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Gameworld Interfaces
by Kristine JørgensenComputer games usually take one of two approaches to presenting game information to players. A game might offer information naturalistically, as part of the game's imaginary universe; or it might augment the world of the game with overlays, symbols, and menus. In this book, Kristine Jørgensen investigates both kinds of gameworld interfaces. She shows that although the naturalistic approach may appear more integral to the imaginary world of the game, both the invisible and visible interfaces effectively present information that players need in order to interact with the game and its rules. The symbolic, less naturalistic approach would seem to conflict with the idea of a coherent, autonomous fictional universe; but, Jørgensen argues, gameworlds are not governed by the pursuit of fictional coherence but by the logics of game mechanics. This is characteristic of gameworlds and distinguishes them from other traditional fictional worlds. Jørgensen investigates gameworld interfaces from the perspectives of both game designers and players. She draws on interviews with the design teams of Harmonix Music (producer of Rock Band and other music games) and Turbine Inc. (producer of such massively multiplayer online games as Lord of the Rings Online), many hours of gameplay, and extensive interviews and observations of players. The player studies focus on four games representing different genres: Crysis, Command & Conquer 3: Tiberian Wars, The Sims 2, and Diablo 2. Finally, she presents a theory of game user interfaces and considers the implications of this theory for game design.
Distributed Algorithms: An Intuitive Approach
by Wan FokkinkThis book offers students and researchers a guide to distributed algorithms that emphasizes examples and exercises rather than the intricacies of mathematical models. It avoids mathematical argumentation, often a stumbling block for students, teaching algorithmic thought rather than proofs and logic. This approach allows the student to learn a large number of algorithms within a relatively short span of time. Algorithms are explained through brief, informal descriptions, illuminating examples, and practical exercises. The examples and exercises allow readers to understand algorithms intuitively and from different perspectives. Proof sketches, arguing the correctness of an algorithm or explaining the idea behind fundamental results, are also included. An appendix offers pseudocode descriptions of many algorithms.Distributed algorithms are performed by a collection of computers that send messages to each other or by multiple software threads that use the same shared memory. The algorithms presented in the book are for the most part "classics," selected because they shed light on the algorithmic design of distributed systems or on key issues in distributed computing and concurrent programming. Distributed Algorithms can be used in courses for upper-level undergraduates or graduate students in computer science, or as a reference for researchers in the field.
A Composer's Guide to Game Music
by Winifred PhillipsMusic in video games is often a sophisticated, complex composition that serves toengage the player, set the pace of play, and aid interactivity. Composers of video game music mustmaster an array of specialized skills not taught in the conservatory, including the creation oflinear loops, music chunks for horizontal resequencing, and compositional fragments for use within agenerative framework. In A Composer's Guide to Game Music, Winifred Phillips --herself an award-winning composer of video game music -- provides a comprehensive, practical guidethat leads an aspiring video game composer from acquiring the necessary creative skills tounderstanding the function of music in games to finding work in the field. Musicians and composersmay be drawn to game music composition because the game industry is a multibillion-dollar,employment-generating economic powerhouse, but, Phillips writes, the most important qualificationfor a musician who wants to become a game music composer is a love of video games. Phillips offersdetailed coverage of essential topics, including musicianship and composition experience; immersion;musical themes; music and game genres; workflow; working with a development team; linear music;interactive music, both rendered and generative; audio technology, from mixers and preamps tosoftware; and running a business. A Composer's Guide to Game Music offersindispensable guidance for musicians and composers who want to deploy their creativity in a dynamicand growing industry, protect their musical identities while working in a highly technical field,and create great music within the constraints of a new medium.
Financial Modeling (3rd Edition)
by Simon BenningaToo often, finance courses stop short of making a connection between textbook finance and the problems of real-world business. Financial Modeling bridges this gap between theory and practice by providing a nuts-and-bolts guide to solving common financial models with spreadsheets. Simon Benninga takes the reader step by step through each model, showing how it can be solved using Microsoft Excel. The long-awaited third edition of this standard text maintains the "cookbook" features and Excel dependence that have made the first and second editions so popular. It also offers significant new material, with new chapters covering such topics as bank valuation, the Black-Litterman approach to portfolio optimization, Monte Carlo methods and their applications to option pricing, and using array functions and formulas. Other chapters, including those on basic financial calculations, portfolio models, calculating the variance-covariance matrix,and generating random numbers, have been revised, with many offering substantially new and improved material. Other areas covered include financial statement modeling, leasing, standard portfolio problems, value at risk (VaR), real options, duration and immunization, and term structure modeling. Technical chapters treat such topics as data tables, matrices, the Gauss-Seidel method, and tips for using Excel. The last section of the text covers the Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) techniques needed for the book. The accompanying CD contains Excel worksheets and solutions to end-of-chapter exercises.
