Media narratives inform our ideas of the future - and Games are currently making a significant contribution to this medial reservoir. On the one hand, Games demonstrate a particular propensity for fantastic and futuristic scenarios. On the other hand, they often serve as an experimental field for the latest media technologies. However, while dystopias are part of the standard gaming repertoire, Games feature utopias much less frequently. Why? This anthology examines playful utopias from two perspectives. It investigates utopias in digital Games as well as utopias of the digital game; that is, the role of ludic elements in scenarios of the future.

Video games permeate our everyday existence. They immerse players in fascinating gameworlds and exciting experiences, often inviting them in various ways to reflect on the enacted events. Gerald Farca explores the genre of dystopian video games and the player's aesthetic response to their nightmarish gameworlds. Players, he argues, will gradually come to see similarities between the virtual dystopia and their own ›offline‹ environment, thus learning to stay wary of social and political developments. In his analysis, Farca draws from a variety of research fields, such as literary theory and game studies, combining them into a coherent theory of aesthetic response to dystopian games.

A wide-ranging intellectual history that reveals how important games have been to human progress, and what’s at stake when we forget what games we’re really playing. We play games to learn about the world, to understand our minds and the minds of others, and to make predictions about the future. Games are an essential aspect of humanity and a powerful tool for modeling reality. They’re also a lot of fun. But games can be dangerous, especially when we mistake the model worlds of games for reality itself and let gamification co-opt human decision making. Playing with Reality explores the riveting history of games since the Enlightenment, weaving an unexpected path through military theory, political science, evolutionary biology, the development of computers and AI, cutting-edge neuroscience, and cognitive psychology. Neuroscientist and physicist Kelly Clancy shows how intertwined games have been with the arc of history. War games shaped the outcomes of real wars in nineteenth and twentieth century Europe. Game theory warped our understanding of human behavior and brought us to the brink of annihilation—yet still underlies basic assumptions in economics, politics, and technology design. We used games to teach computers how to learn for themselves, and now we are designing games that will determine the shape of society and future of democracy. In this revelatory new work, Clancy makes the bold argument that the human fascination with games is the key to understanding our nature and our actions.

Written for an interdisciplinary audience, Just Playing offers a panoramic tour through a range of new and disturbing insights that game theory brings to anthropology, biology, economics, philosophy, and psychology.

Golfers and non-golfers alike will be moved by this powerful story of transformation revealing the secrets to success in life beyond success in our game or work. Luke Chisolm is a talented young golfer set on making the pro tour. But when his first big shot turns into a very public disaster, he escapes the pressures of the game and finds himself unexpectedly stranded in Utopia, Texas. There, he meets Johnny Crawford, an eccentric rancher with a passion for teaching truth, whose faith forces Luke to question not only his past choices, but his direction for the future. Written by author and performance psychologist Dr. David Cook--who has worked with NBA World Champions, National Collegiate Champions, PGA Tour Champions, Olympians, and many Fortune 500 companies--this remarkable and encouraging story reminds us to get our game, and our life, back on course. Now a major motion picture starring Academy Award Winner Robert Duvall and Lucas Black! Also published as Golf's Sacred Journey.

In Gaming Utopia: Ludic Worlds in Art, Design, and Media, Claudia Costa Pederson analyzes modernist avant-garde and contemporary video games to challenge the idea that gaming is an exclusively white, heterosexual, male, corporatized leisure activity and reenvisions it as a catalyst for social change. By looking at over fifty projects that together span a century and the world, Pederson explores the capacity for sociopolitical commentary in virtual and digital realms and highlights contributions to the history of gaming by women, queer, and transnational artists. The result is a critical tool for understanding video games as imaginative forms of living that offer alternatives to our current reality. With an interdisciplinary approach, Gaming Utopia emphasizes how game design, creation, and play can become political forms of social protest and examines the ways that games as art open doors to a more just and peaceful world.

Collective political projects have become ephemeral and are subject to radical forms of erasure through cooptation, division, redefinition or intimidation in present times. Media and Utopia responds to the resulting crisis of the social by investigating the links between mediation and political imagination. This volume addresses those utopian spaces historically constituted through media, and analyses the conditions that made them possible. Individual essays deal with non-Western histories of technopolitics through distinctive perspectives on how to conceive the relationship between social form, everyday life, and utopian possibility, and by examining a range of media formats and genres from print, sound, and film to new media. With contributions from major scholars in the field, this book will be of interest to researchers and scholars of media studies, culture studies, sociology, modern South Asian history, and politics.

This book gives hobbyists and professional programmers the knowledge necessary to create a real time strategy game of their own.

An accessible and comprehensive guide to the philosophy of sport Each chapter is framed by a question that explores the main issues, ideas and literature in the field ranging from questions about the nature and value of sport, the sporting body, aesthetics and ethics. Students are given the opportunity to consider significant debates in the philosophy of sport and each chapter is supplemented by independent study questions. Each section also contains short insightful interviews with eminent scholars in order to give a broader understanding of the history and development of the subject. The main themes covered within this text include: the nature of sport; sport and the body; aesthetics and the aesthetic value of sport; a consideration of fair play, rules and the ethos of sport; the nature of competition; the application and effect of technology on sport and introductions to contemporary ethical issues such as doping, violence, disability, patriotism, elitism and sexual equality, as well as a broader reflection on the connection between sport and moral development.

The Palgrave Handbook of Utopian and Dystopian Literatures celebrates a literary genre already over 500 years old. Specially commissioned essays from established and emerging international scholars reflect the vibrancy of utopian vision, and its resiliency as idea, genre, and critical mode. Covering politics, environment, geography, body and mind, and social organization, the volume surveys current research and maps new areas of study. The chapters include investigations of anarchism, biopolitics, and postcolonialism and study film, art, and literature. Each essay considers central questions and key primary works, evaluates the most recent research, and outlines contemporary debates. Literatures of Africa, Australia, China, Latin America, and the Middle East are discussed in this global, cross-disciplinary, and comprehensive volume.