Through the Looking Glass
Game
2 documents in the library are about Through the Looking Glass, from writers such as DiGRA and Thomas Brush. Each has a summary and key insights with the page they come from.
Connections
Each row is a game or company named alongside Through the Looking Glass, each column a document, oldest first. A mark means that document names it. Select a row to see those documents.
Documents about Through the Looking Glass
Thomas Brush62 min
Want To Make Games? Here's 1 Hour Of Brutal Honesty From A Game Dev Legend (American McGee)
The production of high-end interactive media requires a delicate balance between artistic vision and rigid financial constraints.
- Large-scale game production, such as 'Alice: Madness Returns,' often relies on a core team of fewer than 10 stellar programmers to handle complex technical challenges like hair physics, while the remaining staff focuses on integration and cleanup.
- Production of 'Alice: Madness Returns' involved a total team of approximately 300 people, consisting of 100 internal studio staff and 200 external contractors dedicated to art asset production.
- Publishers may structure development deals to keep spending off their financial books by delaying the booking of costs until the moment a game is delivered and a bond is repaid, effectively making the development process invisible to shareholders during production.
Thomas BrushNov 2025
Whitepaper8 pages
Through the Looking Glass: Weavings between the Magic Circle and Immersive Processes in Video Games
The paper contends that the "magic circle," the widely used concept from Huizinga and Salen and Zimmerman for describing the boundary between play and everyday life, should be understood as a graded cognitive mediation structure rather than a rigid barrier.
- The 'magic circle' boundary between play and everyday life should be understood as a graded cognitive mediation structure rather than a rigid barrier, with the boundary solidifying as immersion deepens.
- The authors use Juul's two axes (rules and fiction versus players' social practices) to argue that rules and fiction compete asymmetrically for player attention during play.
- Immersion is modeled as a staged process tied to Parasuraman's three attentional functions (selection, vigilance, and control), alternating between operational immersion, where rules drive selective attention, and narrative immersion, where fiction sustains it.
DiGRAJan 2009