Virtual Economies
Virtual Economies

Author: Vili Lehdonvirta

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2014-05-09

Total Pages: 307

ISBN-13: 0262027259

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How the basic concepts of economics—including markets, institutions, and money—can be used to create and analyze economies based on virtual goods. In the twenty-first-century digital world, virtual goods are sold for real money. Digital game players happily pay for avatars, power-ups, and other game items. But behind every virtual sale, there is a virtual economy, simple or complex. In this book, Vili Lehdonvirta and Edward Castronova introduce the basic concepts of economics into the game developer's and game designer's toolkits. Lehdonvirta and Castronova explain how the fundamentals of economics—markets, institutions, and money—can be used to create or analyze economies based on artificially scarce virtual goods. They focus on virtual economies in digital games, but also touch on serious digital currencies such as Bitcoin as well as virtual economies that emerge in social media around points, likes, and followers. The theoretical emphasis is on elementary microeconomic theory, with some discussion of behavioral economics, macroeconomics, sociology of consumption, and other social science theories relevant to economic behavior. Topics include the rational choice model of economic decision making; information goods versus virtual goods; supply, demand, and market equilibrium; monopoly power; setting prices; and externalities. The book will enable developers and designers to create and maintain successful virtual economies, introduce social scientists and policy makers to the power of virtual economies, and provide a useful guide to economic fundamentals for students in other disciplines.

Game Economy Design
Game Economy Design

Author: Charlie Czerkawski

Publisher: CRC Press

Published: 2024-10-16

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 1040132871

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This book provides a comprehensive overview of game economy design. It begins with a high-level overview, then utilises subsequent chapters to break this down into finer details, showing methods to approach the various problems and challenges involved in creating an intricate game economy and meta game experience. The content of the book extends to associated and related fields such as monetisation and live operations. The book contains step-by-step processes with best practices and examples, with content written from an empirical standpoint. The reader will gain insights into the components that form a game economy, how these components are utilised to shape a meta-game experience, and how monetization is integrated into this. The content will consider the work economy designers undertake during development through to post-launch live operations. The book will appeal to all game design professionals and students of game design that wish to gain a deeper understanding of how to develop game economies.

Game Mechanics
Game Mechanics

Author: Ernest Adams

Publisher: New Riders

Published: 2012-06-18

Total Pages: 442

ISBN-13: 0132946688

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This in-depth resource teaches you to craft mechanics that generate challenging, enjoyable, and well-balanced gameplay. You’ll discover at what stages to prototype, test, and implement mechanics in games and learn how to visualize and simulate game mechanics in order to design better games. Along the way, you’ll practice what you’ve learned with hands-on lessons. A free downloadable simulation tool developed by Joris Dormans is also available in order to follow along with exercises in the book in an easy-to-use graphical environment. In Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design, you’ll learn how to: * Design and balance game mechanics to create emergent gameplay before you write a single line of code. * Visualize the internal economy so that you can immediately see what goes on in a complex game. * Use novel prototyping techniques that let you simulate games and collect vast quantities of gameplay data on the first day of development. * Apply design patterns for game mechanics—from a library in this book—to improve your game designs. * Explore the delicate balance between game mechanics and level design to create compelling, long-lasting game experiences. * Replace fixed, scripted events in your game with dynamic progression systems to give your players a new experience every time they play. "I've been waiting for a book like this for ten years: packed with game design goodness that tackles the science without undermining the art." --Richard Bartle, University of Essex, co-author of the first MMORPG “Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design by Joris Dormans & Ernest Adams formalizes game grammar quite well. Not sure I need to write a next book now!” -- Raph Koster, author of A Theory of Fun for Game Design.

