The Year S Work In Nerds Wonks And Neocons

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The Year's Work in Nerds, Wonks, and Neocons

Author : Jonathan P. Eburne,Benjamin Schreier
Publisher : Indiana University Press
Page : 379 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 2017-04-17
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780253026873

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The Year's Work in Nerds, Wonks, and Neocons by Jonathan P. Eburne,Benjamin Schreier Pdf

Essays on intellect, passion, alienation, and America’s geeky subcultures. What happens when math nerds, band and theater geeks, goths, sci-fi fanatics, Young Republican debate poindexters, techies, Trekkies, D&D players, wallflowers, bookworms, and RPG players grow up? And what can they tell us about the life of the mind in the contemporary United States? With recent years bringing us phenomena from #GamerGate to The Big Bang Theory, it’s clear that nerds, policy wonks, and neoconservatives play a major role in today’s popular culture. The Year’s Work in Nerds, Wonks, and Neocons delves into subcultures of intellectual history to explore their influence on contemporary American intellectual life. Not limiting themselves to describing how individuals are depicted, the authors consider the intellectual endeavors these depictions have come to represent, exploring many models and practices of learnedness, reflection, knowledge production, and opinion in the contemporary world. As teachers, researchers, and university scholars continue to struggle for mainstream visibility, this book illuminates the other forms of intellectual excitement that have emerged alongside them and found ways to survive and even thrive in the face of dismissal or contempt.

Neverending Stories

Author : R. Lyle Skains
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 289 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 2022-12-29
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781501364921

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Neverending Stories by R. Lyle Skains Pdf

Digital fiction has long been perceived as an experimental niche of electronic literature. Yet born-digital narratives thrive in mainstream culture, as communities of practice create and share digital fiction, filling in the gaps between the media they are given and the stories they seek. Neverending Stories explores the influences of literature and computing on digital fiction and how the practices and cultures of each have impacted who makes and plays digital fiction. Popular creativity emerges from subordinated groups often excluded from producing cultural resources, accepting the materials of capitalism and inverting them for their own carnivalesque uses. Popular digital fiction goes by many different names: webnovels, adventure games, visual novels, Twitter fiction, webcomics, Twine games, walking sims, alternate reality games, virtual reality films, interactive movies, enhanced books, transmedia universes, and many more. The book establishes digital fiction in a foundation of innovation, tracing its emergence in various guises around the world. It examines Infocom, whose commercial success with interactive fiction crumbled, in no small part, because of its failure to consider women as creators or consumers. It takes note of the brief flourish of commercial book apps and literary games. It connects practices of cognitive and conceptual interactivity, and textual multiplicity-dating to the origins of the print novel-to the feminine. It pushes into the technological future of narrative in immersive and mixed realities. It posits the transmedia franchises and the practices of fanfiction as examples of digital fiction that will continue indefinitely, regardless of academic notice or approval.

Asian American Literature in Transition, 1965-1996: Volume 3

Author : Asha Nadkarni,Cathy J. Schlund-Vials
Publisher : Asian American Literature in T
Page : 437 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 2021-06-17
Category : History
ISBN : 9781108843850

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Asian American Literature in Transition, 1965-1996: Volume 3 by Asha Nadkarni,Cathy J. Schlund-Vials Pdf

This volume traces the formation of the Asian American literary canon and the field of Asian American Studies from 1965-1996. It is intended for an academic audience, ranging from advanced undergraduate students to scholars from a variety of disciplines, interested in the formation of Asian American literary studies from 1965-1996.

Technology in Irish Literature and Culture

Author : Margaret Kelleher,James O'Sullivan
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 637 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 2022-12-31
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781009192453

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Technology in Irish Literature and Culture by Margaret Kelleher,James O'Sullivan Pdf

Technology in Irish Literature and Culture shows how such significant technologies—typewriters, gramophones, print, radio, television, computers—have influenced Irish literary practices and cultural production, while also examining how technology has been embraced as a theme in Irish writing. Once a largely rural and agrarian society, contemporary Ireland has embraced the communicative, performative and consumptive habits of a culture utterly reliant on the digital. This text plumbs the origins of the present moment, examining the longer history of literature's interactions with the technological and exploring how the transformative capacity of modern technology has been mediated throughout a diverse national canon. Comprising essays from some of the major figures of Irish literary and cultural studies, this volume offers a wide-ranging, comprehensive account of how Irish literature and culture have interacted with technology.