Participatory IT Design: Designing for Business and Workplace Realities
by Keld Bodker Finn Kensing Jesper SimonsenThe goal of participatory IT design is to set sensible, general, and workable guidelines for the introduction of new information technology systems into an organization. Reflecting the latest systems-development research, this book encourages a business- oriented and socially sensitive approach that takes into consideration the specific organizational context as well as first-hand knowledge of users' work practices and allows all stakeholders--users, management, and staff--to participate in the process. Participatory IT Designis a guide to the theory and practice of this process that can be used as a reference work by IT professionals and as a textbook for classes in information technology at introductory through advanced levels. Drawing on the work of a ten-year research program in which the authors worked with Danish and American companies, the book offers a framework for carrying out IT design projects as well as case studies that stand as examples of the process. The method presented in Participatory IT Design--known as the MUST method, after a Danish acronym for theories and methods of initial analysis and design activities--was developed and tested in thirteen industrial design projects for companies and organizations that included an American airline, a multinational pharmaceutical company, a national broadcasting corporation, a multinational software house, and American and Danish universities. The first part of the book introduces the concepts and guidelines on which the method is based, while the second and third parts are designed as a practical toolbox for utilizing the MUST method. Part II describes the four phases of a design project--initiation, in-line analysis, in-depth analysis, and innovation. Part III explains the method's sixteen techniques and related representation tools, offering first an overview and then specific descriptions of each in separate sections.
How Images Think
by Ron BurnettDigital images are an integral part of all media, including television, film, photography, animation, video games, data visualization, and the Internet. In the digital world, spectators become navigators wending their way through a variety of interactive experiences, and images become spaces of visualization with more and more intelligence programmed into the very fabric of communication processes. In How Images Think, Ron Burnett explores this new ecology, which has transformed the relationships humans have with the image-based technologies they have created. So much intelligence has been programmed into these image-dependent technologies that it often seems as if images are "thinking"; ascribing thought to machines redefines our relationship with them and enlarges our ideas about body and mind. Burnett argues that the development of this new, closely interdependent relationship marks a turning point in our understanding of the connections between humans and machines. After presenting an overview of visual perception, Burnett examines the interactive modes of new technologies -- including computer games, virtual reality, digital photography, and film -- and locates digital images in a historical context. He argues that virtual images occupy a "middle space," combining the virtual and the real into an environment of visualization that blurs the distinctions between subject and object -- part of a continuum of experiences generated by creative choices by viewers, the results of which cannot be attributed either to images or to participants.
Understanding The Digital Economy: Data, Tools, and Research
by Erik Brynjolfsson Brian KahinThe rapid growth of electronic commerce, along with changes in information, computing, and communications, is having a profound effect on the United States economy. President Clinton recently directed the National Economic Council, in consultation with executive branch agencies, to analyze the economic implications of the Internet and electronic commerce domestically and internationally, and to consider new types of data collection and research that could be undertaken by public and private organizations. This book contains work presented at a conference held by executive branch agencies in May 1999 at the Department of Commerce. The goals of the conference were to assess current research on the digital economy, to engage the private sector in developing the research that informs investment and policy decisions, and to promote better understanding of the growth and socioeconomic implications of information technology and electronic commerce. Aspects of the digital economy addressed include macroeconomic assessment, organizational change, small business, access, market structure and competition, and employment and the workforce.
