EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

Book Games of Empire

    Book Details:
  • Author : Nick Dyer-Witheford
  • Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
  • Release : 2013-11-30
  • ISBN : 1452942706
  • Pages : 462 pages

Download or read book Games of Empire written by Nick Dyer-Witheford and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2013-11-30 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Book Open World Empire

    Book Details:
  • Author : Christopher B. Patterson
  • Publisher : NYU Press
  • Release : 2020-04-14
  • ISBN : 147988636X
  • Pages : 360 pages

Download or read book Open World Empire written by Christopher B. Patterson and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist, 2021 John Hope Franklin Prize, given by the American Studies Association Seeking ways to understand video games beyond their imperial logics, Patterson turns to erotics to re-invigorate the potential passions and pleasures of play Video games vastly outpace all other mediums of entertainment in revenue and in global reach. On the surface, games do not appear ideological, nor are they categorized as national products. Instead, they seem to reflect the open and uncontaminated reputation of information technology. Video games are undeniably imperial products. Their very existence has been conditioned upon the spread of militarized technology, the exploitation of already-existing labor and racial hierarchies in their manufacture, and the utopian promises of digital technology. Like literature and film before it, video games have become the main artistic expression of empire today: the open world empire, formed through the routes of information technology and the violences of drone combat, unending war, and overseas massacres that occur with little scandal or protest. Though often presented as purely technological feats, video games are also artistic projects, and as such, they allow us an understanding of how war and imperial violence proceed under signs of openness, transparency, and digital utopia. But the video game, as Christopher B. Patterson argues, is also an inherently Asian commodity: its hardware is assembled in Asia; its most talented e-sports players are of Asian origin; Nintendo, Sony, and Sega have defined and dominated the genre. Games draw on established discourses of Asia to provide an “Asiatic” space, a playful sphere of racial otherness that straddles notions of the queer, the exotic, the bizarre, and the erotic. Thinking through games like Overwatch, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Shenmue II, and Alien: Isolation, Patterson reads against empire by playing games erotically, as players do—seeing games as Asiatic playthings that afford new passions, pleasures, desires, and attachments.

Book Empire Games  Empire Games Book One

Download or read book Empire Games Empire Games Book One written by Charles Stross and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2017-01-26 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The year is 2020. It's seventeen years since the Revolution overthrew the last king of the New British Empire, and the newly reconstituted North American Commonwealth is developing rapidly, on course to defeat the French and bring democracy to a troubled world. But Miriam Burgeson, commissioner in charge of the shadowy Ministry of Intertemporal Research and Intelligence--the paratime espionage agency tasked with catalyzing the Commonwealth's great leap forward--has a problem. For years, she's warned everyone: "The Americans are coming." Now their drones arrive in the middle of a succession crisis--the leader of the American Commonwealth is dying and the vultures are circling. In another timeline, the U.S. has recruited Rita, Miriam's estranged daughter, to spy across timelines and bring down any remaining world-walkers who might threaten national security. But her handlers are keeping information from her. Two nuclear superpowers are set on a collision course. Two increasingly desperate paratime espionage agencies are fumbling around in the dark, trying to find a solution to the firs- contact problem that doesn't result in a nuclear holocaust. And two women--a mother and her long-lost, adopted daughter--are about to find themselves on opposite sides of the confrontation.

Book Game of Empire

Download or read book Game of Empire written by and published by . This book was released on 1970 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Empire Games

    Book Details:
  • Author : Charles Stross
  • Publisher :
  • Release : 2017
  • ISBN :
  • Pages : 0 pages

Download or read book Empire Games written by Charles Stross and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Empire De Centered

    Book Details:
  • Author : Maxim Waldstein
  • Publisher : Routledge
  • Release : 2016-05-06
  • ISBN : 1317144376
  • Pages : 362 pages

Download or read book Empire De Centered written by Maxim Waldstein and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-06 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1991 the Soviet empire collapsed, at a stroke throwing the certainties of the Cold War world into flux. Yet despite the dramatic end of this 'last empire', the idea of empire is still alive and well, its language and concepts feeding into public debate and academic research. Bringing together a multidisciplinary and international group of authors to study Soviet society and culture through the categories empire and space, this collection demonstrates the enduring legacy of empire with regard to Russia, whose history has been marked by a particularly close and ambiguous relationship between nation and empire building, and between national and imperial identities. Parallel with this discussion of empire, the volume also highlights the centrality of geographical space and spatial imaginings in Russian and Soviet intellectual traditions and social practices; underlining how Russia's vast geographical dimensions have profoundly informed Russia's state and nation building, both in practice and concept. Combining concepts of space and empire, the collection offers a reconsideration of Soviet imperial legacy by studying its cultural and societal underpinnings from previously unexplored perspectives. In so doing it provides a reconceptualization of the theoretical and methodological foundations of contemporary imperial and spatial studies, through the example of the experience provided by Soviet society and culture.

