Marcus Carter - Böcker

From Among Us to Minecraft, Catan to Dungeons and Dragons, games and play are fundamentally transforming how we understand storytelling, education, identity, politics, and creativity.Game Studies provides the first ever critical and comprehensive introduction for navigating this complex, interdisciplinary, and rapidly growing research field. Each chapter introduces a timely area of debate in games research, and addresses critical questions about the social, cultural, and economic aspects of games and the people who play and make them. Combining key theoretical frameworks with case studies of influential games, the book equips readers with the tools needed to engage critically with games and their growing cultural significance.Full of concrete examples and pedagogical features, Game Studies offers a highly accessible and urgently needed guide to this rapidly expanding, hotly contested, and culturally significant field. It is essential reading for students of both media studies and game design, and an important resource for scholars, developers, and players.

The fantasies that underpin common perceptions of Virtual Reality and what we need to know about VR s potential risks as well as its opportunities. Virtual Reality is the next new frontier for Silicon Valley. Mark Zuckerberg, who has overseen Meta s investment of billions into VR, pitches it as the next dominant computing paradigm. More than just a gaming technology, VR is top of mind for academics, tech reportage, and industry evangelists who all see the potential for VR to revolutionize fields such as education, and health, as well as the way we work and communicate. But will VR achieve all this? In Fantasies of Virtual Reality, Marcus Carter and Ben Egliston strip bare the tech industry s vision of a future dominated by immersive VR experiences, challenging the utopian promises of this technology's potential. Carter and Egliston offer a critical account of VR in a variety of contexts, from gaming to human resources to policing and the military. They argue that while VR does hold significant potential, the overhyped expectations surrounding it, from achieving true empathetic understanding to transforming traditional education and office work, are often overstated and fraught with issues of privacy, control, and exclusion. What s more, there is nothing truly virtual about Virtual Reality: VR is deeply entrenched in the material world, driven by tangible technological, economic, and social logics. An accessible introduction to this emerging technology, Fantasies of Virtual Reality is essential reading for anyone interested in what VR can really do and what is just plain fantasy.

EVE Online is a socially complex, science-fiction-themed universe simulation and massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) first released in 2003. Notorious for its colossal battles and ruthless player culture, it has hundreds of thousands of players today. In this fascinating book, scholars, players, and EVE’s developer (CCP Games) examine the intricate world of EVEOnline--providing authentic accounts of lived experience within a game with more than a decade of history and millions of “real” dollars behind it.Internet Spaceships Are Serious Business features contributions from outstanding EVE Online players, such as The Mittani, an infamous member of the game’s community, as well as academics from around the globe. They cover a wide range of subjects: the game’s technicalities and its difficulty; its projection of humanity’s future in space; the configuration of its unique, single-server game world; the global nature of warfare in its “nullsec” territory (and how EVE players have formed a global concept of time); stereotypes of Russian players; espionage play; in-game memorials to Vile Rat (aka U.S. State Department official Sean Smith, murdered in the 2012 Benghazi attack); its gendered playing experience; and CCP Games’ relationship with players; and its history and legacy.Internet Spaceships Are Serious Business is a must for EVE Online players interested in a broad perspective on their all-consuming game. It is also accessible to scholars, game designers seeking to understand and replicate the successful aspects unique to EVE Online, and even those who have never played this notoriously complex game.Contributors: William Sims Bainbridge, National Science Foundation; Chribba; Jedrzej Czarnota; Kjartan Pierre Emilsson; Dan Erdman; Rebecca Fraimow; Martin R. Gibbs, U of Melbourne; Catherine Goodfellow; Kathryn Gronsbell; Keith Harrison; Kristin MacDonough; Mantou (Zhang Yuzhou); Oskar Milik; The Mittani (Alexander Gianturco); Joji Mori; Richard Page; Christopher Paul, Seattle U; Erica Titkemeyer, U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Nick Webber, Birmingham City U.

From Among Us to Minecraft, Catan to Dungeons and Dragons, games and play are fundamentally transforming how we understand storytelling, education, identity, politics, and creativity.Game Studies provides the first ever critical and comprehensive introduction for navigating this complex, interdisciplinary, and rapidly growing research field. Each chapter introduces a timely area of debate in games research, and addresses critical questions about the social, cultural, and economic aspects of games and the people who play and make them. Combining key theoretical frameworks with case studies of influential games, the book equips readers with the tools needed to engage critically with games and their growing cultural significance.Full of concrete examples and pedagogical features, Game Studies offers a highly accessible and urgently needed guide to this rapidly expanding, hotly contested, and culturally significant field. It is essential reading for students of both media studies and game design, and an important resource for scholars, developers, and players.

In this ground-breaking book, we navigate the uncharted terrain of social virtual reality (VR), a technology that, while offering unprecedented immersive experiences, brings forth significant governance challenges.