An Introduction to Distributed Algorithms
by Valmir C. BarbosaAn Introduction to Distributed Algorithms takes up some of the main concepts and algorithms, ranging from basic to advanced techniques and applications, that underlie the programming of distributed-memory systems such as computer networks, networks of workstations, and multiprocessors. Written from the broad perspective of distributed-memory systems in general it includes topics such as algorithms for maximum flow, program debugging, and simulation that do not appear in more orthodox texts on distributed algorithms. Moving from fundamentals to advances and applications, ten chapters--with exercises and bibliographic notes--cover a variety of topics. These include models of distributed computation, information propagation, leader election, distributed snapshots, network synchronization, self- stability, termination detection, deadlock detection, graph algorithms, mutual exclusion, program debugging, and simulation. All of the algorithms are presented in a clear, template- based format for the description of message-passing computations among the nodes of a connected graph. Such a generic setting allows the treatment of problems originating from many different application areas. The main ideas and algorithms are described in a way that balances intuition and formal rigor--most are preceded by a general intuitive discussion and followed by formal statements as to correctness complexity or other properties.
Connected Play: Tweens in a Virtual World
by Yasmin B. Kafai Deborah A. FieldsMillions of children visit virtual worlds every day. In such virtual play spaces as Habbo Hotel, Toontown, and Whyville, kids chat with friends from school, meet new people, construct avatars, and earn and spend virtual currency. In "Connected Play," Yasmin Kafai and Deborah Fields investigate what happens when kids play in virtual worlds, how this matters for their offline lives, and what this means for the design of educational opportunities in digital worlds. Play is fundamentally important for kids development, but, Kafai and Fields argue, to understand play in virtual worlds, we need to connect concerns of development and culture with those of digital media and learning. Kafai and Fields do this through a detailed study of kids play in Whyville, a massive, informal virtual world with educational content for tween players. Combining ethnographic accounts with analysis of logfile data, they present rich portraits and overviews of how kids learn to play in a digital domain, developing certain technological competencies; how kids learn to play well -- responsibly, respectfully, and safely; and how kids learn to play creatively, creating content that becomes a part of the virtual world itself.
Beyond Choices
by Miguel SicartToday's blockbuster video games -- and their never-ending sequels, sagas, and reboots -- provide plenty of excitement in high-resolution but for the most part fail to engage a player's moral imagination. In Beyond Choices, Miguel Sicart calls for a new generation of video and computer games that are ethically relevant by design. In the 1970s, mainstream films -- including The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, Raging Bull, and Taxi Driver -- filled theaters but also treated their audiences as thinking beings. Why can't mainstream video games have the same moral and aesthetic impact? Sicart argues that it is time for games to claim their place in the cultural landscape as vehicles for ethical reflection.Sicart looks at games in many manifestations: toys, analog games, computer and video games, interactive fictions, commercial entertainments, and independent releases. Drawing on philosophy, design theory, literary studies, aesthetics, and interviews with game developers, Sicart provides a systematic account of how games can be designed to challenge and enrich our moral lives. After discussing such topics as definition of ethical gameplay and the structure of the game as a designed object, Sicart offers a theory of the design of ethical game play. He also analyzes the ethical aspects of game play in a number of current games, including Spec Ops: The Line, Beautiful Escape: Dungeoneer, Fallout New Vegas, and Anna Anthropy's Dys4Ia. Games are designed to evoke specific emotions; games that engage players ethically, Sicart argues, enable us to explore and express our values through play.
Collaborative Media: Production, Consumption, and Design Interventions
by Jonas Löwgren Bo ReimerWith many new forms of digital media--including such popular social media as Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr -- the people formerly known as the audience no longer only consume but also produce and even design media. Jonas L'wgren and Bo Reimer term this phenomenon collaborative media, and in this book they investigate the qualities and characteristics of these forms of media in terms of what they enable people to do. They do so through an interdisciplinary research approach that combines the social sciences and humanities traditions of empirical and theoretical work with practice-based, design-oriented interventions. L'wgren and Reimer offer analysis and a series of illuminating case studies -- examples of projects in collaborative media that range from small multidisciplinary research experiments to commercial projects used by millions of people. L'wgren and Reimer discuss the case studies at three levels of analysis: society and the role of collaborative media in societal change; institutions and the relationship of collaborative media with established media structures; and tribes, the nurturing of small communities within a large technical infrastructure. They conclude by advocating an interventionist turn within social analysis and media design.
