Katherine Isbister's Books

Playful Wearables

Understanding the Design Space of Wearables for Games and Related Experiences

By: Oguz Buruk,Ella Dagan,Katherine Isbister,Elena Marquez Segura,Theresa Jean Tanenbaum

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Playful Wearables

Understanding the Design Space of Wearables for Games and Related Experiences

By: Oguz Buruk,Ella Dagan,Katherine Isbister,Elena Marquez Segura,Theresa Jean Tanenbaum

An expert introduction to the world of “playful wearables” and their design, with a wide range of engaging examples, case studies, and exercises. This pioneering introduction to the world of wearable technology takes readers beyond the practical realm (think Fitbits, Apple Watches, and smartglasses) to consider another important side of the technology—the playful. Playful Wearables offers an engaging account of what “playful wearables” are, why they matter, how they work, how they’re made, and what their future might hold. The book’s authors draw on decades of experience in design, development, and research to offer real-world examples, exercises, and implications, showing how this kind of wearable tech can introduce an invaluable element of play into our everyday lives. As wearable technology emerges in the ecology of costume and fashion, the authors consider its intimate connection to identity and culture. And they look at the ways in which playful wearables, when smoothly integrated into everyday social experiences, support social interaction. The book then moves on to the mechanics of playful wearables—from design strategies and frameworks to specific methods and game design patterns. All of these elements point to possibilities beyond the realm of games and dedicated play, as the value and uses of playful wearables in the larger world of self, society, and culture become ever more apparent.

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Page Count

242

Publisher

MIT Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0262546914

ISBN 13

9780262546911

Better Game Characters by Design

A Psychological Approach

By: Katherine Isbister

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Better Game Characters by Design

A Psychological Approach

By: Katherine Isbister

Games are poised for a major evolution, driven by growth in technical sophistication and audience reach. Characters that create powerful social and emotional connections with players throughout the game-play itself (not just in cut scenes) will be essential to next-generation games. However, the principles of sophisticated character design and interaction are not widely understood within the game development community. Further complicating the situation are powerful gender and cultural issues that can influence perception of characters. Katherine Isbister has spent the last 10 years examining what makes interactions with computer characters useful and engaging to different audiences. This work has revealed that the key to good design is leveraging player psychology: understanding what's memorable, exciting, and useful to a person about real-life social interactions, and applying those insights to character design. Game designers who create great characters often make use of these psychological principles without realizing it. Better Game Characters by Design gives game design professionals and other interactive media designers a framework for understanding how social roles and perceptions affect players' reactions to characters, helping produce stronger designs and better results.

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Page Count

443

Publisher

CRC Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1000688860

ISBN 13

9781000688863

How Games Move Us

Emotion by Design

By: Katherine Isbister

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How Games Move Us

Emotion by Design

By: Katherine Isbister

An engaging examination of how video game design can create strong, positive emotional experiences for players—with examples from popular, indie, and art games. This is a renaissance moment for video games—in the variety of genres they represent, and the range of emotional territory they cover. But how do games create emotion? In How Games Move Us, Katherine Isbister takes the reader on a timely and novel exploration of the design techniques that evoke strong emotions for players. She counters arguments that games are creating a generation of isolated, emotionally numb, antisocial loners. Games, Isbister shows us, can actually play a powerful role in creating empathy and other strong, positive emotional experiences; they reveal these qualities over time, through the act of playing. She offers a nuanced, systematic examination of exactly how games can influence emotion and social connection, with examples—drawn from popular, indie, and art games—that unpack the gamer’s experience. Isbister describes choice and flow, two qualities that distinguish games from other media, and explains how game developers build upon these qualities using avatars, non-player characters, and character customization, in both solo and social play. She shows how designers use physical movement to enhance players’ emotional experience, and examines long-distance networked play. She illustrates the use of these design methods with examples that range from Sony’s Little Big Planet to the much-praised indie game Journey to art games like Brenda Romero’s Train. Isbister’s analysis shows us a new way to think about games, helping us appreciate them as an innovative and powerful medium for doing what film, literature, and other creative media do: helping us to understand ourselves and what it means to be human.

