An entertaining deep dive into the world, gameplay, and evolution of the hugely successful Assassin’s Creed video game franchiseA hooded figure stands in a bell tower overlooking medieval Jerusalem, surveying his prey. Parkour-style, he leaps down into the square to kill his target before vanishing into the crowd . . .Released in fall 2007, Assassin’s Creed transformed video gaming. Across more than a dozen franchise entries, players engag...

Communication and Control: Tools, Systems, and New Dimensions advocates a systems view of human communication in a time of intelligent, learning machines. This edited collection sheds new light on things as mundane yet still profoundly consequential (and seemingly “low-tech”) as push buttons, pagers, and telemarketing systems. Contributors also investigate aspects of “remote control” related to education, organizational design, artificial intelligence, cyberwarfare, drones, and even binge-...

"An original, fascinating scientific history of how human memory and a series of inventions have driven the advance of civilization" ( Kirkus , starred).Memory makes us human. No other animal carries in its brain so many memories of such complexity nor so regularly revisits those memories for happiness, safety, and the accomplishment of complex tasks. Human civilization continues because we are able to pass along memories ...

Recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the most popular MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) in videogame history, World of Warcraft is everywhere - from episodes of South Park and The Simpsons, to online series like Watch the Guild, accolades and awards from game critics, and prime-time commercials with Mr. T. Inevitably, such a cultural phenomenon triggers deeper questions. When does an assumed identity become r...

From two of the most acclaimed writers in the field today, a groundbreaking look at how SF and fantasy writing—and reading!****—work.Jo Walton and Ada Palmer are two of the most innovative and insightful writers to emerge in the SF and fantasy genres in this century. As writers of fiction they’ve each won multiple awards. As commenters on SF and fantasy in print and in visual media, they’ve both sparked new conversations that expanded our imaginations and understan...

A FASCINATING DEEP-DIVE FOR FANS OF WoW: Exploring the popular online role-playing game, World of Warcraft, as a virtual prototype of the real human future.World of Warcraft is more than a game. There is no ultimate goal, no winning hand, no princess to be rescued. WoW is an immersive virtual world in which characters must cope in a dangerous environment, assume identities, struggle to understand and communicate, learn to use tec...

Storytelling, a tradition that built human civilization, may soon destroy itHumans are storytelling animals. Stories are what make our societies possible. Countless books celebrate their virtues. But Jonathan Gottschall, an expert on the science of stories, argues that there is a dark side to storytelling we can no longer ignore. Storytelling, the very tradition that built human civilization, may be the thing that destroys it.In The Story Paradox, ...

Classic and cutting-edge writings on games, spanning nearly 50 years of game analysis and criticism, by game designers, game journalists, game fans, folklorists, sociologists, and media theorists.The Game Design Reader is a one-of-a-kind collection on game design and criticism, from classic scholarly essays to cutting-edge case studies. A companion work to Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman's textbook Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, The G...

Mark J.P. Wolf’s study of imaginary worlds theorizes world-building within and across media, including literature, comics, film, radio, television, board games, video games, the Internet, and more. Building Imaginary Worlds departs from prior approaches to imaginary worlds that focused mainly on narrative, medium, or genre, and instead considers imaginary worlds as dynamic entities in and of themselves. Wolf argues that imaginary worlds—which are often transnarrative, transmedial,...

Many of today's hottest selling games--both non-electronic and electronic--focus on such elements as shooting up as many bad guys as one can (Duke Nuk'em), beating the toughest level (Mortal Kombat), collecting all the cards (Pokemon), and scoring the most points (Tetris). Fantasy role-playing games (Dungeons & Dragons, Rolemaster, GURPS), while they may involve some of those aforementioned elements, rarely focus on them. Instead, playing a fantasy role-playing game is much like acting out...

WOULD YOU KILL ONE PERSON TO SAVE FIVE OTHERS?If you could upload all of your memories into a machine, would that machine be you? Is it possible we're all already artificial intelligences, living inside a simulation?These sound like questions from a philosophy class, but in fact they're from modern, popular video games. Philosophical discussion often uses thought experiments to consider ideas that we can't test in real life, and media like books, films, and...

A Next Big Idea Club "Must Read" for December 2023As all aspects of our social and informational lives increasingly migrate online, the line between what is "real" and what is digitally fabricated grows ever thinner—and that fake content has undeniable real-world consequences. A History of Fake Things on the Internet takes the long view of how advances in technology brought us to the point where faked texts, images, and video content are nearly indistingui...