The greatest trick the videogame industry ever pulled was convincing the world that videogames were games rather than a medium for making metagames. Elegantly defined as “games about games,” metagames implicate a diverse range of practices that stray outside the boundaries and bend the rules: from technical glitches and forbidden strategies to Renaissance painting, algorithmic trading, professional sports, and the War on Terror. In Metagaming, Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux demonstrate how games always extend beyond the screen, and how modders, mappers, streamers, spectators, analysts, and artists are changing the way we play. Metagaming uncovers these alternative histories of play by exploring the strange experiences and unexpected effects that emerge in, on, around, and through videogames. Players puzzle through the problems of perspectival rendering in Portal, perform clandestine acts of electronic espionage in EVE Online, compete and commentate in Korean StarCraft, and speedrun The Legend of Zelda in record times (with or without the use of vision). Companies like Valve attempt to capture the metagame through international e-sports and online marketplaces while the corporate history of Super Mario Bros. is undermined by the endless levels of Infinite Mario, the frustrating pranks of Asshole Mario, and even Super Mario Clouds, a ROM hack exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art. One of the only books to include original software alongside each chapter, Metagaming transforms videogames from packaged products into instruments, equipment, tools, and toys for intervening in the sensory and political economies of everyday life. And although videogames conflate the creativity, criticality, and craft of play with the act of consumption, we don’t simply play videogames—we make metagames.

Speculative science fiction at its finest, MetaGame by Sam Landstrom is a 'future gamers' field guide and a philosophical cyberpunk adventure. In this original and disturbingly irreverent prospective world, gaming is more than a diversion--and gamers are, literally, in it for life. The OverSoul, an enigmatic, unifying force, offers winners points that add up to currency. Reigning champs are given the gift of immortality--while losers are condemned to aging and death. D_Light is one of the best players in his Family and will do anything to win, even if it means committing murder. When he's invited to a MetaGame--an exclusive, high-stakes competition--he jumps at the chance. But after the first quest, D_Light's overly ambitious ways brand him a renegade. With a warped sense of freewill that is needed to prevail, D_Light must either kill someone he's grown to love--or lose everything.

Social computing concerns the study of social behavior and context based on computational systems. Behavioral modeling reproduces the social behavior, and allows for experimenting with and deep understanding of behavior, patterns, and potential outcomes. The pervasive use of computer and Internet technologies provides an unprecedented environment where people can share opinions and experiences, offer suggestions and advice, debate, and even conduct experiments. Social computing facilitates behavioral modeling in model building, analysis, pattern mining, anticipation, and prediction. The proceedings from this interdisciplinary workshop provide a platform for researchers, practitioners, and graduate students from sociology, behavioral and computer science, psychology, cultural study, information systems, and operations research to share results and develop new concepts and methodologies aimed at advancing and deepening our understanding of social and behavioral computing to aid critical decision making.

An impassioned look at games and game design that offers the most ambitious framework for understanding them to date. As pop culture, games are as important as film or television—but game design has yet to develop a theoretical framework or critical vocabulary. In Rules of Play Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman present a much-needed primer for this emerging field. They offer a unified model for looking at all kinds of games, from board games and sports to computer and video games. As active participants in game culture, the authors have written Rules of Play as a catalyst for innovation, filled with new concepts, strategies, and methodologies for creating and understanding games. Building an aesthetics of interactive systems, Salen and Zimmerman define core concepts like "play," "design," and "interactivity." They look at games through a series of eighteen "game design schemas," or conceptual frameworks, including games as systems of emergence and information, as contexts for social play, as a storytelling medium, and as sites of cultural resistance. Written for game scholars, game developers, and interactive designers, Rules of Play is a textbook, reference book, and theoretical guide. It is the first comprehensive attempt to establish a solid theoretical framework for the emerging discipline of game design.

Essays discuss the terminology, etymology, and history of key terms, offering a foundation for critical historical studies of games. Even as the field of game studies has flourished, critical historical studies of games have lagged behind other areas of research. Histories have generally been fact-by-fact chronicles; fundamental terms of game design and development, technology, and play have rarely been examined in the context of their historical, etymological, and conceptual underpinnings. This volume attempts to “debug” the flawed historiography of video games. It offers original essays on key concepts in game studies, arranged as in a lexicon—from “Amusement Arcade” to “Embodiment” and “Game Art” to “Simulation” and “World Building.” Written by scholars and practitioners from a variety of disciplines, including game development, curatorship, media archaeology, cultural studies, and technology studies, the essays offer a series of distinctive critical “takes” on historical topics. The majority of essays look at game history from the outside in; some take deep dives into the histories of play and simulation to provide context for the development of electronic and digital games; others take on such technological components of games as code and audio. Not all essays are history or historical etymology—there is an analysis of game design, and a discussion of intellectual property—but they nonetheless raise questions for historians to consider. Taken together, the essays offer a foundation for the emerging study of game history. Contributors Marcelo Aranda, Brooke Belisle, Caetlin Benson-Allott, Stephanie Boluk, Jennifer deWinter, J. P. Dyson, Kate Edwards, Mary Flanagan, Jacob Gaboury, William Gibbons, Raiford Guins, Erkki Huhtamo, Don Ihde, Jon Ippolito, Katherine Isbister, Mikael Jakobsson, Steven E. Jones, Jesper Juul, Eric Kaltman, Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Carly A. Kocurek, Peter Krapp, Patrick LeMieux, Henry Lowood, Esther MacCallum-Stewart, Ken S. McAllister, Nick Monfort, David Myers, James Newman, Jenna Ng, Michael Nitsche, Laine Nooney, Hector Postigo, Jas Purewal, Reneé H. Reynolds, Judd Ethan Ruggill, Marie-Laure Ryan, Katie Salen Tekinbaş, Anastasia Salter, Mark Sample, Bobby Schweizer, John Sharp, Miguel Sicart, Rebecca Elisabeth Skinner, Melanie Swalwell, David Thomas, Samuel Tobin, Emma Witkowski, Mark J.P. Wolf

Game theory could be formally defined as a theory of rational decision in conflict situations. Models of such situations, as they are conceived in game theory, involve (1) a set of decision makers, called players; (2) a set of strategies available to each player; (3) a set of outcomes, each of which is a result of particular choices of strategies made by the players on a given play of the game; and (4) a set of payoffs accorded to each player in each of the possible outcomes. It is assumed that each player is 'individually rational', in the sense that his preference ordering of the outcomes is determined by the order of magnitudes of his (and only his) associated payoffs. Further, a player is rational in the sense that he assumes that every other player is rational in the above sense. The rational player utilizes knowledge of the other players' payoffs in guiding his choice of strategy, because it gives him information about how the other players' choices are guided. Since, in general, the orders of magnitude of the payoffs that accrue to the several players in the several outcomes do not coincide, a game of strategy is a model of a situation involving conflicts of interests.

Poker is not a 'get rich quick' scheme. Becoming a consistent winner takes effort and dedication. In this collection of classic articles and much new material, prolific poker strategy writer Alex Scott explains how to take your game to the next level. One of the most comprehensive poker guides available, 'What I Know About Poker' is a must-have for any player's library.