Zoo Tycoon
Game
3 documents in the library are about Zoo Tycoon, from writers such as DiGRA and Frontier Developments. Each has a summary and key insights with the page they come from.
Connections
Each row is a game or company named alongside Zoo Tycoon, each column a document, oldest first. A mark means that document names it. Select a row to see those documents.
Documents about Zoo Tycoon
Zoos as Utopian Enclaves in Ark Nova
This paper analyses the economic board game Ark Nova (Wigge, 2022) and its portrayal of zoos as utopian enclaves, using a ludo-textual method that combines close reading of game mechanics with ecocriticism and critical utopian theory.
- The paper argues that Ark Nova departs from earlier zoo games like the Zoo Tycoon franchise and its board game adaptation, which frame zoos purely as profit-driven colonial-style entertainment parks, by presenting zoos as sites where capitalist pressures and conservation goals collide.
- Players in Ark Nova use two forms of capital, economic and ecological, and must balance ticket revenue against contributions to research and conservation in order to win.
- Animal cards are shuffled into the same deck as human cards such as scientists, treating human and nonhuman actors as functionally equal in construction and play, though animals still carry a capitalist ticket value.
Terribly Bored Lizards: Resonating with the Captive Animal in Jurassic World: Evolution
This document is a scholarly paper from the Proceedings of DiGRA 2024 that uses textual analysis and Animal Studies and Affect Studies approaches to examine how Jurassic World: Evolution (Frontier, 2018) represents captive animals.
- The paper argues that Jurassic World: Evolution (Frontier, 2018) uses constrained, repetitive park-management systems so that players grow bored with the dinosaurs rather than encountering them 'in themselves,' and it reads this monotony as a deliberate design choice that creates a space of 'resonance' with the nonhuman.
- Critics frequently described Evolution as repetitious and boring, noting that dinosaurs nap more often than they fight, escapes are routinised, and players must balance a narrow set of happiness parameters for animals and visitors.
- The author characterises the dinosaur as an ambivalent figure that resists Janski's typology of game animals as opponents, background assets, or resources, instead being simultaneously enemy, tool, actual animal, and speculative construction.
Frontier Developments Half Year Trading Update
Frontier Developments is currently executing a strategic transition from a traditional developer for external publishers to a self-publishing model supported by proprietary technology.
- Frontier Developments is transitioning to a self-publishing model, leading to a planned reduction in headline revenue and EBITDA for the six-month period ending 30 November 2013.
- The company maintains a stable financial position with over £11 million in cash to support its ongoing investment in internal intellectual property.
- Development of Elite: Dangerous has secured over £2.1 million in funding from more than 40,900 backers and has successfully launched Alpha Phase One.