You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This book argues that games offer a means of coming to terms with a world that is being transformed by digital technologies. As blends of software and fiction, videogames are uniquely capable of representing and exploring the effects of digitization on day-to-day life. By modeling and incorporating new technologies (from artificial intelligence routines and data mining techniques to augmented reality interfaces), and by dramatizing the implications of these technologies for understandings of identity, nationality, sexuality, health and work, games encourage us to playfully engage with these issues in ways that traditional media cannot.
None
None
Winner of the 2012 LAMBDA Literary Award for Best Lesbian Fiction and of the 2011 Rainbow Awards Ismail Boxwala made the worst mistake of his life one summer morning twenty years ago: he forgot his baby daughter in the back seat of his car. After his daughter’s tragic death, he struggles to continue living. A divorce, years of heavy drinking, and sex with strangers only leave him more alone and isolated. But Ismail’s story begins to change after he reluctantly befriends two women: Fatima, a young queer activist kicked out of her parents’ home; and Celia, his grieving Portuguese-Canadian neighbour who lives just six metres away. A slow-simmering romance develops between Ismail and Celia. Meanwhile, dangers lead Fatima to his doorstep. Each makes complicated demands of him, ones he is uncertain he can meet.
The World is Born From Zero is an investigation into the relationship between video games and science fiction through the philosophy of speculation. Cameron Kunzelman argues that the video game medium is centered on the evaluation and production of possible futures by following video game studies, media philosophy, and science fiction studies to their furthest reaches. Claiming that the best way to understand games is through rigorous formal analysis of their aesthetic strategies and the cultural context those strategies emerge from, Kunzelman investigates a diverse array of games like The Last of Us, VA-11 Hall-A, and Civilization VI in order to explore what science fiction video games can tell us about their genres, their ways of speculating, and how the medium of the video game does (or does not) direct us down experiential pathways that are both oppressive and liberatory. Taking a multidisciplinary look at these games, The World is Born From Zero offers a unique theorization of science fiction games that provides both science fiction studies and video game studies with new tools for thinking how this medium and mode inform each other.
This is a complete revision of the author's 1993 McFarland book Television Specials that not only updates entries contained within that edition, but adds numerous programs not previously covered, including beauty pageants, parades, awards programs, Broadway and opera adaptations, musicals produced especially for television, holiday specials (e.g., Christmas and New Year's Eve), the early 1936-1947 experimental specials, honors specials. In short, this is a reference work to 5,336 programs--the most complete source for television specials ever published.
“Seldom are we able to listen to the story of a school that has so greatly impacted world mission. As we contemplated how to record the first forty years of the School of World Mission, now School of Intercultural Studies, it was obvious that the best way was to capture the memory of one who lived it. While many of our faculty can claim deep root in the school, no one compares to Chuck Kraft who, apart from the first four years, has been a vital part of every development.” - C. Douglas McConnell, Dean, School of Intercultural Studies