The Civic Web: Young People, the Internet and Civic Participation
by Shakuntala Banaji David BuckinghamThere has been widespread concern in contemporary Western societies about declining engagement in civic life; people are less inclined to vote, to join political parties, to campaign for social causes, or to trust political processes. Young people in particular are frequently described as alienated or apathetic. Some have looked optimistically to new media -- and particularly the Internet -- as a means of revitalizing civic life and democracy. Governments, political parties, charities, NGOs, activists, religious and ethnic groups, and grassroots organizations have created a range of youth-oriented websites that encourage widely divergent forms of civic engagement and use varying degrees of interactivity. But are young people really apathetic and lacking in motivation? Does the Internet have the power to re-engage those disenchanted with politics and civic life? Based on a major research project funded by the European Commission, this book attempts to understand the role of the Internet in promoting young peoples participation. Examples are drawn from Hungary, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, and the United Kingdom -- countries offering contrasting political systems and cultural contexts. The book also addresses broader questions about the meaning of civic engagement, the nature of new forms of participation, and their implications for the future of civic life.
Scripting Reading Motions: The Codex and the Computer as Self-Reflexive Machines
by Manuel PortelaIn Scripting Reading Motions, Manuel Portela explores theexpressive use of book forms and programmable media in experimental works of both print andelectronic literature and finds a self-conscious play with the dynamics of reading and writing. Portela examines a series of print and digital works by Johanna Drucker, Mark Z. Danielewski, RuiTorres, Jim Andrews, and others, for the insights they yield about the semiotic and interpretiveactions through which readers produce meaning when interacting with codes. Analyzing these works asembodiments and simulations of the motions of reading, Portela pays particular attention to the waysin which awareness of eye movements and haptic interactions in both print and electronic media feedsback onto the material and semantic layers of the works. These feedbacks, he argues, sustainself-reflexive loops that link the body of the reader to the embodied work. Readers' haptic actionsand eye movements coinstantiate the object that they are reading. Porteladiscusses typographic and graphic marks as choreographic notations for reading movements; examinesdigital recreations of experimental print literary artifacts; considers reading motions in kineticand generated texts; analyzes the relationship of bibliographic, linguistic, and narrative coding inDanielewski's novel-poem, Only Revolutions; and describes emergent meanings ininteractive textual instruments. The expressive use of print and programmable media, Portela shows,offers a powerful model of the semiotic, interpretive, and affective operations embodied in readingprocesses.
Relive: Media Art Histories
by Sean Cubitt Paul ThomasIn "Relive," leading historians of the media arts grapple with this dilemma: how can we speak of "new media" and at the same time write the histories of these arts? These scholars and practitioners redefine the nature of the field, focusing on the materials of history -- the materials through which the past is mediated. Drawing on the tools of media archaeology and the history and philosophy of media, they propose a new materialist media art history. The contributors consider the idea of history and the artwork's moment in time; the intersection of geography and history in regional practice, illustrated by examples from eastern Europe, Australia, and New Zealand; the contradictory scales of evolution, life cycles, and bodily rhythms in bio art; and the history of the future -- how the future has been imagined, planned for, and established as a vector throughout the history of new media arts. These essays, written from widely diverse critical perspectives, capture a dynamic field at a moment of productive ferment. ContributorsSusan Ballard, Brogan Bunt, Andr's Burbano, Jon Cates, John Conomos, Martin Constable, Sean Cubitt, Francesca Franco, Darko Fritz, Zhang Ga, Monika Gorska-Olesinska, Ross Harley, Jens Hauser, Stephen Jones, Douglas Kahn, Ryszard W. Kluszczynski, Caroline Seck Langill, Leon Marvell, Rudy Rucker, Edward A. Shanken, Stelarc, Adele Tan, Paul Thomas, Darren Tofts, Joanna Walewska
Aesthetics of Interaction in Digital Art
by Katja Kwastek Niamh WardeSince the 1960s, artworks that involve the participation of the spectator have received extensive scholarly attention. Yet interactive artworks using digital media still present a challenge for academic art history. In this book, Katja Kwastek argues that the particular aesthetic experience enabled by these new media works can open up new perspectives for our understanding of art and media alike. Kwastek, herself an art historian, offers a set of theoretical and methodological tools that are suitable for understanding and analyzing not only new media art but also other contemporary art forms. Addressing both the theoretician and the practitioner, Kwastek provides an introduction to the history and the terminology of interactive art, a theory of the aesthetics of interaction, and exemplary case studies of interactive media art. Kwastek lays the historical and theoretical groundwork with discussions of processual strategies of twentieth-century art and theories of aesthetic experience, process aesthetics, play, and performance. She then develops an aesthetics of interaction, discussing such aspects as real space and data space, temporal structures, instrumental and phenomenal perspectives, and the relationship between materiality and interpretability. Finally, she applies her theory to specific works of interactive media art, including narratives in virtual and real space, interactive installations, and performance -- with case studies of works by Olia Lialina, Susanne Berkenheger, Stefan Schemat, Teri Rueb, Lynn Hershman, Agnes Heged's, Tmema, David Rokeby, Sonia Cillari, and Blast Theory.
