The video game industry has evolved. What was at first hobbyists working in their spare time in school labs or converted garages has grown into veteran specialists working in high-rise offices and multimillion-dollar studios. Some of these professionals came from those early days of video game development, but many emerged from other disciplines, including traditional game design, art, software programming, film animation, screenwriting, engineering, music production, and many more. Each of them brought along their own languagea collection of terms and definitions relevant to their fieldwhich filtered in and out of the industry as they did. Games continued tochange and so did the way we talked about them. Confusion inevitably arose as each discipline had, up until then, been largely independent and therefore had its own unique vocabulary. For example, what was known as value by an artist would have beencalled brightness by a programmer (to whom value meant something else entirely). Theme had a different meaning to a game designer than it did to a writer. A common language had not, and still has not,developed; yet in order for the members of any multidisciplinary venture to communicate efficiently, it must. THE GAME DEVELOPERS DICTIONARY is the first attempt to collect the terms and phrases usedwithin all avenues of game development, and define them, with hundreds of definitions covering gameart, design, programming, production, writing, and sound. Terms are categorized alphabetically andby discipline so that entries can be accessed quickly and easily. The book emphasizes creating an understanding between the game development disciplines great care has been exercised to define termsin ways that someone outside the related area of expertise can easily grasp. A survey of