Katherine Isbister: 3 books

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...

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...

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 c