Game Balance
Game Balance

Author: Ian Schreiber

Publisher: CRC Press

Published: 2021-08-16

Total Pages: 806

ISBN-13: 1498799582

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Within the field of game design, game balance can best be described as a black art. It is the process by which game designers make a game simultaneously fair for players while providing them just the right amount of difficulty to be both exciting and challenging without making the game entirely predictable. This involves a combination of mathematics, psychology, and occasionally other fields such as economics and game theory. Game Balance offers readers a dynamic look into game design and player theory. Throughout the book, relevant topics on the use of spreadsheet programs will be included in each chapter. This book therefore doubles as a useful reference on Microsoft Excel, Google Spreadsheets, and other spreadsheet programs and their uses for game designers. FEATURES The first and only book to explore game balance as a topic in depth Topics range from intermediate to advanced, while written in an accessible style that demystifies even the most challenging mathematical concepts to the point where a novice student of game design can understand and apply them Contains powerful spreadsheet techniques which have been tested with all major spreadsheet programs and battle-tested with real-world game design tasks Provides short-form exercises at the end of each chapter to allow for practice of the techniques discussed therein along with three long-term projects divided into parts throughout the book that involve their creation Written by award-winning designers with decades of experience in the field Ian Schreiber has been in the industry since 2000, first as a programmer and then as a game designer. He has worked on eight published game titles, training/simulation games for three Fortune 500 companies, and has advised countless student projects. He is the co-founder of Global Game Jam, the largest in-person game jam event in the world. Ian has taught game design and development courses at a variety of colleges and universities since 2006. Brenda Romero is a BAFTA award-winning game director, entrepreneur, artist, and Fulbright award recipient and is presently game director and creator of the Empire of Sin franchise. As a game director, she has worked on 50 games and contributed to many seminal titles, including the Wizardry and Jagged Alliance series and titles in the Ghost Recon, Dungeons & Dragons, and Def Jam franchises.

Play Money
Play Money

Author: Julian Dibbell

Publisher: Basic Books

Published: 2007-03-09

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 0465003672

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Play Money explores a remarkable new phenomenon that's just beginning to enter public consciousness: MMORPGs, or Massively MultiPlayer Online Role-Playing Games, in which hundreds of thousands of players operate fantasy characters in virtual environments the size of continents. With city-sized populations of nearly full-time players, these games generate their own cultures, governments, and social systems and, inevitably, their own economies, which spill over into the real world. The desire for virtual goods -- magic swords, enchanted breastplates, and special, hard-to-get elixirs -- has spawned a cottage industry of "virtual loot farmers": People who play the games just to obtain fantasy goods that they can sell in the real world. The best loot farmers can make between six figures a year and six figures a month.Play Money is an extended walk on the weird side: a vivid snapshot of a subculture whose denizens were once the stuff of mere sociological spectacle but now -- with computer gaming poised to eclipse all other entertainments in dollar volume, and with the lines between play and work, virtual and real increasingly blurred -- look more and more like the future.

Advanced Game Design
Advanced Game Design

Author: Michael Sellers

Publisher:

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13: 9780134668185

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In Advanced Game Design , pioneering game designer and instructor Michael Sellers situates game design practices in a strong theoretical framework of systems thinking, enabling designers to think more deeply and clearly about their work, so they can produce better, more engaging games for any device or platform. Sellers offers a deep unifying framework in which practical game design best practices and proven systems thinking theory reinforce each other, helping game designers understand what they are trying to accomplish and the best ways to achieve it. Drawing on 20+ years of experience designing games, launching game studios, and teaching game design, Sellers explains: What games are, and how systems thinking can help you think about them more clearly How to systematically promote engagement, interactivity, and fun What you can learn from MDA and other game design frameworks How to create gameplay and core loops How to design the entire player experience, and how to build game mechanics that work together to create that experience How to capture your game’s “big idea” and Unique Selling Proposition How to establish high-level and background design and translate it into detailed design How to build, playtest, and iterate early prototypes How to build your game design career in a field that keeps changing at breakneck speed

