Here is everything players need to know to embark on an incredible gaming odyssey. Step-by-step guidelines explain how to get started, and game overviews across the genres cover all the options, even online. Includes a "game-o-pedia" reference (the most comprehensive glossary ever published on the subject) and other valuable resources.
Many of today's hottest selling games--both non-electronic and electronic--focus on such elements as shooting up as many bad guys as one can (Duke Nuk'em), beating the toughest level (Mortal Kombat), collecting all the cards (Pokemon), and scoring the most points (Tetris). Fantasy role-playing games (Dungeons & Dragons, Rolemaster, GURPS), while they may involve some of those aforementioned elements, rarely focus on them. Instead, playing a fantasy role-playing game is much like acting out a scene from a play, movie or book, only without a predefined script. Players take on such roles as wise wizards, noble knights, roguish sellswords, crafty hobbits, greedy dwarves, and anything else one can imagine and the referee allows. The players don't exactly compete; instead, they interact with each other and with the fantasy setting. The game is played orally with no game board, and although the referee usually has a storyline planned for a game, much of the action is impromptu. Performance is a major part of role-playing, and role-playing games as a performing art is the subject of this book, which attempts to introduce an appreciation for the performance aesthetics of such games. The author provides the framework for a critical model useful in understanding the art--especially in terms of aesthetics--of role-playing games. The book also serves as a contribution to the beginnings of a body of criticism, theory, and aesthetics analysis of a mostly unrecognized and newly developing art form. There are four parts: the cultural structure, the extent to which the game relates to outside cultural elements; the formal structure, or the rules of the game; the social structure, which encompasses the degree and quality of social interaction among players; and the aesthetic structure, concerned with the emergence of role-playing as an art form.
A thirtieth-anniversary retrospective explores the Dungeons & Dragons franchise, featuring a selection of essays and photographs that capture the events, products, personalities, art, and influence of the game through the years.
Reviews over 400 seminal games from 1975 to 2015. Each entry shares articles on the genre, mod suggestions and hints on how to run the games on modern hardware.
The New Game Makers Bible is the premier book for helping game makers make the best games possible. It teaches good game making in many forms, whatever the genre, whatever the topic, it is covered here. It goes over good ideas, bad ideas, different kinds of games, story development, particular elements such as game mechanics, and much more. Table of Contents: The Most Important Elements In Games - Page 6. The Best Ideas I’ve Seen Used - Page 12. Obscure but Good Ideas For Games - Page 14. Ideas For Video Games (New) (Contains: Character Ideas, The Possible Setting/Story, Possible Power Ups and Items, Tools/Effects, Weapons and Similar Things, Powers and Magic, Abilities, Other Things, Nice Touches, and Possible Enemies.) - Page 17. Good Ideas for Games - Page 37. Bad Ideas for Games - Page 39. The Success or Failure of a Game - Page 40. Contrasting Old Ideas - Page 43. Game Making Tactics - Page 44. Having the Most Fun in a Game - Page 50. Developing a Theme and World - Page 57. Developing a Story - Page 58. Ideas for Story Development - Page 59. Types of Characters and Their Motives - Page 62. The Enemies Motives - Page 68. The Actual Player’s Motives - Page 69. The Most Important Questions For A Game Maker To Find Answers For - Page 73. The Best Ways to Place Secrets - Page 85. The Best Things… Page 86. The History of Some Major Games - Page 88. Two Player Elements in Different Games - Page 97. Choosing a System to Create For - Page 100. History and Facts About Old Consoles - Page 101. Neat Game Things - Page 109. Choosing a Peripheral to Create For - Page 112. On Doing Things That Have Never Been Done Before - Page 113. A Brief History of Early Video Games - Page 114. The Gaming Community - Page 118. The Joy of Game Making - Page 120. The 75 Rules of Good Games - Page 121. The 75 Sins of Game Making - Page 124. In Book Two: Part One: An Effective Philosophy of Game Making. This contains many numbered lists helpful for game making. - Page 128. Part Two: Frequently Used Ideas (The Best of Them) - Page 171. Part Three: Some Free Ideas Technology-Wise And Game-Wise - Page 241. Part Four: Creating From Different Genres - Page 248. A formula for a good side scrolling game - Page 251. The best platformers - Page 253. Adventure Games - Page 254. About Simulation Games - Page 260. 3D Games - Page 261. Odds and ends of other genres - Page 264. Educational Games - Page 267. Casino Games - Page 269. Games of Lesser Tech - Page 270. Games that are stylized after their own world - Page 270. A Mental Hospital Simulator - Page 272. Part Five: Miscellaneous Things and Additions to the Previous Things - Page 273. Different ways a game can start - Page 276. Frequently/ Traditionally used Ideas - Page 278. Retro Video Game History - Page 284. More About Making Good Games - Page 286. Part Six: New And Free Video Game Ideas - Page 293.
