As science becomes increasingly computational, the limits of what is computationally tractable become a barrier to scientific progress. Many scientific problems, however, are amenable to human problem solving skills that complement computational power. By leveraging these skills on a larger scale---beyond the relatively few individuals currently engaged in scientific inquiry---there is the potential for new scientific discoveries.This book presents a framework for mapping open scientific problems into video games. The game framework combines computational power with human problem solving and creativity to work toward solving scientific problems that neither computers nor humans could previously solve alone. To maximize the potential contributors to scientific discovery, the framework designs a game to be played by people with no formal scientific background and incentivizes long-term engagement with a myriad of collaborative or competitive reward structures.

Ethics and games are emerging as a very popular field of study. As such, there has become a need to define the field in terms of its primary challenges and the current state of the discipline.Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values through Play is the first book in its field to challenge scholars and researchers to answer questions such as: How can game design be improved to foster ethical thinking and discourse? What are the theories and methodologies that will help us understand, model, and assess ethical thinking in games? How do we use games in classrooms and informal educational settings to support moral development? This distinguished publication approaches such questions from a multidisciplinary perspective with the ultimate goal of inspiring further interdisciplinary dialogue and research in order to continue building the ethics and games community.

The Art of Videogames explores how philosophy of the arts theories developed to address traditional art works can also be applied to videogames. Presents a unique philosophical approach to the art of videogaming, situating videogames in the framework of analytic philosophy of the arts. Explores how philosophical theories developed to address traditional art works can also be applied to videogames. Written for a broad audience of both philosophers and videogame enthusiasts by a philosopher who is also an avid gamer. Discusses the relationship between games and earlier artistic and entertainment media, how videogames allow for interactive fiction, the role of game narrative, and the moral status of violent events depicted in videogame worlds. Argues that videogames do indeed qualify as a new and exciting form of representational art.

Despite the pervasive rhetorics of immersion and embodiment found in industrial and social discourses, playing a video game is an exercise in non-linearity. The pervasiveness of trial and error mechanics, unforgiving game over screens, loading times, minute tweakings of options and settings, should lead us to consider video games as a medium that cannot eschew fragmentation. Every Game is an Island is an analysis and a critique of grey areas, dead ends and extremities found in digital games, an exploration of border zones where play and non-play coexist or compete. Riccardo Fassone describes the complexity of the experience of video game play and brings integral but often overlooked components of the gameplay experience to the fore, in an attempt to problematize a reading of video games as grandiosely immersive, all-encompassing narrative experiences. Through the analysis of closures and endings, limits and borders, and liminal states, this field-advancing study looks at the heart of a medium starting from its periphery.