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Video games are both physically and cognitively demanding—so what does that mean for those with a disability or mental illness? Though they may seem at odds, Ability Machines illuminates just how vital video games are to understanding our bodies and abilities. In Ability Machines, Sky LaRell Anderson shows us how video games can help us imagine what our abilities mean and how they engage us physically, behaviorally, and cognitively to envision our agency beyond limitations. On the surface, this can mean games provide power fantasies; more profoundly, games can fundamentally reshape cultural and personal understandings of mental health, illness, disability, and accessibility. Video games are indeed ability machines that produce a reimagined state of agency. Featuring a comparative analysis of key video game titles, including Metal Gear Solid V, Wolfenstein II, Celeste, Devil May Cry 5, Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, Hades, Nier: Automata, and more, Ability Machines tackles larger questions of ability and how our bodies relate to interactive media.
Have you ever wanted to know which games to use in your classroom, library, or afterschool program, or even at home? Which games can help teach preschoolers, K-12, college students, or adults? What can you use for science, literature, or critical thinking skills? This book explores 100 different games and how educators have used the games to teach - what worked and didn't work and their tips and techniques. The list of 100 goes from A to Z Safari to Zoombinis, and includes popular games like Fortnite, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, and Minecraft, as well as PC, mobile, VR, AR, card and board games.
What is a videogame? What makes a videogame "good"? If a game is supposed to be fun, can it be fun without a good story? If another is supposed to be an accurate simulation, does it still need to be entertaining? With the ever-expanding explosion of new videogames and new developments in the gaming world, questions about videogame criticism are becoming more complex. The differing definitions that players and critics use to decide what a game is and what makes a game successful, often lead to different ideas of how games succeed or fail. This collection of new essays puts on display the variety and ambiguity of videogames. Each essay is a work of game criticism that takes a different approach to defining the game and analyzing it. Through analysis and critical methods, these essays discuss whether a game is defined by its rules, its narrative, its technology, or by the activity of playing it, and the tensions between these definitions. With essays on Overwatch, Dark Souls 3, Far Cry 4, Farmville and more, this collection attempts to show the complex changes, challenges and advances to game criticism in the era of videogames.
A definitive guide to contemporary video game studies, this second edition has been fully revised and updated to address the ongoing theoretical and methodological development of game studies. Expertly compiled by well-known video game scholars Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, the Companion includes comprehensive and interdisciplinary models and approaches for analyzing video games, new perspectives on video games both as an art form and cultural phenomenon, explorations of the technical and creative dimensions of video games, and accounts of the political, social, and cultural dynamics of video games. Brand new to this second edition are chapters examining topics such as preservation; au...
This book explores the efficacy of game-based learning to develop university students’ skills and competencies. While writing on game-based learning has previously emphasised the use of games developed specifically for educational purposes, this book fills an important gap in the literature by focusing on commercial games such as World of Warcraft and Minecraft. Underpinned by robust empirical evidence, the author demonstrates that the current negative perception of video games is ill-informed, and in fact these games can be important tools to develop graduate skills related to employability. Speaking to very current concerns about the employability of higher education graduates and the skills that university is intended to develop, this book also explores the attitudes to game-based learning as expressed by instructors, students and game developers.
Historically the bodies of civilians are the most damaged by the increasing mechanization and derealization of warfare, but this is not reflected in the representation of violence in popular media. In War Without Bodies, author Martin Danahay argues that the media in the United States in particular constructs a “war without bodies” in which neither the corpses of soldiers or civilians are shown. War Without Bodies traces the intertwining of new communications technologies and war from the Crimean War, when Roger Fenton took the first photographs of the British army and William Howard Russell used the telegraph to transmit his dispatches, to the first of three “video wars” in the Gulf...
Disability Identity in Simulation Narratives considers the relationship between disability identity and simulation activities (ranging from traditional gameplay to more revolutionary technology) in contemporary science fiction. Anelise Haukaas applies posthumanist theory to an examination of disability identity in a variety of science fiction texts: adult novels, young adult literature and comics, as well as ethnographic research with gamers. Haukaas argues that instead of being a means of escapism, simulated experiences are a valuable tool for cultivating self-acceptance and promoting empathy. Through increasingly accessible technology and innovative gameplay, traditional hierarchies are dismantled, and different ways of being are both explored and validated. Ultimately, the book aims to expand our understandings of disability, performance, and self-creation in significant ways by exploring the boundless selves that the simulated environments in these texts allow.
Public in Public History presents international research on the role of the public in public history: the ways people perceive, respond to and influence history-related institutions, events, services and products that deal with the past. The book addresses theoretical reflections on the public, or multiple publics, and their role in public history, and empirical analyses of the publics’ active responses to and impact on existing forms of public history. Special attention is also paid to digital public history, which facilitates the double role of the public—as both recipient and creator of public history. With a multinational author team, the book is based on various national, but also i...
Combining research-based perspectives and current examples including Minecraft and Animal Crossing : New Horizons, We the Gamers shows how games can be used in ethics, civics, and social studies education to inspire learning, critical thinking, and civic change.
This collection intends to fill a long overdue research gap on the praxeological aspects of the relationships between disabilities, accessibility, and digital gaming. It will focus on the question of how Game Studies can profit from a Disability Studies perspective of en-/disabling gaming and issues of disability, (in)accessibility and ableism, and vice versa. Instead of departing from the medical model of disability that informs a wide range of publications on “disabled” gaming and that preconceives users as either “able-bodied,” “normal” or as “disabled,” “deficit,” or “unable to play,” our central premise is that dis/ability is not an essential characteristic of the playing subject. We rather intend to analyze the complex infrastructures of playing, i.e., the complex interplay of heterogeneous human and non-human actors, that are en- or disabling.