PRZEKŁAD – Krzysztof Abriszewski, Paweł Gąska, Adrian Zabielski REDAKCJA NAUKOWA ORAZ NAUKOWE OPRACOWANIE PRZEKŁADU – Krzysztof Abriszewski i Paweł Gąska Gry wideo są modelowymi mediami zarówno Imperium, jak i niektórych sił, które się mu sprzeciwiają – taka teza przyświeca Grom Imperium, książce czerpiącej garściami z dzieł Micheala Hardta, Antonia Negriego, Michela Foucualta, Gillesa Deleuza i Felixa Guattariego. Jest to pierwsze takie dzieło, w którym autorzy, za pomocą narzędzi współczesnej myśli krytycznej, przyglądają się grom wideo w kontekście krążenia kapitału, kompleksu wojskowo-przemysłowego czy wyzysku pracowników kognitywnych. Krytyka jest tu rzetelna, napisana przystępnym językiem, nie popada nigdy ani w bezpodstawną panikę moralną, ani w przesadny technooptymizm. W tekście utrzymano równowagę między teorią a empirycznymi przykładami (wśród których znajdują się choćby Full Spectrum Warrior, World of Warcraft, seria Grand Theft Auto czy konsola Sony Playstation). Gry Imperium to książka dla szerokiego grona odbiorców. Krytycy neoliberalnego kapitalizmu znajdą kolejne przykłady jego destrukcyjnego wpływu. Kulturoznawcy i groznawcy poznają nową perspektywę, z której można spoglądać na gry wideo. Wreszcie gracze będą mogli w przystępnej formie przeczytać o jasnych i ciemnych stronach ważnego dla nich medium. Prezentowana książka otwiera nową serię wydawniczą Kultura Współczesności, która ma podjąćtrudne zadanie zrozumienia współczesnej kultury w ciekawy sposób. Osoby pracujące nad przekładem łączą własne zaplecze teoretyczne z pracą empiryczną. Istotne jest także, by prace tego rodzaju zawierały element krytyczny, który pomoże wydobyć wielowymiarowość otaczającego nas świata. Obecność tych trzech warunków jest ważna o tyle, że żaden z nich z osobna nie oferuje satysfakcjonujących efektów podczas badania teraźniejszości, razem jednak dają szansę ukazania jej w sposób zaskakujący, nowy i inspirujący. Ufamy, że każda z publikowanych pozycji wniesie swój wkład w rozumienie kultury naszych czasów. Drugą planowaną pracą w serii jest przekład książki A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players Jespera Juula.

In a marketplace that demands perpetual upgrades, the survival of interactive play ultimately depends on the adroit management of negotiations between game producers and youthful consumers of this new medium. The authors suggest a model of expansion that encompasses technological innovation, game design, and marketing practices. Their case study of video gaming exposes fundamental tensions between the opposing forces of continuity and change in the information economy: between the play culture of gaming and the spectator culture of television, the dynamism of interactive media and the increasingly homogeneous mass-mediated cultural marketplace, and emerging flexible post-Fordist management strategies and the surviving techniques of mass-mediated marketing. Digital Play suggests a future not of democratizing wired capitalism but instead of continuing tensions between "access to" and "enclosure in" technological innovation, between inertia and diversity in popular culture markets, and between commodification and free play in the cultural industries.

In this highly readable and thought-provoking work, Nick Dyer-Witheford assesses the relevance of Marxism in our time and demonstrates how the information age, far from transcending the historic conflict between capital and its laboring subjects, constitutes the latest battleground in their encounter. Dyer-Witheford maps the dynamics of modern capitalism, showing how capital depends for its operations not just on exploitation in the immediate workplace, but on the continuous integration of a whole series of social sites and activities, from public health and maternity to natural resource allocation and the geographical reorganization of labor power. He also shows how these sites and activities may become focal points of subversion and insurgency, as new means of communication vital for the smooth flow of capital also permit otherwise isolated and dispersed points of resistance to connect and combine with one another. Cutting through the smokescreen of high-tech propaganda, Dyer-Witheford predicts the advent of a reinvented, "autonomist" Marxism that will rediscover the possibility of a collective, communist transformation of society. Refuting the utopian promises of the information revolution, he discloses the real potentialities for a new social order in the form of a twenty-first-century communism based on the common sharing of wealth.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, video games are an integral part of global media culture, rivaling Hollywood in revenue and influence. No longer confined to a subculture of adolescent males, video games today are played by adults around the world. At the same time, video games have become major sites of corporate exploitation and military recruitment. In Games of Empire, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter offer a radical political critique of such video games and virtual environments as Second Life, World of Warcraft, and Grand Theft Auto, analyzing them as the exemplary media of Empire, the twenty-first-century hypercapitalist complex theorized by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. The authors trace the ascent of virtual gaming, assess its impact on creators and players alike, and delineate the relationships between games and reality, body and avatar, screen and street. Games of Empire forcefully connects video games to real-world concerns about globalization, militarism, and exploitation, from the horrors of African mines and Indian e-waste sites that underlie the entire industry, the role of labor in commercial game development, and the synergy between military simulation software and the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan exemplified by Full Spectrum Warrior to the substantial virtual economies surrounding World of Warcraft, the urban neoliberalism made playable in Grand Theft Auto, and the emergence of an alternative game culture through activist games and open-source game development. Rejecting both moral panic and glib enthusiasm, Games of Empire demonstrates how virtual games crystallize the cultural, political, and economic forces of global capital, while also providing a means of resisting them.