Wandering Games

Author : Melissa Kagen
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 215 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 2022-10-11
Category : Games & Activities
ISBN : 9780262370974

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Wandering Games by Melissa Kagen Pdf

An analysis of wandering within different game worlds, viewed through the lenses of work, colonialism, gender, and death. Wandering in games can be a theme, a formal mode, an aesthetic metaphor, or a player action. It can mean walking, escaping, traversing, meandering, or returning. In this book, game studies scholar Melissa Kagen introduces the concept of “wandering games,” exploring the uses of wandering in a variety of game worlds. She shows how the much-derided Walking Simulator—a term that began as an insult, a denigration of games that are less violent, less task-oriented, or less difficult to complete—semi-accidentally tapped into something brilliant: the vast heritage and intellectual history of the concept of walking in fiction, philosophy, pilgrimage, performance, and protest. Kagen examines wandering in a series of games that vary widely in terms of genre, mechanics, themes, player base, studio size, and funding, giving close readings to Return of the Obra Dinn, Eastshade, Ritual of the Moon, 80 Days, Heaven’s Vault, Death Stranding, and The Last of Us Part II. Exploring the connotations of wandering within these different game worlds, she considers how ideologies of work, gender, colonialism, and death inflect the ways we wander through digital spaces. Overlapping and intersecting, each provides a multifaceted lens through which to understand what wandering does, lacks, implies, and offers. Kagen’s account will attune game designers, players, and scholars to the myriad possibilities of the wandering ludic body.

Mental Health | Atmospheres | Video Games

Author : Jimena Aguilar Rodríguez,Federico Alvarez Igarzábal,Michael S. Debus,Curtis L. Maughan,Su-Jin Song,Miruna Vozaru,Felix Zimmermann
Publisher : transcript Verlag
Page : 263 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 2022-10-31
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9783839462645

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Mental Health | Atmospheres | Video Games by Jimena Aguilar Rodríguez,Federico Alvarez Igarzábal,Michael S. Debus,Curtis L. Maughan,Su-Jin Song,Miruna Vozaru,Felix Zimmermann Pdf

Gaming has never been disconnected from reality. When we engage with ever more lavish virtual worlds, something happens to us. The game imposes itself on us and influences how we feel about it, the world, and ourselves. How do games accomplish this and to what end? The contributors explore the video game as an atmospheric medium of hitherto unimagined potential. Is the medium too powerful, too influential? A danger to our mental health or an ally through even the darkest of times? This volume compiles papers from the Young Academics Workshop at the Clash of Realities conferences of 2019 and 2020 to provide answers to these questions.

Playing at a Distance

Author : Sonia Fizek
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 186 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 2022-11-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780262544627

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Playing at a Distance by Sonia Fizek Pdf

An essential exploration of video game aesthetic that decenters the human player and challenges what it means to play. Do we play video games or do video games play us? Is nonhuman play a mere paradox or the future of gaming? And what do video games have to do with quantum theory? In Playing at a Distance, Sonia Fizek engages with these and many more daunting questions, forging new ways to think and talk about games and play that decenter the human player and explore a variety of play formats and practices that require surprisingly little human action. Idling in clicker games, wandering in walking simulators, automating gameplay with bots, or simply watching games rather than playing them—Fizek shows how these seemingly marginal cases are central to understanding how we play in the digital age. Introducing the concept of distance, Fizek reorients our view of computer-mediated play. To “play at a distance,” she says, is to delegate the immediate action to the machine and to become participants in an algorithmic spectacle. Distance as a media aesthetic framework enables the reader to come to terms with the ambiguity and aesthetic diversity of play. Drawing on concepts from philosophy, media theory, and posthumanism, as well as cultural and film studies, Playing at a Distance invites a wider understanding of what digital games and gaming are in all their diverse experiences and forms. In challenging the common perception of video games as inherently interactive, the book contributes to our understanding of the computer’s influence on practices of play—and prods us to think more broadly about what it means to play.

