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This book offers an overview of how conflicts are represented and enacted in games, in a variety of genres and game systems. Games are a cultural form apt at representing real world conflicts, and this edited volume highlights the intrinsic connection between games and conflict through a set of theoretical and empirical studies. It interrogates the nature and use of conflicts as a fundamental aspect of game design, and how a wide variety of conflicts can be represented in digital and analogue games. The book asks what we can learn from conflicts in games, how our understanding of conflicts change when we turn them into playful objects, and what types of conflicts are still not represented in games. It queries the way games make us think about armed conflict, and how games can help us understand such conflicts in new ways. Offering a deeper understanding of how games can serve political, pedagogical, or persuasive purposes, this volume will interest scholars and students working in fields such as game studies, media studies, and war studies.
In 2014, the UK science-fiction television series Black Mirror was released on Netflix worldwide, quickly becoming a hit with US audiences. Like other beloved British imports, this series piqued Americans' interest with hints of dark comedy, clever plotlines, and six-episode seasons that left audiences frantic for more. In Transatlantic Television Drama, volume editors Michele Hilmes, Matt Hills, and Roberta Pearson team up with leading scholars in TV studies and transnational television to look at how serial dramas like Black Mirror captivate US audiences, and what this reveals about the ways Americans and Brits relate to each other on and off the screen. Focusing on production strategies, ...
Even a global political watershed, such as the end of the Cold War, seems to have left a fundamental characteristic of cultural relations between the US and the rest of the world unchanged: American popular culture still stirs up emotion. American popular culture's products, artifacts, and practices entangle their consumers in affective encounters characterized by feelings of fascination, excitement, or even wholesale rejection. What is it that continues to make 'American' popular culture 'cool?' Which role does 'cool' play in the consumers' affective encounters with 'America?' This volume of essays offers new insights on the post-Cold War dissemination of American popular culture, exploring the manifold ways in which 'cool' has emerged as an elusive, yet determining, factor of an American culture gone global. (Series: American Studies in Austria - Vol. 13)
Artificial intelligence (AI) is rarely out of the news or the public imagination. Images of red-eyed Terminators illustrate press accounts of incremental advances in medical diagnosis, facial recognition, natural language processing, and robotics. Such advances are transforming society through measurable impacts on people’s decisions and opportunities. Religion and Artificial Intelligence: An Introduction explores an emerging field with a religious studies approach, drawing on cultural and digital anthropological methods to demonstrate the entanglements of religion and AI, our imaginaries of these objects and our ideas about their utopian or dystopian futures. It addresses key topics, incl...
Digital Religion: The Basics explores how digital media and internet platforms are transforming religious practice in a digital age and the impact this has had on religious culture in contemporary society. Through exploring six defining characteristics of how religion is acted out online, including multisite reality, convergence practice, networked community, storied identity, shifting authority, and experiential authenticity, the book considers how digital religion both shapes, and is influenced by, religion offline. Questions asked include: How is religion being performed and reimagined through digital media and cultures? In what ways do the practices of religion online merge or correspond with shifts in perspective taking place in offline religious practice? How do the key findings of religion online reflect broader social, cultural, and structural practices observed within mobile, networked society? With case studies and further readings, Digital Religion: The Basics is a must-read for students wanting to come to grips with how religion is changing and experienced through digital media.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the European Conference on Information Literacy, ECIL 2014, held in Dubrovnik, Croatia, in October 2014. The 93 revised full papers presented together with two keynotes and one invited paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 283 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on theoretical framework; related concepts; research; rights and ethics; children; higher education; education and instruction; assessment and evaluation; libraries; different aspects.
This volume brings together a number of scholars from a variety of disciplines to examine the phenomenon of the transformation of Poland within the context of regional and global power relations, focusing in particular on analyses of the country’s political and social development within the area of transatlantic relations. It provides a distinct view on the current dynamics and future perspectives of the transatlantic alliance. At a time when the story of Poland as the shining example of post-Communist success and European integration has been interrupted, several other leading narratives of the Western world also appear to be in danger: western values cannot be considered to be universal,...
This edited collection brings in multiple scholarly perspectives to examine the impact of the pandemic and resulting government policies, especially lockdowns, on one particular cultural sphere: games. The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted virtually every aspect of our lives, regardless of where we live. In the initial months, many industry reports noted the unexpected positive impact on online digital game sales. Games were not just lockdown-proof, but boosted by lockdowns. Stay-at-home orders triggered a rush toward games as an alternative form of entertainment, and the ubiquity of mobile phones allowed wider than ever participation. Gaming and Gamers in Times of Pandemic studies how the COVID-19 pandemic affected game players, game developers, game journalists and game scholars alike in many other ways, starting with the most direct – illness, and sometimes death. Some effects are temporary, others are here to stay.