High Street rental company Blockbuster goes into administration

"Blockbuster, the video and games rental company, has become the latest high street name to collapse into administration.

The rising popularity of internet film rental services like iTunes and Lovefilm have taken their toll on Blockbuster's 528 high street video rental stores, and the company is now loss-making.'"

(Juliette Garside, 16 January 2013, Guardian News and Media Limited)

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Alice: Madness Returns gameplay Demo.

LUDOLOGY MEETS NARRATOLOGY: Similitude and differences between (video)games and narrative

"Literary theory and narratology have been helpful to understand cybertexts and videogames. Aristotelian Poetics [Laurel, 1993], Russian formalism [Porush and Hivner, ?], and poststructuralism [Landow, 1992] are some of the different perspectives that have been used to study the subject.

Some authors see cybertexts and videogames as a new form of or as an expansion of traditional narrative or drama. The fact is that these computer programs share many elements with stories: characters, chained actions, endings, settings.

However, there is another dimension that has been usually almost ignored when studying this kind of computer software: to analyze them as games.

The problems of using a 'game' perspective are many. Basically, traditional games have always had less academic status than other objects, like narrative. And because of this, game formalist studies are fragmented through different disciplines, and not very well developed.

In this paper we will propose to explore videogames and cybertexts as games. Our intention is not to replace the narratologic approach, but to complement it. We want to better understand what is the relationship with narrative and videogames; their similarities and differences."

(Gonzalo Frasca, 1999)

Frasca, Gonzalo (1999) 'Ludology Meets Narratology. Similitude and Differences between (Video)games and Narrative'. Originally published in Finnish in Parnasso 1999: 3, 365–71.

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The History of Choose Your Own Adventure Story Fiction

"Choose Your Own Adventure's 'you' centered decision making, and exciting pace, has been cited as an influence in numerous games and media that followed the series. Examples of Choose Your Own Adventure's reference in the gaming world includes Japan's popular Bishoujo video games, which combine narratives with gameplay and mark the beginning of 'the trend in modern gaming toward using technology to allow players control over their stories... taking on characteristics of highly detailed Choose Your Own Adventure novels,' Choose Your Own Adventure is credited with partial responsibility for the heightened popularity of Role Playing Games, including Dungeons and Dragons. Other games which have been referenced as inspired by Choose Your Own Adventure include Mass Effect II which has a narrative-based adaptive difficulty setting where potential gameplay is altered by a player's decision-making early in the game and FormSoft's Adventure Player, a portable memory stick for PlayStation that allows players to build narrative-based games. The Interactive Fiction community has also credited Choose Your Own Adventure as being a major influence of their works."

(Chooseco LLC)

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6th Annual International Conference on Computer Games Multimedia & Allied Technologies

"Annual International Conference on Computer Games, Multimedia and Allied Technology raises a platform for the Asian Gaming Community to realize, recognize, and reveal the technological interplay at work behind the immersive and compelling world of gaming. The conference mantles the experience, expertise, and technological know-how flowing in from academicians, researchers, and industry professionals and provides an apt platform for view and review.

The Conference Themes on Animation,Multimedia, IPTV, Edutainment, Mobile, Virtual Reality nunciating [sic] the evident convergence of technology while focusing on the differing facets of the gaming industry. The world of gaming is a result of numerous technologies, game tools and systems, the conference strives to discuss the technological advances, perspectives of future developments, and innovative applications while exploring the key concerns and issues related to Game security and Game regulations."

(Global Science & Technology Forum, Singapore)