The mobile app as technique and imaginary tool, offering a shortcut to instantaneous connection and entertainment. Mobile apps promise to deliver (h)appiness to our devices at the touch of a finger or two. Apps offer gratifyingly immediate access to connection and entertainment. The array of apps downloadable from the app store may come from the cloud, but they attach themselves firmly to our individual movement from location to location on earth. In The Imaginary App, writers, theorists, and artists—including Stephen Wolfram (in conversation with Paul Miller) and Lev Manovich—explore the cultural and technological shifts that have accompanied the emergence of the mobile app. These contributors and interviewees see apps variously as “a machine of transcendence,” “a hulking wound in our nervous system,” or “a promise of new possibilities.” They ask whether the app is an object or a relation, and if it could be a “metamedium” that supersedes all other artistic media. They consider the control and power exercised by software architecture; the app's prosthetic ability to enhance certain human capacities, in reality or in imagination; the app economy, and the divergent possibilities it offers of making a living or making a fortune; and the app as medium and remediator of reality. Also included (and documented in color) are selected projects by artists asked to design truly imaginary apps, “icons of the impossible.” These include a female sexual arousal graph using Doppler images; “The Ultimate App,” which accepts a payment and then closes, without providing information or functionality; and “iLuck,” which uses GPS technology and four-leaf-clover icons to mark places where luck might be found. Contributors Christian Ulrik Andersen, Thierry Bardini, Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, Benjamin H. Bratton, Drew S. Burk, Patricia Ticineto Clough, Robbie Cormier, Dock Currie, Dal Yong Jin, Nick Dyer-Witheford, Ryan and Hays Holladay, Atle Mikkola Kjøsen, Eric Kluitenberg, Lev Manovich, Vincent Manzerolle, Svitlana Matviyenko, Dan Mellamphy, Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid, Steven Millward, Anna Munster, Søren Bro Pold, Chris Richards, Scott Snibbe, Nick Srnicek, Stephen Wolfram

Short stories labeled "Mirroshade," "Neuromanatic," "Cyberpunk," etc. by such authors as Greg Bear, Pat Cadigan, William Gibson, Rudy Rucker, Lewis Shiner, John Shirley and others.

The first English-language publication of one of the greatest Polish science fiction novels of all time 'We have given you life ... so that you could discover a fraction of the great secret.' Is BER-66 a human or a robot? His controllers, known as 'the Mechanism,' tell him he is a living machine, programmed to gather information on the inhabitants of the strange underground world he finds himself in. But as he penetrates its tunnels and locked rooms, encountering mysterious doppelgangers and a petrified city, he comes closer to the truth of his existence. Considered one of the most important Polish science fiction novels of all time, Robot is a haunting philosophical enquiry into the nature of our reality and our place in the universe. 'An instant classic which catapulted Snerg to the rank of Poland's best sf authors' Science Fiction Encyclopedia

The past several years have brought staggering advances in the field of Artificial Intelligence. And Marxist analysis has to keep up: while machines were always central to Marxist analysis, modern AI is a new kind of machine that Marx could not have anticipated. Inhuman Power explores the relationship between Marxist theory and AI through three approaches, each using the lens of a different Marxist theoretical concept. While the idea of widespread AI tends to be celebrated as much as questioned, a deeper analysis of its reach and potential produces a more complex and disturbing picture than has been identified. Inhuman Power argues that on its current trajectory, AI is likely to render humanity obsolete and that the only way to prevent it is a communist revolution.

From the era-defining author of Generation X comes a novel of overworked coders who escape the serfdom of Bill Gates to forge their own path. They are Microserfs—six code-crunching computer whizzes who spend upward of sixteen hours a day “coding” and eating “flat” foods (food which, like Kraft singles, can be passed underneath closed doors) as they fearfully scan company e-mail to learn whether the great Bill is going to “flame” one of them. But now there’s a chance to become innovators instead of cogs in the gargantuan Microsoft machine. The intrepid Microserfs are striking out on their own—living together in a shared digital flophouse as they desperately try to cultivate well-rounded lives and find love amid the dislocated, subhuman whir and buzz of their computer-driven world.