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Page Count

187

Publisher

MIT Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0262534452

ISBN 13

9780262534451

Game Usability

Advancing the Player Experience

By: Katherine Isbister,Noah Schaffer

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Game Usability

Advancing the Player Experience

By: Katherine Isbister,Noah Schaffer

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Page Count

392

Publisher

CRC Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0080922422

ISBN 13

9780080922423

Perverse Midrash

Oscar Wilde, André Gide,and Censorship of Biblical Drama

By: Katherine Brown Downey

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Perverse Midrash

Oscar Wilde, André Gide,and Censorship of Biblical Drama

By: Katherine Brown Downey

Downey uses Oscar Wilde's Salome and Andre Gide's Saul to discuss censorship of biblical drama from the sixteenth century through the nineteenth century.

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Page Count

204

Publisher

A&C Black

Published Date

ISBN 10

0826416217

ISBN 13

9780826416216

Canadians and Americans

Myths and Literary Traditions

By: Katherine L. Morrison

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Canadians and Americans

Myths and Literary Traditions

By: Katherine L. Morrison

Using specific works by recognized authors of their time, Morrison considers the role of religion and the church, violence and the law, and humor and satire, in the literature of both countries. The book also explores the role of women, race, and class in the literature of both countries. It concludes with a discussion of the tenacity of national myths, and draws some tentative conclusions."--BOOK JACKET.

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Page Count

352

Publisher

Transaction Publishers

ISBN 10

1412819091

ISBN 13

9781412819091

Working Girls

Fiction, Sexuality, and Modernity

By: Katherine Mullin

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Working Girls

Fiction, Sexuality, and Modernity

By: Katherine Mullin

Working Girls: Fiction, Sexuality, and Modernity investigates the significance of a new form of sexual identity at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Young women of the lower-middle and working classes were increasingly abandoning domestic service in favour of occupations of contested propriety. They inspired both moral unease and erotic fascination. Working Girls considers representations of four highly glamorised yet controversial types of women worker: telegraphists and typists (in newly-feminised offices), shop assistants (in the new department stores), and barmaids (in the new 'gin palaces' of major British cities). Economically emancipated (more or less) and liberated (more or less) from the protection and constraints of home and family, shop-girls, barmaids, typists, and telegraphists became mass media sensations. They energised a wide range of late-Victorian and Modernist fiction. This study will bring late-Victorian and Modernist British writers into intimate conversation with a substantial new archive of ephemeral sources often regarded as remote from high art and its concerns: popular fiction; music hall and musical comedy; beauty pageants and fairground exhibitions; visual art and early film; careers manuals; magazine and periodical journalism; moral reform crusades, Royal Commissions, and attempts at protective legislation. Working Girls argues that these seductive yet perilous young women helped writers negotiate anxieties about the state of literary culture in the United Kingdom. Crucially, they preoccupy novelists who were themselves beleaguered by anxieties over cultural capital, the shifting pressures of the literary marketplace, or controversies about the morality of fiction (often leading to the threat of censorship). In articulating questions about sexual integrity, Working Girls articulate often submerged questions about textual integrity and the role of the modern novel.

