Fumito Ueda’s masterpiece is the subject of this original analysis by British writer Ben Mottershead. The player of the game takes on the role of Ico, a young boy born with a pair of horns, who must escort a princess named Yorda safely out of a castle without her being Read the rest of this entry »

Fin dalla sua apparizione sul mercato nel 2001, seguita ad una lunghissima fase di sviluppo sotto il nome di K-Project, lo shooter musicale in terza persona per PS2 e Dreamcast edito da Sega e realizzato dalla nipponica United Game Artists, ha suscitato un generale imbarazzo nel mondo della critica videoludica. Read the rest of this entry »

Al centro di questa innovativa ricerca è l’analisi delle interfacce di gioco di un corpus di god games, tra cui Simcity, The Sims, Civilization, Age of Empires. Applicando i concetti e i metodi di analisi della Semiotica del testo, e riaggiustandoli quando necessario, l’indagine cerca di comprendere come vengano creati Read the rest of this entry »

GameScenes. Art in the Age of Videogames (John & Levi, 2006) is the first volume entirely dedicated to Game Art.

Edited by Matteo Bittanti and Domenico Quaranta, GameScenes. Art in the Age of Videogames provides a detailed overview of the emerging field of Game Art, examining the complex Read the rest of this entry »

Virtual Geographic provides a series of illustrated critism of popular videogames. A series of reportages in the virtual worlds, inspired by the National Geographic. Personal narratives, travelogues, explorations into (un)known lands.

Virtual Geographic is available now. Read the rest of this entry »

“The first time I encountered Myst was at the 1994 Digital World Expo in Los Angeles. A back room, away from the noise of the main convention halls, was lined with software booths where companies were promoting and hyping their latest products. Among them one vendor area stood Read the rest of this entry »

The book is availbe in Italian only. Read the rest of this entry »

Doom. The First Person Reader is the first interdisciplinary volume to explore a range of topics regarding the aesthetics, politics and logics of the first person shooter genre, and specifically of id Software’s Doom series, which gave birth to a new era of computer gaming. The published contributions come Read the rest of this entry »

Civilization. Virtual History, Real Fantasies is a collection of essays that explores Sid Meier’s Civilization, and how it has been approached theoretically, culturally and historically. In doing so, the contributors provide invaluable insight into many of the theories at the heart of game studies. The sixteen essays included in this Read the rest of this entry »

“The aim of this chapter is to consider the extent to which the ideological dimensions of games are likely to be actively in-play, as it were, during the performance of gameplay tasks. All games, I suggest, like all other cultural texts, have ideological potential. That is to say, they contain Read the rest of this entry »