Games of Empire
Games of Empire

Author: Nick Dyer-Witheford

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2013-11-30

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 1452942706

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In the first decade of the twenty-first century, video games are an integral part of global media culture, rivaling Hollywood in revenue and influence. No longer confined to a subculture of adolescent males, video games today are played by adults around the world. At the same time, video games have become major sites of corporate exploitation and military recruitment. In Games of Empire, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter offer a radical political critique of such video games and virtual environments as Second Life, World of Warcraft, and Grand Theft Auto, analyzing them as the exemplary media of Empire, the twenty-first-century hypercapitalist complex theorized by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. The authors trace the ascent of virtual gaming, assess its impact on creators and players alike, and delineate the relationships between games and reality, body and avatar, screen and street. Games of Empire forcefully connects video games to real-world concerns about globalization, militarism, and exploitation, from the horrors of African mines and Indian e-waste sites that underlie the entire industry, the role of labor in commercial game development, and the synergy between military simulation software and the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan exemplified by Full Spectrum Warrior to the substantial virtual economies surrounding World of Warcraft, the urban neoliberalism made playable in Grand Theft Auto, and the emergence of an alternative game culture through activist games and open-source game development. Rejecting both moral panic and glib enthusiasm, Games of Empire demonstrates how virtual games crystallize the cultural, political, and economic forces of global capital, while also providing a means of resisting them.

Uncertainty in Games
Uncertainty in Games

Author: Greg Costikyan

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 150

ISBN-13: 0262018969

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How uncertainty in games -- from Super Mario Bros. to Rock/Paper/Scissors -- engages players and shapes play experiences.

Gamestorming
Gamestorming

Author: Dave Gray

Publisher: "O'Reilly Media, Inc."

Published: 2010-07-14

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 1449395902

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Great things don't happen in a vacuum. But creating an environment for creative thinking and innovation can be a daunting challenge. How can you make it happen at your company? The answer may surprise you: gamestorming. This book includes more than 80 games to help you break down barriers, communicate better, and generate new ideas, insights, and strategies. The authors have identified tools and techniques from some of the world's most innovative professionals, whose teams collaborate and make great things happen. This book is the result: a unique collection of games that encourage engagement and creativity while bringing more structure and clarity to the workplace. Find out why -- and how -- with Gamestorming. Overcome conflict and increase engagement with team-oriented games Improve collaboration and communication in cross-disciplinary teams with visual-thinking techniques Improve understanding by role-playing customer and user experiences Generate better ideas and more of them, faster than ever before Shorten meetings and make them more productive Simulate and explore complex systems, interactions, and dynamics Identify a problem's root cause, and find the paths that point toward a solution

Practical Game Design
Practical Game Design

Author: Adam Kramarzewski

Publisher: Packt Publishing Ltd

Published: 2018-04-19

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13: 1787122166

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Design accessible and creative games across genres, platforms, and development realities Key Features Implement the skills and techniques required to work in a professional studio Ace the core principles and processes of level design, world building, and storytelling Design interactive characters that animate the gaming world Book Description If you are looking for an up-to-date and highly applicable guide to game design, then you have come to the right place! Immerse yourself in the fundamentals of game design with this book, written by two highly experienced industry professionals to share their profound insights as well as give valuable advice on creating games across genres and development platforms. Practical Game Design covers the basics of game design one piece at a time. Starting with learning how to conceptualize a game idea and present it to the development team, you will gradually move on to devising a design plan for the whole project and adapting solutions from other games. You will also discover how to produce original game mechanics without relying on existing reference material, and test and eliminate anticipated design risks. You will then design elements that compose the playtime of a game, followed by making game mechanics, content, and interface accessible to all players. You will also find out how to simultaneously ensure that the gameplay mechanics and content are working as intended. As the book reaches its final chapters, you will learn to wrap up a game ahead of its release date, work through the different challenges of designing free-to-play games, and understand how to significantly improve their quality through iteration, polishing and playtesting. What you will learn Define the scope and structure of a game project Conceptualize a game idea and present it to others Design gameplay systems and communicate them clearly and thoroughly Build and validate engaging game mechanics Design successful business models and prepare your games for live operations Master the principles behind level design, worldbuilding and storytelling Improve the quality of a game by playtesting and polishing it Who this book is for Whether you are a student eager to design a game or a junior game designer looking for your first role as a professional, this book will help you with the fundamentals of game design. By focusing on best practices and a pragmatic approach, Practical Game Design provides insights into the arts and crafts from two senior game designers that will interest more seasoned professionals in the game industry.