms can elucidate and inform current scholarship. Read more...

Many popular digital games have historical themes or settings. Taking its cue from recent research emphasizing the educational value of computer and video games, this article investigates the bias of the medium in presenting history. Although sharing an appreciation for the cultural value of history simulations and games, the author argues that the digital game medium currently tends to result in stereotypically masculine, mechanical, and spatially oriented interactive presentations of history. This article does not take a technological determinist stance nor a simplistic view of interpretation. Nevertheless, the author believes that the weight and momentum of the historical development of the digital game medium, its technological structure, and its institutional character have encouraged certain patterns in digital games that should be critically examined. Read more...

The article traces the history of adventure games from the birth of the fantasy genre in William Morris' work and the origins of the Kriegspiel, through Tolkien's fantasy world and Dungeons and Dragons to the early text adventures and the first graphical adventures. Read more...