Book Empire Games

    Book Details:
  • Author : Charles Stross
  • Publisher : Macmillan
  • Release : 2017-01-17
  • ISBN : 0765337568
  • Pages : 332 pages

Download or read book Empire Games written by Charles Stross and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2017-01-17 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charles Stross builds a new series with Empire Games, expanding on the world he created in the Family Trade series, a new generation of paratime travellers walk between parallel universes. The year is 2020. It's seventeen years since the Revolution overthrew the last king of the New British Empire, and the newly-reconstituted North American Commonwealth is developing rapidly, on course to defeat the French and bring democracy to a troubled world. But Miriam Burgeson, commissioner in charge of the shadowy Ministry of Intertemporal Research and Intelligence—the paratime espionage agency tasked with catalyzing the Commonwealth's great leap forward—has a problem. For years, she's warned everyone: "The Americans are coming." Now their drones arrive in the middle of a succession crisis. In another timeline, the U.S. has recruited Miriam's own estranged daughter to spy across timelines in order to bring down any remaining world-walkers who might threaten national security. Two nuclear superpowers are set on a collision course. Two increasingly desperate paratime espionage agencies try to find a solution to the first contact problem that doesn't result in a nuclear holocaust. And two women—a mother and her long-lost daughter—are about to find themselves on opposite sides of the confrontation.

Book Mapping an Empire of American Sport

Download or read book Mapping an Empire of American Sport written by Mark Dyreson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the mid-nineteenth century, the United States has used sport as a vehicle for spreading its influence and extending its power, especially in the Western Hemisphere and around the Pacific Rim, but also in every corner of the rest of the world. Through modern sport in general, and through American pastimes such as baseball, basketball and the American variant of football in particular, the U.S. has sought to Americanize the globe’s masses in a long series of both domestic and foreign campaigns. Sport played roles in American programs of cultural, economic, and political expansion. Sport also contributed to American efforts to assimilate immigrant populations. Even in American games such as baseball and football, sport has also served as an agent of resistance to American imperial designs among the nations of the Western hemisphere and the Pacific Rim. As the twenty-first century begins, sport continues to shape American visions of a global empire as well as framing resistance to American imperial designs. Mapping an Empire of American Sport chronicles the dynamic tensions in the role of sport as an element in both the expansion of and the resistance to American power, and in sport’s dual role as an instrument for assimilation and adaptation. This book was published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

Book Science Fiction and Empire

Download or read book Science Fiction and Empire written by Patricia Kerslake and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From its beginnings, science fiction has experimented with imperialistic scenarios of alien invasion, extraterrestrial exploitation, xenophobia, and colonial conquest. In Science Fiction and Empire, Patricia Kerslake brings contemporary thinking about postcolonialism and imperialism to bear on a variety of classic sci-fi novels and films, including The War of the Worlds, Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, and Star Wars. The first book to identify the consequences of empire in science fiction, Kerslake’s study is a compelling investigation of the political ramifications of how we imagine our future. “Science Fiction and Empire is thought-provoking and insightful, . . . the kind of large-scale postcolonial work that science fiction has needed for quite some time.”—Science Fiction Studies

Book Panama Canal Record

    Book Details:
  • Author :
  • Publisher :
  • Release : 1914
  • ISBN :
  • Pages : 576 pages

Download or read book Panama Canal Record written by and published by . This book was released on 1914 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book The British Empire  2 volumes

Download or read book The British Empire 2 volumes written by Mark Doyle and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2018-06-29 with total page 701 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essential starting point for anyone wanting to learn about life in the largest empire in history, this two-volume work encapsulates the imperial experience from the 16th–21st centuries. From early sixteenth-century explorations to the handover of Hong Kong in 1997, the British Empire controlled outposts on every continent, spreading its people and ideas across the globe and profiting mightily in the process. The present state of our world—from its increasing interconnectedness to its vast inequalities and from the successful democracies of North America to the troubled regimes of Africa and the Middle East—can be traced, in large part, to the way in which Great Britain expanded and controlled its empire. The British Empire: A Historical Encyclopedia addresses a broader range of topics than do most other surveys of the empire, covering not only major political and military developments but also topics that have only recently come to serious scholarly attention, such as women's and gender history, art and architecture, indigenous histories and perspectives, and the construction of colonial knowledge and ideologies. By going beyond the "headline" events of the British Empire, this captivating work communicates the British imperial experience in its totality.