Since the release of Dungeons & Dragons in 1974, role-playing games (RPGs) have spawned a vibrant industry and subculture whose characteristics and player experiences have been well explored. Yet little attention has been devoted to the ways RPGs have shaped society at large over the last four decades. Role-playing games influenced video game design, have been widely represented in film, television and other media, and have made their mark on education, social media, corporate training and the military. This collection of new essays illustrates the broad appeal and impact of RPGs. Topics range from a critical reexamination of the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, to the growing significance of RPGs in education, to the potential for "serious" RPGs to provoke awareness and social change. The contributors discuss the myriad subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways in which the values, concepts and mechanics of RPGs have infiltrated popular culture.
This Handbook provides a comprehensive guide to the latest research on role-playing games (RPGs) across disciplines, cultures, and media in one single, accessible volume. Collaboratively authored by more than 40 key scholars, it traces the history of RPGs, from wargaming precursors to tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons to the rise of live-action role-play and contemporary computer RPG and massively multiplayer online RPG franchises, like Baldur’s Gate, Genshin Impact, and World of Warcraft. Individual chapters survey the perspectives, concepts, and findings on RPGs from key disciplines, like performance studies, sociology, psychology, education, economics, game design, literary studies, and more. Other chapters integrate insights from RPG studies around broadly significant topics, like worldbuilding, immersion, and player-character relations, as well as explore actual play and streaming, diversity, equity, inclusion, jubensha, therapeutic uses of RPGs, and storygames, journaling games, and other forms of text-based RPGs. Each chapter includes definitions of key terms and recommended readings to help students and scholars new to RPG studies find their way into this interdisciplinary field. A comprehensive reference volume ideal for students and scholars of game studies and immersive experiences and those looking to learn more about the ever-growing, interdisciplinary field of RPG studies.
This study examines roleplaying games (RPGs) as both a literary and cultural phenomenon, in which the text’s producers take the role of an authorial multiplicity. --- ABSTRACT: Authorship has undergone drastic revision in the twentieth century. A fundamental transformation in literature, wherein the author has become a multiplicity of voices, is evinced by the development of roleplaying games as both literary and cultural texts. The literary roots of roleplaying games are self-evident, as they draw on writers such as H. P. Lovecraft and J. R. R. Tolkien. However, a consequence of the development of the roleplaying game has been a subsequent departure from these authorial beginnings; roleplaying games have irrevocably transformed the role of the writers who inspired them, altering the authorial position to become a border-blurring multiplicity. Not only do roleplaying game designers reinterpret literary texts as literary games, often borrowing rules material from other designers in the process, in modifying the function of the author from a single creative entity to an empowered storytelling among groups roleplaying games further complicate previous distinctions between author and audience. Players create a fictional world as a group endeavor, authoring a complex structure of fantasy that addresses Freudian concepts of dreams and wish fulfillment. In this way, roleplaying becomes a locus for issues of identity, including questions of performance, spectatorship, and gender construction. And by allowing play in regard to identity, roleplaying games are able to transgressively navigate expressions of difference, encouraging players to subtly work against the traditional split between spectacle and narrative. The thriving fan subculture surrounding roleplaying only emphasizes the transgressiveness of the hobby; this is a social formation that aggressively utilizes new technology such as the internet, through which fans are able to explore culturally subversive methods of authoring in the face of hostility from the surrounding cultural environment. They, too, are active producers and manipulators of meanings, rather than passively accepting dominant ideology. By fusing the broader perspectives of literary and cultural criticism with personal experiences, this study examines the development of roleplaying games from the fiction of individual writers to the interactive roleplaying based on them, wherein fiction writers, the hobby’s creators, designers, editors, publishers, fans, players, and the cultural environment are all invested with the creative power to contribute meaningfully to the narrative.
