Serious Games will focus on specific issues and approaches for implementing gaming techniques and technologies in companies from startups to large established corporations. Issues will be discussed from business, social and technology perspectives. Areas such as health care and intellectual property concerns will be addressed.
What explains the massive worldwide success of video games such as Fortnite, Minecraft, and Pokémon Go? Game companies and their popularity are poorly understood and often ignored from the standpoint of traditional business strategy. Yet this industry generates billions in revenue by thinking creatively about digital distribution, free-to-play content, and phenomena like e-sports and live streaming. What lessons can we draw from its major successes and failures about the future of entertainment? One Up offers a pioneering empirical analysis of innovation and strategy in the video game industry to explain how it has evolved from a fringe activity to become a mainstream form of entertainment. Joost van Dreunen, a widely recognized industry expert with over twenty years of experience, analyzes how game makers, publishers, and platform holders have tackled strategic challenges to make the video game industry what it is today. Using more than three decades of rigorously compiled industry data, he demonstrates that video game companies flourish when they bring the same level of creativity to business strategy that they bring to game design. Filled with case studies of companies such as Activision Blizzard, Apple, Electronic Arts, Epic Games, Microsoft, Nexon, Sony, Take-Two Interactive, Tencent, and Valve, this book forces us to rethink common misconceptions around the emergence of digital and mobile gaming. One Up is required reading for investors, creatives, managers, and anyone looking to learn about the major drivers of change and growth in contemporary entertainment.
Because they are analytical rather than descriptive, the case studies are not typical teaching cases. The cases are paired with customized game-theoretic models that cover a wide range of commitment decisions, from short-run commitments such as price to longer-run commitments such as capacity expansion and reduction, product and process innovation, and battles for market share. A variety of quantitative and qualitative techniques are used to test the models' predictions on case data.
The story of video games is often told as the successive rise of computers and consoles from famous names like Atari, Commodore, Nintendo, Sega, Sony and Microsoft. But beyond this familiar tale, there’s a whole world of weird and wonderful gaming machines that seldom get talked about. Curious Video Game Machines reveals the fascinating stories behind a bevy of rare and unusual consoles, computers and coin-ops – like Kimtanktics, a 1970s wargame computer made out of calculator parts, or the suite of Korea-exclusive consoles made by car manufacturer Daewoo. Then there’s the Casio Loopy, a 1990s console that doubled up as a sticker printer, the RDI Halcyon, a 1985 LaserDisc-based machine that could recognize your voice, and the Interton VC 4000, a German console made by a hearing-aid company, as well as a range of bizarre arcade machines, from early attempts at virtual reality to pedal-powered flying contraptions. There are tales of missed opportunities, like the astonishingly powerful Enterprise 64 computer, which got caught in development hell and arrived too late to make an impact on the British microcomputer market. And there are tales of little-known triumphs, like the Galaksija DIY computer kit that introduced a whole generation of Yugoslavians to computing before the country became engulfed by war. Featuring exclusive interviews with creators, developers and collectors, Curious Video Game Machines finally shines a light on the forgotten corners of video-game history.
This text brings together topical contributions from figures in the field of games and simulations, representing the current international thinking and best practice.
This book is about the challenges that emerge for organizations from an ever faster changing world. While useful at their time, several management tools, including classic strategic planning processes, will no longer suffice to address these challenges in a timely and comprehensive fashion. While individual management tools are still valid to solve specific problems, they need to be employed based on a clear understanding of what the greater challenge is and how they need to be combined and prioritized with other approaches. In order to do so, companies can apply the clarity of thinking from the military with regard to which leadership level is responsible for what and how these levels need to interact in order to produce a single aligned response to an outside opportunity or threat. Finally, the tool of business wargaming, while known for some time, proves to be an ideal approach to quickly and effectively bring all leadership levels together, align them around a common objective and lay the groundwork for effective implementation of targeted responses that will keep the organization competitive and in the game for the long run. The book offers a comprehensive introduction to business wargaming, including a historical account, a classification of different types of games and a number of specific real-world examples. This book is targeted at practicing managers dealing with the aforementioned challenges, as well as for students of business and strategy at every level.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 52nd International Simulation and Gaming Association Conference, ISAGA 2021, held in Indore, India, during September 6–10, 2021. The 24 full papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 58 submissions. They were organized in topical sections as follows: game design and facilitation; gaming in education; player experience in simulations; and policy formulation and serious games.