Materializing Digital Futures

Author : Toija Cinque,Jordan Beth Vincent
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 51,6 Mb
Release : 2022-01-27
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781501361272

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Materializing Digital Futures by Toija Cinque,Jordan Beth Vincent Pdf

Digital, visual media are found in most aspects of everyday life, from workplaces to household devices - computer and digital television screens, appliances such as refrigerators and home assistants, and applications for social media and gaming. Each technologically enabled opportunity brings an increasingly sophisticated language with the act of pursuing the intrasensorial ways of perceiving the world around us - through touch, movement, sound and vision - that is the heart of screen media use and audience engagement with digital artifacts. Drawing on digital media's currently evolving transformation and transforming capacity this book builds a story of the multiple processes in robotics and AI, virtual reality, creative image and sound production, the representation of data and creative practice. Issues around commodification, identity, identification, and political economy are critically examined for the emerging and affecting encounters and perceptions that are brought to bear.

Slow Narrative and Nonhuman Materialities

Author : Marco Caracciolo
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 54,6 Mb
Release : 2022-03
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781496229090

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Slow Narrative and Nonhuman Materialities by Marco Caracciolo Pdf

Marco Caracciolo investigates how the experience of slowness in contemporary narrative practices can create a vision of interconnectedness between human communities and the nonhuman world in an era marked by dramatically shifting climate patterns.

On Soulsring Worlds

Author : Marco Caracciolo
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 102 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2024-02-26
Category : Games & Activities
ISBN : 9781040018163

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On Soulsring Worlds by Marco Caracciolo Pdf

The first book-length study devoted to FromSoftware games, On Soulsring Worlds explores how the Dark Souls series and Elden Ring are able to reconcile extreme difficulty in both gameplay and narrative with broad appeal. Arguing that the games are strategically positioned in relation to contemporary audiences and designed to tap into the new forms of interpretation afforded by digital media, the author situates the games vis-à-vis a number of current debates, including the posthuman and the ethics of gameplay. The book delivers an object lesson on the value of narrative (and) complexity in digital play and in the interpretive practices it gives rise to. Cross-fertilizing narrative theory, game studies, and nonhuman-oriented philosophy, this book will appeal to students and scholars of game studies, media studies, narratology, and video game ethnography.

How Pac-Man Eats

Author : Noah Wardrip-Fruin
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 382 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 2020-12-15
Category : Games & Activities
ISBN : 9780262044653

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How Pac-Man Eats by Noah Wardrip-Fruin Pdf

How the tools and concepts for making games are connected to what games can and do mean; with examples ranging from Papers, Please to Dys4ia. In How Pac-Man Eats, Noah Wardrip-Fruin considers two questions: What are the fundamental ways that games work? And how can games be about something? Wardrip-Fruin argues that the two issues are related. Bridging formalist and culturally engaged approaches, he shows how the tools and concepts for making games are connected to what games can and do mean. Wardrip-Fruin proposes that games work at a fundamental level on which their mechanics depend: operational logics. Games are about things because they use play to address topics; they do this through playable models (of which operational logics are the primary building blocks): larger structures used to represent what happens in a game world that relate meaningfully to a theme. Game creators can expand the expressiveness of games, Wardrip-Fruin explains, by expanding an operational logic. Pac-Man can eat, for example, because a game designer expanded the meaning of collision from hitting things to consuming them. Wardrip-Fruin describes strategies game creators use to expand what can be said through games, with examples drawn from indie games, art games, and research games that address themes ranging from border policy to gender transition. These include Papers, Please, which illustrates expansive uses of pattern matching; Prom Week, for which the game's developers created a model of social volition to enable richer relationships between characters; and Dys4ia, which demonstrates a design approach that supports game metaphors of high complexity.

Indie Games in the Digital Age

Author : M.J. Clarke,Cynthia Wang
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2020-04-16
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781501356438

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Indie Games in the Digital Age by M.J. Clarke,Cynthia Wang Pdf

A host of digital affordances, including reduced cost production tools, open distribution platforms, and ubiquitous connectivity, have engendered the growth of indie games among makers and users, forcing critics to reconsider the question of who makes games and why. Taking seriously this new mode of cultural produciton compells analysts to reconsider the blurred boundaries and relations of makers, users and texts as well as their respective relationship to cultural power and hierarchy. The contributions to Indie Games in the Digital Age consider these questions and examine a series of firms, makers, games and scenes, ranging from giants like Nintendo and Microsoft to grassroots games like Cards Against Humanity and Stardew Valley, to chart more precisely the productive and instructive disruption that this new site of cultural production offers.

