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The Rule Book
How games are built on the foundations of rules, and how rules—of which there are only five kinds—really work. Board games to sports, digital games to party games, gambling to role-playing games. They all share one thing in common: rules. Indeed, rules are the one and only thing game scholars agree is central to games. But what, in fact, are rules? In The Rule Book, Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola explore how different kinds of rules work as building blocks of games. Rules are constraints placed on us while we play, carving a limited possibility space for us. They also inject meaning into our play: without rules there is no queen in chess, no ball in Pong, and no hole in one in golf. S...
The Beauty of Games
How games create beauty and meaning, and how we can use them to explore the aesthetics of thought. Are games art? This question is a dominant mode of thinking about games and play in the twenty-first century, but it is fundamentally the wrong question. Instead, Frank Lantz proposes in his provocative new book, The Beauty of Games, that we think about games and how they create meaning through the lens of the aesthetic. We should think of games, he writes, the same way we think about literature, theater, or music—as a form that ranges from deep and profound to easy and disposable, and everything in between. Games are the aesthetic form of interactive systems, a set of possibilities connected by rules of cause and effect. In this book, Lantz analyzes games from chess to poker to tennis to understand how games create beauty and evoke a deeper meaning. He suggests that we think of games not only as hyper-modern objects but also as forms within the ancient context of artistic production, encompassing all of the nebulous and ephemeral qualities of the aesthetic experience.
Constant Disconnection
The weight of constant digital connection is the default condition of working life, home life, and everyday personal life – driving us to engage more with platforms than with people, a new state of constant disconnection that we cannot escape. Overflowing email inboxes, deluges of mobile phone notifications and torrents of social media posts—the flow of communication in its abundance is today's individualized interface for interpersonal and professional practices. Communication technologies and their use are both the needle and the thread of the wider social tapestry of everyday contemporary life. This ever-changing communication environment is where the neoliberal economic policies of t...
The Grounds of Gaming
How do we make space for video games in the places where we live, work, and play—and who is allowed to feel welcome there? Despite attempts to expand games beyond their conventional audience of young men, the physical contexts of gameplay and production remain off-limits and unsafe for so many. The Grounds of Gaming explores the physical places where games are played and how they contribute to the persistence of gaming's problematic politics. Drawing on fieldwork in an array of sites, author Nicholas Taylor explores the real-world settings where games are played, watched, discussed and designed. Sometimes these places are sticky, dark, and stinky; other times they are pristine and well appointed. Situating its chapters in such scenes as domestic gaming setups, campus computer labs, LAN parties, esports arenas, and convention centers, Taylor maps the infrastructural connections between games, place, masculinity, and whiteness. By inviting us to reconsider gaming's cultural politics from the ground up, The Grounds of Gaming offers new theoretical insights and practical resources regarding how to make game cultures and industries more inclusive.
Fantasies of Virtual Reality
The fantasies that underpin common perceptions of Virtual Reality—and what we need to know about VR’s potential risks as well as its opportunities. Virtual reality is the next new frontier for Silicon Valley. Mark Zuckerberg, who has overseen Meta’s investment of billions into VR, pitches it as the next dominant computing paradigm. More than just a gaming technology, VR is top of mind for academics, tech reportage, and industry evangelists who all see the potential for VR to revolutionize fields such as education and health, as well as the way we work and communicate. But will VR achieve all this? In Fantasies of Virtual Reality, Marcus Carter and Ben Egliston strip bare the tech indus...
Mediating Misogyny
Mediating Misogyny is a collection of original academic essays that foregrounds the intersection of gender, technology, and media. Framed and informed by feminist theory, the book offers empirical research and nuanced theoretical analysis about the gender-based harassment women experience both online and offline. The contributors of this volume provide information on the ways feminist activists are using digital tools to combat harassment, raise awareness, and organize for social and political change across the globe. Lastly, the book provides practical resources and tips to help students, educators, institutions, and researchers stop online harassment.
Ethics of Virtual Reality
In this book, Michael Grabowski draws on established theories of ethics to consider critical questions surrounding the growing adoption of virtual reality (VR) technologies. These questions include who should control and have access to VR, its impact on privacy, its potential for misrepresentation and bias, and how to provide a platform for free expression while mitigating harassment and abuse. Grabowski examines use cases of other digital technologies, including social media and artificial intelligence, to examine who is helped and harmed by the widespread implementation of VR and how it might transform existing institutions, social relationships, and communication. Finally, Grabowski forecasts the possible futures of VR and what limits, if any, should be placed on representing the real world or imagining new ones. Scholars of media studies, technology studies, communication, and ethics will find this book of particular interest.
Technology and Literature
Whereas previous books have explored how literature depicts or discusses scientific concepts, this book argues that literature is a technology. It shows how literature has been shaped by technological revolutions, and reveals the essential work that literature has done in helping to uncover the consequences of new technologies. Individual chapters focus on how specific literary technologies – the development of writing, the printing press, typewriters, the computer – changed the kinds of stories it was possible to tell, and how one could tell them. They also cover the way that literature has engaged with non-literary technologies – clocks, compasses, trains, telegraphs, cameras, bombs, computer networks – to help its readers to work through the new social configurations and new possibilities for human identity and imagination that they unveil. Human life is inescapably mediated through technology; literature demonstrates this, and thus helps its readers to engage consciously and actively with their technological worlds.
Run and Jump
How abstract design decisions in 2D platform games create rich worlds of meaning for players. Since the 1980s, 2D platform games have captivated their audiences. Whether the player scrambles up the ladders in Donkey Kong or leaps atop an impossibly tall pipe in Super Mario Bros., this deceptively simple visual language has persisted in our cultural imagination of video games. In Run and Jump, Peter McDonald surveys the legacy of 2D platform games and examines how abstract and formal design choices have kept players playing. McDonald argues that there is a rich layer of meaning underneath, say, the quality of an avatar’s movement, the pacing and rhythm of level design, the personalities exp...
Moments of Valuation
The outcome of innovation processes are determined by complex, historically grown valuation practices. In this book, a wide range of innovations are taken into consideration, from small inventions like entertainment novelties to large societal changes through new technologies. The chapters observe the particular local or distributed sites in which their episodes of innovation take place, and they identify the initial dissonance among those judging a newly proposed alternative. The emphasis of the inquiry, however, is on the practices of valuation that are at work when something succeeds in being "new". The authors represent a wide variety of sub-disciplines and national backgrounds in the so...