The Art of Failure
by Jesper JuulWe may think of video games as being "fun," but in The Art of Failure, Jesper Juul claims that this is almost entirely mistaken. When we play video games, our facial expressions are rarely those of happiness or bliss. Instead, we frown, grimace, and shout in frustration as we lose, or die, or fail to advance to the next level. Humans may have a fundamental desire to succeed and feel competent, but game players choose to engage in an activity in which they are nearly certain to fail and feel incompetent. So why do we play video games even though they make us unhappy? Juul examines this paradox. In video games, as in tragic works of art, literature, theater, and cinema, it seems that we want to experience unpleasantness even if we also dislike it. Reader or audience reaction to tragedy is often explained as catharsis, as a purging of negative emotions. But, Juul points out, this doesn't seem to be the case for video game players. Games do not purge us of unpleasant emotions; they produce them in the first place. What, then, does failure in video game playing do? Juul argues that failure in a game is unique in that when you fail in a game, you (not a character) are in some way inadequate. Yet games also motivate us to play more, in order to escape that inadequacy, and the feeling of escaping failure (often by improving skills) is a central enjoyment of games. Games, writes Juul, are the art of failure: the singular art form that sets us up for failure and allows us to experience it and experiment with it. The Art of Failure is essential reading for anyone interested in video games, whether as entertainment, art, or education.
Uncertainty in Games
by Greg CostikyanIn life, uncertainty surrounds us. Things that we thought were good for us turn outto be bad for us (and vice versa); people we thought we knew well behave in mysterious ways; thestock market takes a nosedive. Thanks to an inexplicable optimism, most of the time we are fairlycheerful about it all. But we do devote much effort to managing and ameliorating uncertainty. Is itany wonder, then, asks Greg Costikyan, that we have taken this aspect of our lives and transformedit culturally, making a series of elaborate constructs that subject us to uncertainty but in afictive and nonthreatening way? That is: we create games. In this concise and entertaining book,Costikyan, an award-winning game designer, argues that games require uncertainty to hold ourinterest, and that the struggle to master uncertainty is central to their appeal. Game designers, hesuggests, can harness the idea of uncertainty to guide their work. Costikyan explores the manysources of uncertainty in many sorts of games -- from Super Mario Bros. toRock/Paper/Scissors, from Monopoly toCityVille, from FPS Deathmatch play to Chess. He describestypes of uncertainty, including performative uncertainty, analytic complexity, and narrativeanticipation. And he suggest ways that game designers who want to craft novel game experiences canuse an understanding of game uncertainty in its many forms to improve their designs.
An Aesthesia of Networks
by Anna MunsterToday almost every aspect of life for which data exists can be rendered as a network. Financial data, social networks, biological ecologies: all are visualized in links and nodes, linesconnecting dots. A network visualization of a corporate infrastructure could look remarkably similarto that of a terrorist organization. In An Aesthesia of Networks, Anna Munsterargues that this uniformity has flattened our experience of networks as active and relationalprocesses and assemblages. She counters the "network anaesthesia" that results from thispervasive mimesis by reinserting the question of experience, or aesthesia, into networked cultureand aesthetics. Rather than asking how humans experience computers and networks, Munster asks hownetworks experience -- what operations they perform and undergo to change andproduce new forms of experience. Drawing on William James's radical empiricism, she asserts thatnetworked experience is assembled first and foremost through relations, which make up its mostimmediately sensed and perceived aspect. Munster critically considers a range of contemporaryartistic and cultural practices that engage with network technologies and techniques, includingdatabases and data mining, the domination of search in online activity, and the proliferation ofviral media through YouTube. These practices -- from artists who "undermine" data tomusicians and VJs who use intranetworked audio and video software environments -- are concerned withthe relationality at the core of today's network experience.