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Page Count

288

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0191037834

ISBN 13

9780191037832

How Games Move Us

Emotion by Design

By: Katherine Isbister

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How Games Move Us

Emotion by Design

By: Katherine Isbister

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Page Count

187

Publisher

MIT Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0262534452

ISBN 13

9780262534451

Game Usability

Advancing the Player Experience

By: Katherine Isbister,Noah Schaffer

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Game Usability

Advancing the Player Experience

By: Katherine Isbister,Noah Schaffer

Computers used to be for geeks. And geeks were fine with dealing with a difficult and finicky interface--they liked this--it was even a sort of badge of honor (e.g. the Unix geeks). But making the interface really intuitive and useful--think about the first Macintosh computers--took computers far far beyond the geek crowd. The Mac made HCI (human computer interaction) and usability very popular topics in the productivity software industry. Suddenly a new kind of experience was crucial to the success of software - the user experience. Now, 20 years later, developers are applying and extending these ideas to games. Game companies are now trying to take games beyond the 'hardcore' gamer market--the people who love challenge and are happy to master a complicated or highly genre-constrained interface. Right about now (with the growth of interest in casual games) game companies are truly realizing that usability matters, particularly to mainstream audiences. If it's not seamless and easy to use and engaging, players will just not stay to get to the 'good stuff'. By definition, usability is the ease with which people can emplo a particular tool in order to achieve a particular goal. Usability refers to a computer program's efficiency or elegance. This book gives game designers a better understanding of how player characteristics impact usability strategy, and offers specific methods and measures to employ in game usability practice. The book also includes practical advice on how to include usability in already tight development timelines, and how to advocate for usability and communicate results to higher-ups effectively.

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Page Count

400

Publisher

CRC Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0123744474

ISBN 13

9780123744470

Better Game Characters by Design

A Psychological Approach

By: Katherine Isbister

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Better Game Characters by Design

A Psychological Approach

By: Katherine Isbister

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

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Page Count

443

Publisher

CRC Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1000688860

ISBN 13

9781000688863

Playful Wearables

Understanding the Design Space of Wearables for Games and Related Experiences

By: Oguz Buruk,Ella Dagan,Katherine Isbister,Elena Marquez Segura,Theresa Jean Tanenbaum

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Playful Wearables

Understanding the Design Space of Wearables for Games and Related Experiences

By: Oguz Buruk,Ella Dagan,Katherine Isbister,Elena Marquez Segura,Theresa Jean Tanenbaum

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

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Page Count

242

Publisher

MIT Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0262546914

ISBN 13

9780262546911

Motion-Based Game Design

How to Design Quality Movement Games for Wii, Kinect, and Move

By: Katherine Isbister

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Motion-Based Game Design

How to Design Quality Movement Games for Wii, Kinect, and Move

By: Katherine Isbister

Everyday gameplay was already revolutionized by the introduction of the Wii, and in the last year, the rapid growth of multi-touch platforms, and the introduction of the Sony Move and the Xbox Kinect, have brought movement-based games into the limelight as a growing market opportunity. Yet, there is little or no information circulating for developers and designers about how best to design movement-based mechanics. Each team goes through expensive trial and error, as they work to adapt existing properties and genres and/or to invent new ones. There is a great need for a book that brings together what is already known about movement design, both in general, and for the specific target platforms, to help reduce risk and increase the likelihood of successful design. The book will include interviews with developers who have faced the challenges outlined in the book, and who have developed commercially successful and award winning titles. The companion web site will include video clips of play of the movement game examples from the book, to better illustrate the concepts. --Author, Katherine Isbister is uniquely qualified to write this book. She studies movement mechanics and their effects on players in her lab, presents this work at GDC and Human Computer Interaction conferences. Her lab's work has been featured in Wired.com and National Public Radio's Science Friday show. --No books available yet on movement-based games. We will be first to market on this growing and important emerging category of games. --Practical advice for designers on what work well in movement game design, based on real-world social science research and lab work. The book demonstrates a perfect mix of lab tested, practical advice, combined with case studies across many genres and platforms. --Companion web site offers video clips of play of the movement game examples from the book, to better illustrate the concepts.

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Age

Page Count

250

Publisher

Morgan Kaufmann

Published Date

ISBN 10

0124158706

ISBN 13

9780124158702

Book's by Katherine Isbister

Playful Wearables

Playful Wearables

Better Game Characters by Design

Better Game Characters by Design

How Games Move Us

How Games Move Us

Game Usability

Game Usability

Perverse Midrash

Perverse Midrash

Canadians and Americans

Canadians and Americans

Working Girls

Working Girls

How Games Move Us

How Games Move Us

Game Usability

Game Usability

Better Game Characters by Design

Better Game Characters by Design

Playful Wearables

Playful Wearables

Motion-Based Game Design

Motion-Based Game Design

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