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A potent new book examines the overlap between our ecological crisis and video games Video games may be fun and immersive diversions from daily life, but can they go beyond the realm of entertainment to do something serious—like help us save the planet? As one of the signature issues of the twenty-first century, ecological deterioration is seemingly everywhere, but it is rarely considered via the realm of interactive digital play. In Playing Nature, Alenda Y. Chang offers groundbreaking methods for exploring this vital overlap. Arguing that games need to be understood as part of a cultural response to the growing ecological crisis, Playing Nature seeds conversations around key environmenta...
Mesocosm -- Scale -- Nonhuman -- Entropy -- Collapse.
Sustainable Media explores the many ways that media and environment are intertwined from the exploitation of natural and human resources during media production to the installation and disposal of media in the landscape; from people’s engagement with environmental issues in film, television, and digital media to the mediating properties of ecologies themselves. Edited by Nicole Starosielski and Janet Walker, the assembled chapters expose how the social and representational practices of media culture are necessarily caught up with technologies, infrastructures, and environments.Through in-depth analyses of media theories, practices, and objects including cell phone towers, ecologically-themed video games, Geiger counters for registering radiation, and sound waves traveling through the ocean, contributors question the sustainability of the media we build, exchange, and inhabit and chart emerging alternatives for media ecologies.
"Alternative Historiographies of the Digital Humanities examines the process of history in the narrative of the digital humanities and deconstructs its history as a straight line from the beginnings of humanities computing. By discussing alternatives histories of the digital humanities that address queer gaming, feminist game studies praxis, Cold War military-industrial complex computation, the creation of the environmental humanities, monolingual discontent in DH, the hidden history of DH in English studies, radical media praxis, cultural studies and DH, indigenous futurities, Pacific Rim post-colonial DH, the issue of scale and DH, the radical, indigenous, feminist histories of the digital database, and the possibilities for an antifascist DH, this collection hopes to re-set discussions of the DH straight, white origin myths. Thus, this collection hopes to reexamine the silences in such a straight and white masculinist history and how power comes into play to shape this straight, white DH narrative."--Page 4 of cover
From catastrophe to utopia, the most comprehensive survey yet of how literature can speak to the 'Anthropocene'.
In our unprecedentedly networked world, games have come to occupy an important space in many of our everyday lives. Digital games alone engage an estimated 2.5 billion people worldwide as of 2020, and other forms of gaming, such as board games, role playing, escape rooms, and puzzles, command an ever-expanding audience. At the same time, “gamification”—the application of game mechanics to traditionally nongame spheres, such as personal health and fitness, shopping, habit tracking, and more—has imposed unprecedented levels of competition, repetition, and quantification on daily life. Drawing from his own experience as a game designer, Patrick Jagoda argues that games need not be synon...
A thought-provoking analysis of wandering within different game worlds, viewed through the lenses of work, colonialism, gender, and death—with examples from The Last of Us Part II and others. Wandering in games can be a theme, a formal mode, an aesthetic metaphor, or a player action. It can mean walking, escaping, traversing, meandering, or returning. In this book, game studies scholar Melissa Kagen introduces the concept of “wandering games,” exploring the uses of wandering in a variety of game worlds. She shows how the much-derided Walking Simulator—a term that began as an insult, a denigration of games that are less violent, less task-oriented, or less difficult to complete—semi...
"Ever since the creators of the animated television show South Park turned their lovingly sardonic gaze on the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft for an entire episode, WoW's status as an icon of digital culture has been secure. My Life as a Night Elf Priest digs deep beneath the surface of that icon to explore the rich particulars of the World of Warcraft player's experience." —Julian Dibbell, Wired "World of Warcraft is the best representative of a significant new technology, art form, and sector of society: the theme-oriented virtual world. Bonnie Nardi's pioneering transnational ethnography explores this game both sensitively and systematically using the methods of cul...
This book traces the history of threats to species and habitat in California, from the time of the Gold Rush to the present. The author shows how, over the course of more than a century, scientists and conservationists came to view the fates of endangered species as dependent on the ecological conditions and human activities in the places where those species lived. The story begins with the tale of the state's extinct mascot, the California grizzly, and the conservation movements and laws that followed its disappearance. The second half of the book focuses on four high-profile endangered species: the California condor, the desert tortoise, the San Joaquin kit fox, and the Delta smelt. The author offers an account of how Americans developed a civil system in which imperiled species serve as proxies for broader conflicts about the politics of place. The book concludes that the challenge for conservationists in the twenty-first century will be to expand habitat conservation beyond protected wildlands to build more diverse and sustainable landscapes.
Illustrates artistic expressions made with an emphasis on videogames. Text in English and Italian.