Moving without a Body
by Stamatia PortanovaDigital technologies offer the possibility of capturing, storing, and manipulating movement, abstracting it from the body and transforming it into numerical information. In Moving without a Body, Stamatia Portanova considers what really happens when the physicality of movement is translated into a numerical code by a technological system. Drawing on the radical empiricism of Gilles Deleuze and Alfred North Whitehead, she argues that this does not amount to a technical assessment of software's capacity to record motion but requires a philosophical rethinking of what movement itself is, or can become. Discussing the development of different audiovisual tools and the shift from analog to digital, she focuses on some choreographic realizations of this evolution, including works by Loie Fuller and Merce Cunningham. Throughout, Portanova considers these technologies and dances as ways to think -- rather than just perform or perceive -- movement. She distinguishes the choreographic thought from the performance: a body performs a movement, and a mind thinks or choreographs a dance. Similarly, she sees the move from analog to digital as a shift in conception rather than simply in technical realization. Analyzing choreographic technologies for their capacity to redesign the way movement is thought, Moving without a Body offers an ambitiously conceived reflection on the ontological implications of the encounter between movement and technological systems.
Digital Methods
by Richard RogersIn Digital Methods, Richard Rogers proposes a methodological outlook for social and cultural scholarly research on the Web that seeks to move Internet research beyond the study of online culture. It is not a toolkit for Internet research, or operating instructions for a software package; it deals with broader questions. How can we study social media to learn something about society rather than about social media use? How can hyperlinks reveal not just the value of a Web site but the politics of association? Rogers proposes repurposing Web-native techniques for research into cultural change and societal conditions. We can learn to reapply such "methods of the medium" as crawling and crowd sourcing, PageRank and similar algorithms, tag clouds and other visualizations; we can learn how they handle hits, likes, tags, date stamps, and other Web-native objects. By "thinking along" with devices and the objects they handle, digital research methods can follow the evolving methods of the medium. Rogers uses this new methodological outlook to examine the findings of inquiries into 9/11 search results, the recognition of climate change skeptics by climate-change-related Web sites, the events surrounding the Srebrenica massacre according to Dutch, Serbian, Bosnian, and Croatian Wikipedias, presidential candidates' social media "friends," and the censorship of the Iranian Web. With Digital Methods, Rogers introduces a new vision and method for Internet research and at the same time applies them to the Web's objects of study, from tiny particles (hyperlinks) to large masses (social media).
Ambient Commons
by Malcolm McculloughThe world is filling with ever more kinds of media, in ever more contexts andformats. Glowing rectangles have become part of the scene; screens, large and small, appeareverywhere. Physical locations are increasingly tagged and digitally augmented. Sensors, processors,and memory are not found only in chic smart phones but also built into everyday objects. Amid thisflood, your attention practices matter more than ever. You might not be able to tune this world out. So it is worth remembering that underneath all these augmentations and data flows, fixed formspersist, and that to notice them can improve other sensibilities. In AmbientCommons, Malcolm McCullough explores the workings of attention though a rediscovery ofsurroundings. Not all that informs has been written and sent; not all attention involves deliberatethought. The intrinsic structure of space -- the layout of a studio, for example, or a plaza --becomes part of any mental engagement with it. McCullough describes what he calls the Ambient: anincreasing tendency to perceive information superabundance whole, where individual signals matterless and at least some mediation assumes inhabitable form. He explores how the fixed forms ofarchitecture and the city play a cognitive role in the flow of ambient information. As apersistently inhabited world, can the Ambient be understood as a shared cultural resource, to besocially curated, voluntarily limited, and self-governed as if a commons? AmbientCommons invites you to look past current obsessions with smart phones to rethink attentionitself, to care for more situated, often inescapable forms of information.