Teaching Jewish American Literature

Author : Roberta Rosenberg,Rachel Rubinstein
Publisher : Modern Language Association
Page : 210 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 2020-04-01
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9781603294461

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Teaching Jewish American Literature by Roberta Rosenberg,Rachel Rubinstein Pdf

A multilingual, transnational literary tradition, Jewish American writing has long explored questions of personal identity and national boundaries. These questions can engage students in literature, writing, or religion; at Jewish, Christian, or secular schools; and in or outside the United States. This volume takes an expansive view of Jewish American literature, beginning with writing from the earliest colonies in the Americas and continuing to contemporary Soviet-born authors in the United States, including works that engage deeply with religious concepts and others that embrace assimilation. It invites readers to rethink the nature of American multiculturalism, suggests pairings of Jewish American texts with other ethnic American literatures, and examines the workings of whiteness and privilege. Contributors offer varied perspectives on classic texts such as Yekl, Bread Givers, and "Goodbye, Columbus," along with approaches to interdisciplinary topics including humor, graphic novels, and musical theater. The volume concludes with an extensive resources section.

Video Games Have Always Been Queer

Author : Bonnie Ruberg
Publisher : NYU Press
Page : 278 pages
File Size : 46,5 Mb
Release : 2019-03-19
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781479831036

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Video Games Have Always Been Queer by Bonnie Ruberg Pdf

Argues for the queer potential of video games While popular discussions about queerness in video games often focus on big-name, mainstream games that feature LGBTQ characters, like Mass Effect or Dragon Age, Bonnie Ruberg pushes the concept of queerness in games beyond a matter of representation, exploring how video games can be played, interpreted, and designed queerly, whether or not they include overtly LGBTQ content. Video Games Have Always Been Queer argues that the medium of video games itself can—and should—be read queerly. In the first book dedicated to bridging game studies and queer theory, Ruberg resists the common, reductive narrative that games are only now becoming more diverse. Revealing what reading D. A. Miller can bring to the popular 2007 video game Portal, or what Eve Sedgwick offers Pong, Ruberg models the ways game worlds offer players the opportunity to explore queer experience, affect, and desire. As players attempt to 'pass' in Octodad or explore the pleasure of failure in Burnout: Revenge, Ruberg asserts that, even within a dominant gaming culture that has proved to be openly hostile to those perceived as different, queer people have always belonged in video games—because video games have, in fact, always been queer.

Media Crossroads

Author : Paula J. Massood,Angel Daniel Matos,Pamela Robertson Wojcik
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 218 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2021-02-08
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9781478021308

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Media Crossroads by Paula J. Massood,Angel Daniel Matos,Pamela Robertson Wojcik Pdf

The contributors to Media Crossroads examine space and place in media as they intersect with sexuality, race, ethnicity, age, class, and ability. Considering a wide range of film, television, video games, and other media, the authors show how spaces—from the large and fantastical to the intimate and virtual—are shaped by the social interactions and intersections staged within them. The highly teachable essays include analyses of media representations of urban life and gentrification, the ways video games allow users to adopt an experiential understanding of space, the intersection of the regulation of bodies and spaces, and how style and aesthetics can influence intersectional thinking. Whether interrogating the construction of Portland as a white utopia in Portlandia or the link between queerness and the spatial design and gaming mechanics in the Legend of Zelda video game series, the contributors deepen understanding of screen cultures in ways that redefine conversations around space studies in film and media. Contributors. Amy Corbin, Desirée J. Garcia, Joshua Glick, Noelle Griffis, Malini Guha, Ina Rae Hark, Peter C. Kunze, Paula J. Massood, Angel Daniel Matos, Nicole Erin Morse, Elizabeth Patton, Matthew Thomas Payne, Merrill Schleier, Jacqueline Sheean, Sarah Louise Smyth, Erica Stein, Kirsten Moana Thompson, John Vanderhoef, Pamela Robertson Wojcik