8 1. Introduction
ment team, the marketing department (or a team that liaises with an external
marketing group), administrative staff , and the IT department, whose job is
to purchase, install, and confi gure hardware and soft ware for the team and to
provide technical support.1.1.6. Publishers and Studios
The marketing, manufacture, and distribution of a game title are usually
handled by a publisher, not by the game studio itself. A publisher is typically
a large corporation, like Electronic Arts, THQ, Vivendi, Sony, Nintendo, etc.
Many game studios are not affi liated with a particular publisher. They sell
each game that they produce to whichever publisher strikes the best deal with
them. Other studios work exclusively with a single publisher, either via a long-
term publishing contract, or as a fully owned subsidiary of the publishing
company. For example, THQ’s game studios are independently managed, but
they are owned and ultimately controlled by THQ. Electronic Arts takes this
relationship one step further, by directly managing its studios. First-party de-
velopers are game studios owned directly by the console manufacturers (Sony,
Nintendo, and Microsoft ). For example, Naughty Dog is a fi rst-party Sony
developer. These studios produce games exclusively for the gaming hardware
manufactured by their parent company.1.2 What Is a Game?
We probably all have a prett y good intuitive notion of what a game is. The
general term “game” encompasses board games like chess and Monopoly, card
games like poker and blackjack, casino games like roulett e and slot machines,
military war games, computer games, various kinds of play among children,
and the list goes on. In academia we sometimes speak of “game theory,” in
which multiple agents select strategies and tactics in order to maximize their
gains within the framework of a well-defi ned set of game rules. When used
in the context of console or computer-based entertainment, the word “game”
usually conjures images of a three-dimensional virtual world featuring a hu-
manoid, animal, or vehicle as the main character under player control. (Or for
the old geezers among us, perhaps it brings to mind images of two-dimen-
sional classics like Pong, Pac-Man, or Donkey Kong.) In his excellent book, A
Theory of Fun for Game Design, Raph Koster defi nes a “game” to be an inter-
active experience that provides the player with an increasingly challenging
sequence of patt erns which he or she learns and eventually masters [26]. Ko-
ster’s assertion is that the activities of learning and mastering are at the heart