From gaming consoles to smartphones, video games are everywhere today, including those set in historical times and particularly in the ancient world. This volume explores the varied depictions of the ancient world in video games and demonstrates the potential challenges of games for scholars as well as the applications of game engines for educational and academic purposes. With successful series such as “Assassin's Creed” or "Civilization” selling millions of copies, video games rival even television and cinema in their role in shaping younger audiences' perceptions of the past. Yet classical scholarship, though embracing other popular media as areas of research, has so far largely ignored video games as a vehicle of classical reception. This collection of essays fills this gap with a dedicated study of receptions, remediations and representations of Classical Antiquity across all electronic gaming platforms and genres. It presents cutting-edge research in classics and classical receptions, game studies and archaeogaming, adopting different perspectives and combining papers from scholars, gamers, game developers and historical consultants. In doing so, it delivers the first state-of-the-art account of both the wide array of 'ancient' video games, as well as the challenges and rewards of this new and exciting field.

This book explores the representations of national Asian histories in digital games. Situated at the intersection of regional game studies and historical game studies, this book offers chapters on histories and heritages of Japan, China, Iran, Iraq, Taiwan, South Korea, Indonesia, Singapore, Turkey, and Russia. The volume looks beyond the diversity of the local histories depicted in games, and the audience reception of these histories, to show a diversity of approaches which can be used in examining historical games– from postcolonialism to identity politics to heritage studies. It demonstrates various methodological approaches to historical/regional game studies: case studies of nationally produced historical games that deal with local history, studies of media reception of history/heritage-themed games, text-mining methods studying attitudes expressed by players of such games, and educational perspectives on games in teaching cultural heritage. Through the lens of videogames, the authors explore how nations struggle with the legacies of war, colonialism and religious strife that have been a part of nation-building - but also how victimized cultures can survive, resist, and sometimes prevail. Appealing primarily to scholars in the fields of game studies, heritage studies, postcolonial criticism, and media studies, this book will be particularly useful for the subfields of historical game studies and postcolonial game studies.

This book is a multidisciplinary study of the translation and localisation of video games. It offers a descriptive analysis of the industry – understood as a global phenomenon in entertainment – and aims to explain the norms governing present industry practices, as well as game localisation processes. Additionally, it discusses particular translation issues that are unique to the multichannel nature of video games, in which verbal and nonverbal signs must be cohesively combined with interactivity to achieve maximum playability and immerse players in the game’s virtual world. Although positioned within the theoretical framework of descriptive translation studies, Bernal-Merino incorporates research from audiovisual translation, software localisation, computer assisted translation, comparative literature, and video game production. Moving beyond this framework, Translation and Localisation in Video Games challenges some of the basic tenets of translation studies and proposes changes to established and unsatisfactory processes in the video game and language services industries.

The Internet has become an indispensable tool for communications, research and commerce. But this report addresses the growing public concern at the Internet's dark side: the easy availability of hardcore pornography, which people may find offensive, the uploading by ordinary people of film of real fights, bullying or alleged rape, or the setting up of websites encouraging others to follow extreme diets, or self-harm, or even commit suicide. In particular, there is increasing anxiety among parents about the use of social networking sites and chatrooms for grooming and sexual predation. The Committee welcomes the Government-commissioned report by Dr Tanya Byron on the risks posed by the Internet to children, and agrees that a UK Council for Child Internet Safety should be established. Sites which host user-generated content-typically photos and videos uploaded by members of the public-have taken some steps to set minimum standards for that content. The Committee recommends that proactive review of content should be standard practice for such sites, and calls for provision of high profile facilities for reporting abuse or unwelcome behaviour directly to law enforcement and support organisations. There is a distinct issue about labelling of video games to indicate the nature of their content. Two systems currently exist side by side: the industry awards its own ratings, and the British Board of Film Classification awards classifications to a small number of games which feature content unsuitable for children. The dual system is confusing, and BBFC should have responsibility for rating games with content appropriate for adults or teenagers.

From the text adventures of Zork, to the arcade game of Pac-Man, to the corridors of Doom, and on to the city streets of Grand Theft Auto IV, the maze has often been used as a space to trap and confuse players in their navigation of gameworlds. However, the maze as a construction on the landscape has a long history before the invention of the videogame. By examining the change in the maze from the landscapes of open spaces and closed gardens through to the screen of the videogame, both mazes and labyrinths are discussed in terms of historical reference, alongside the author's personal experiences of walking and playing these structures. This book shows how our cultural experiences of real world maze landscapes may have changed, and how we negotiate videogame worlds along the various paths and meanings they so often create for us.

This volume focuses on the depiction of women in video games set in historical periods or archaeological contexts, explores the tension between historical and archaeological accuracy and authenticity, examines portrayals of women in historical periods or archaeological contexts, portrayals of female historians and archaeologists, and portrayals of women in fantastical historical and archaeological contexts. It includes both triple A and independent video games, incorporating genres such as turn-based strategy, action-adventure, survival horror, and a variety of different types of role-playing games. Its chronological and geographical scope ranges from late third century BCE China, to mid first century BCE Egypt, to Pictish and Viking Europe, to Medieval Germany, to twentieth century Taiwan, and into the contemporary world, but it also ventures beyond our universe and into the fantasy realm of Hyrule and the science fiction solar system of the Nebula.

While video games have blossomed into the foremost expression of contemporary popular culture over the past decades, their critical study occupies a fringe position in American Studies. In its engagement with video games, this book contributes to their study but with a thematic focus on a particularly important subject matter in American Studies: spatiality. The volume explores the production, representation, and experience of places in video games from the perspective of American Studies. Contributions critically interrogate the use of spatial myths ("wilderness," "frontier," or "city upon a hill"), explore games as digital borderlands and contact zones, and offer novel approaches to geographical literacy. Eventually, Playing the Field II brings the rich theoretical repertoire of the study of space in American Studies into conversation with questions about the production, representation, and experience of space in video games.

Drawing across Games Studies, Childhood Studies, and Children’s Literature Studies, this book redirects critical conversations away from questions of whether videogames are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for child-players and towards questions of how videogames produce childhood as a set of social roles and rules in contemporary Western contexts. It does so by cataloguing and critiquing representations of childhood across a corpus of over 500 contemporary videogames. While child-players are frequently the topic of academic debate – particularly within the fields of psychology, behavioural science, and education research - child-characters in videogames are all but invisible. This book's aim is to make these child-characters not only visible, but legible, and to demonstrate that coded kids in virtual worlds can shed light on how and why the boundaries between adults and children are shifting.

Video games are becoming culturally dominant. But what does their popularity say about our contemporary society? This book explores video game culture, but in doing so, utilizes video games as a lens through which to understand contemporary social life. Video games are becoming an increasingly central part of our cultural lives, impacting on various aspects of everyday life such as our consumption, communities, and identity formation. Drawing on new and original empirical data – including interviews with gamers, as well as key representatives from the video game industry, media, education, and cultural sector – Video Games as Culture not only considers contemporary video game culture, but also explores how video games provide important insights into the modern nature of digital and participatory culture, patterns of consumption and identity formation, late modernity, and contemporary political rationalities. This book will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as postdoctoral researchers, interested in fields such Video Games, Sociology, and Media and Cultural Studies. It will also be useful for those interested in the wider role of culture, technology, and consumption in the transformation of society, identities, and communities.