Playing with Sound: A Theory of Interacting with Sound and Music in Video Games
by Karen CollinsKaren Collins examines video game sound from the player's perspective. She explores the many ways that players interact with a game's sonic aspects -- which include not only music but also sound effects, ambient sound, dialogue, and interface sounds -- both within and outside of the game. She investigates the ways that meaning is found, embodied, created, evoked, hacked, remixed, negotiated, and renegotiated by players in the space of interactive sound in games. Drawing on disciplines that range from film studies and philosophy to psychology and computer science, Collins develops a theory of interactive sound experience that distinguishes between interacting with sound and simply listening without interacting. Her conceptual approach combines practice theory (which focuses on productive and consumptive practices around media) and embodied cognition (which holds that our understanding of the world is shaped by our physical interaction with it). Collins investigates the multimodal experience of sound, image, and touch in games; the role of interactive sound in creating an emotional experience through immersion and identification with the game character; the ways in which sound acts as a mediator for a variety of performative activities; and embodied interactions with sound beyond the game, including machinima, chip-tunes, circuit bending, and other practices that use elements from games in sonic performances.
On Computing
by Paul S. RosenbloomComputing isn't simply about hardware or software, or calculation or applications. Computing, writes Paul Rosenbloom, is an exciting and diverse, yet remarkably coherent, scientific enterprise that is highly multidisciplinary yet maintains a unique core of its own. In On Computing, Rosenbloom proposes that computing is a great scientific domain on a par with the physical, life, and social sciences. Rosenbloom introduces a relational approach for understanding computing, conceptualizing it in terms of forms of interaction and implementation, to reveal the hidden structures and connections among its disciplines. He argues for the continuing vitality of computing, surveying the leading edge in computing's combination with other domains, from biocomputing and brain-computer interfaces to crowdsourcing and virtual humans to robots and the intermingling of the real and the virtual. He explores forms of higher order coherence, or macrostructures, over complex computing topics and organizations, such as computing's role in the pursuit of science and the structure of academic computing. Finally, he examines the very notion of a great scientific domain in philosophical terms, honing his argument that computing should be considered the fourth great scientific domain. Rosenbloom's proposal may prove to be controversial, but the intent is to initiate a long overdue conversation about the nature and future of a field in search of its soul. Rosenbloom, a key architect of the founding of University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies and former Deputy Director of USC's Information Sciences Institute, offers a broader perspective on what computing is and what it can become.
The Design Way: Intentional Change in an Unpredictable World (Second Edition)
by Harold G. Nelson Erik StoltermanHumans did not discover fire--they designed it. Design is not defined by software programs, blueprints, or font choice. When we create new things--technologies, organizations, processes, systems, environments, ways of thinking--we engage in design. With this expansive view of design as their premise, in The Design Way Harold Nelson and Erik Stolterman make the case for design as its own culture of inquiry and action. They offer not a recipe for design practice or theorizing but a formulation of design culture's fundamental core of ideas. These ideas--which form "the design way"--are applicable to an infinite variety of design domains, from such traditional fields as architecture and graphic design to such nontraditional design areas as organizational, educational, interaction, and healthcare design. The text of this second edition is accompanied by new detailed images, "schemas" that visualize, conceptualize, and structure the authors' understanding of design inquiry. The text itself has been revised and expanded throughout, in part in response to reader feedback.
Coding Places
by Yuri TakhteyevSoftware development would seem to be a quintessential example of today's Internet-enabled "knowledge work"--a global profession not bound by the constraints of geography. In Coding Places, Yuri Takhteyev looks at the work of software developers who inhabit two contexts: a geographical area--in this case, greater Rio de Janeiro--and a "world of practice," a global system of activities linked by shared meanings and joint practice. The work of the Brazilian developers, Takhteyev discovers, reveals a paradox of the world of software: it is both diffuse and sharply centralized. The world of software revolves around a handful of places--in particular, the San Francisco Bay area--that exercise substantial control over both the material and cultural elements of software production. Takhteyev shows how in this context Brazilian software developers work to find their place in the world of software and to bring its benefits to their city. Takhteyev's study closely examines Lua, an open source programming language developed in Rio but used in such internationally popular products as World of Warcraft and Angry Birds. He shows that Lua had to be separated from its local origins on the periphery in order to achieve success abroad. The developers, Portuguese speakers, used English in much of their work on Lua. By bringing to light the work that peripheral practitioners must do to give software its seeming universality, Takhteyev offers a revealing perspective on the not-so-flat world of globalization.