Book Critical Digital Studies

Download or read book Critical Digital Studies written by Arthur Kroker and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2013-12-11 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its initial publication, Critical Digital Studies has proven an indispensable guide to understanding digitally mediated culture. Bringing together the leading scholars in this growing field, internationally renowned scholars Arthur and Marilouise Kroker present an innovative and interdisciplinary survey of the relationship between humanity and technology. The reader offers a study of our digital future, a means of understanding the world with new analytic tools and means of communication that are defining the twenty-first century. The second edition includes new essays on the impact of social networking technologies and new media. A new section – “New Digital Media” – presents important, new articles on topics including hacktivism in the age of digital power and the relationship between gaming and capitalism. The extraordinary range and depth of the first edition has been maintained in this new edition. Critical Digital Studies will continue to provide the leading edge to readers wanting to understand the complex intersection of digital culture and human knowledge.

Book Korea s Online Gaming Empire

Download or read book Korea s Online Gaming Empire written by Dal Yong Jin and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rapid growth of the Korean online game industry, viewed in social, cultural, and economic contexts. In South Korea, online gaming is a cultural phenomenon. Games are broadcast on television, professional gamers are celebrities, and youth culture is often identified with online gaming. Uniquely in the online games market, Korea not only dominates the local market but has also made its mark globally. In Korea's Online Gaming Empire, Dal Yong Jin examines the rapid growth of this industry from a political economy perspective, discussing it in social, cultural, and economic terms. Korea has the largest percentage of broadband subscribers of any country in the world, and Koreans spend increasing amounts of time and money on Internet-based games. Online gaming has become a mode of socializing—a channel for human relationships. The Korean online game industry has been a pioneer in software development and eSports (electronic sports and leagues). Jin discusses the policies of the Korean government that encouraged the development of online gaming both as a cutting-edge business and as a cultural touchstone; the impact of economic globalization; the relationship between online games and Korean society; and the future of the industry. He examines the rise of Korean online games in the global marketplace, the emergence of eSport as a youth culture phenomenon, the working conditions of professional gamers, the role of game fans as consumers, how Korea's local online game industry has become global, and whether these emerging firms have challenged the West's dominance in global markets.

Book Empire at War

    Book Details:
  • Author : Michael Knight
  • Publisher : Random House Digital, Inc.
  • Release : 2005-10
  • ISBN : 0761551654
  • Pages : 274 pages

Download or read book Empire at War written by Michael Knight and published by Random House Digital, Inc.. This book was released on 2005-10 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: • Exhaustive details on every unit. All heroes, ground vehicles, infantry, buildings, and starships covered. • Statistics and full information on every planet in the galaxy • Expert walkthroughs of each mission in both campaigns: Rebel and Imperial • Tips and hints for winning the Skirmish and multiplayer games • Battle-proven tactics for ground and space combat • Strategies for victory in the Galactic Conquest games

Book Gaming Utopia

    Book Details:
  • Author : Claudia Costa Pederson
  • Publisher : Indiana University Press
  • Release : 2021-04-06
  • ISBN : 0253054508
  • Pages : 281 pages

Download or read book Gaming Utopia written by Claudia Costa Pederson and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Book The Empire s New Clothes

    Book Details:
  • Author : Philip Murphy
  • Publisher : Oxford University Press
  • Release : 2018-08-01
  • ISBN : 0190935006
  • Pages : pages

Download or read book The Empire s New Clothes written by Philip Murphy and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the wake of Brexit, the Commonwealth has been identified as an important body for future British trade and diplomacy, but few know what it actually does. How is it organized and what has held it together for so long? How important is the Queen's role as Head of the Commonwealth? Most importantly, why has it had such a troubled recent past, and is it realistic to imagine that its fortunes might be reversed?In The Empire's New Clothes,? Murphy strips away the gilded self-image of the Commonwealth to reveal an irrelevant institution afflicted by imperial amnesia. He offers a personal perspective on this complex and poorly understood institution, and asks if it can ever escape from the shadow of the British Empire to become an organization based on shared values, rather than a shared history.

Book Empire Games  Empire Games Book One

Download or read book Empire Games Empire Games Book One written by Charles Stross and published by Tor UK. This book was released on 2017-01-31 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A time of ambition, treachery and dangerous secrets . . . Rita Douglas is plucked from her dead-end job and trained as a reluctant US spy. All because she has the latent genetic talent to hop between alternate timelines - and infiltrate them. The United States is waging a high-tech war, targeting assassins who can move between worlds to deliver death on a mass scale. And Rita will be their secret weapon. Miriam Beckstein has her own mission, as a politician in an industrial revolution US. She must accelerate her world's technology before their paranoid American twin finds them. It would blow them to hell. After all, they've done it before. Each timeline also battles internal conspiracies, as a cold war threatens to turn white hot. But which world is the aggressor - and will Rita have to choose a side? This new series is set in the same world as Charles Stross' 'Merchant Princes' series.