Download or read book Thought Provoking Play Political Philosophies in Science Fictional Videogame Spaces from Japan written by Martin Roth and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2018-01-05 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book considers videogames as spaces of political philosophy. Emerging from a negotiation between designers, player and computer, they prompt us to rethink life in common and imagine alternatives to the status quo. Several case studies on science fictional videogames from Japan serve to demonstrate this potential for thought-provoking play.
Download or read book National Identity and Millennials in Northeast Asia written by Vanessa Frangville and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-08-10 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines how the young in Northeast Asia engage with the political, especially in terms of the production, reformulation, or contestation of their national identities. Through case studies covering China, Japan, South Korea, North Korea and Taiwan, the contributions provide a study of the online spaces where youth engage with current debates regarding national identities. The book also unpacks the distinctive forms of expression and negotiation of national identities favoured by younger generations across Northeast Asia and asks questions specifically raised by their political mobilisation. For example, how their public mobilisation for a given cause has forced them to rethink their place in national and global communities. This book will be a valuable resource for scholars and students of East Asian culture and politics, media studies and youth studies. The Introduction of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
Download or read book Capture Japan written by Marco Bohr and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-12-01 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Capture Japan investigates the formation of visual tropes and how these have contributed to perceptions of Japan in the global imagination. The book proposes that images are not incidental in the formation of such perceptions, but central to notions about identity, history and memory. From a tentative western ally in 1952 to a 'soft power' superpower with a huge global influence in the 21st century, the book locates questions about Japan in the global imagination to the country's transforming geopolitical position. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach, with a multiplicity of perspectives from around the world, Capture Japan goes beyond binarisms to uncover how images can also produce discourses that challenge, subvert or even contradict each other. The word 'capture' in the title of the book recognises both the deeply problematic role that images have played in relation to colonialism, as well as the potential dominance that visual spectacles can wield in a contemporary context. Diverse essays from a wide range of perspectives investigate the institutional framework that has allowed certain types of images of Japan to be promoted, while others have been suppressed. In doing so, the book points to a vast network of images that have shaped the perception of Japan both from within and from outside, revealing how these images are inextricably linked to wider ideological, political, cultural or economic agendas.
Download or read book Japanese Role Playing Games written by Rachael Hutchinson and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-04-11 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japanese Role-playing Games: Genre, Representation, and Liminality in the JRPG examines the origins, boundaries, and transnational effects of the genre, addressing significant formal elements as well as narrative themes, character construction, and player involvement. Contributors from Japan, Europe, North America, and Australia employ a variety of theoretical approaches to analyze popular game series and individual titles, introducing an English-speaking audience to Japanese video game scholarship while also extending postcolonial and philosophical readings to the Japanese game text. In a three-pronged approach, the collection uses these analyses to look at genre, representation, and liminality, engaging with a multitude of concepts including stereotypes, intersectionality, and the political and social effects of JRPGs on players and industry conventions. Broadly, this collection considers JRPGs as networked systems, including evolved iterations of MMORPGs and card collecting “social games” for mobile devices. Scholars of media studies, game studies, Asian studies, and Japanese culture will find this book particularly useful.
Download or read book Toward a Gameic World written by Ben Whaley and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2023-05-03 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the ways in which Japanese video games engage with social issues and national traumas
Download or read book Hideo Kojima written by Bryan Hikari Hartzheim and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2023-08-24 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the influential work of Hideo Kojima, creator of cinematic titles such as the blockbuster Metal Gear Solid franchise, which has moved over 50 million units globally, as well as Snatcher, Policenauts, and Death Stranding. As the architect of the Metal Gear Solid franchise, Kojima is synonymous with the “stealth game” genre, where tension and excitement is created from players avoiding enemies rather than confronting them. Through the franchise, Kojima also helped to bridge the gap between games and other forms of media, arguing that games could be deep experiences that unearthed complex emotions from players on the same level as films or novels. Drawing on archives of interviews in English and Japanese with Kojima and his team, as well as academic discourses of social/political games and cinematic narrative/world-building, this book examines Kojima's progressive game design as it applies to four key areas: socially-relevant narratives, cinematic aesthetics, thematically-connected systems, and reflexive spaces.
Download or read book New Perspectives on Imagology written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-11-14 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With this volume, the editors Katharina Edtstadler, Sandra Folie, and Gianna Zocco propose an extension of the traditional conception of imagology as a theory and method for studying the cultural construction and literary representation of national, usually European characters. Consisting of an instructive introduction and 21 articles, the book relates this sub-field of comparative literature to contemporary political developments and enriches it with new interdisciplinary, transnational, intersectional, and intermedial perspectives. The contributions offer [1] a reconsideration and update of the field’s methods, genres, and theoretical frames; [2] trans-/post-national, migratory, and marginalized perspectives beyond the European nation-state; [3] insights into geopolitical dichotomies such as Orient/Occident; [4] intersectional approaches considering the entanglements of national images with notions of age, class, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity/race; [5] investigations of the role of national images in visual narratives and music.
Download or read book Speculative Everything written by Anthony Dunne and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2013-12-06 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How to use design as a tool to create not only things but ideas, to speculate about possible futures. Today designers often focus on making technology easy to use, sexy, and consumable. In Speculative Everything, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby propose a kind of design that is used as a tool to create not only things but ideas. For them, design is a means of speculating about how things could be—to imagine possible futures. This is not the usual sort of predicting or forecasting, spotting trends and extrapolating; these kinds of predictions have been proven wrong, again and again. Instead, Dunne and Raby pose “what if” questions that are intended to open debate and discussion about the kind of future people want (and do not want). Speculative Everything offers a tour through an emerging cultural landscape of design ideas, ideals, and approaches. Dunne and Raby cite examples from their own design and teaching and from other projects from fine art, design, architecture, cinema, and photography. They also draw on futurology, political theory, the philosophy of technology, and literary fiction. They show us, for example, ideas for a solar kitchen restaurant; a flypaper robotic clock; a menstruation machine; a cloud-seeding truck; a phantom-limb sensation recorder; and devices for food foraging that use the tools of synthetic biology. Dunne and Raby contend that if we speculate more—about everything—reality will become more malleable. The ideas freed by speculative design increase the odds of achieving desirable futures.
Download or read book Constellation Games written by Leonard Richardson and published by . This book was released on 2012-04 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First contact isn't all fun and games. Ariel Blum is pushing thirty and doesn't have much to show for it. His computer programming skills are producing nothing but pony-themed video games for little girls. His love life is a slow-motion train wreck, and whenever he tries to make something of his life, he finds himself back on the couch, replaying the games of his youth. Then the aliens show up. Out of the sky comes the Constellation: a swarm of anarchist anthropologists, exploring our seas, cataloguing our plants, editing our wikis, and eating our Twinkies. No one knows how to respond--except for nerds like Ariel who've been reading, role-playing and wargaming first-contact scenarios their entire lives. Ariel sees the aliens' computers, and he knows that wherever there are computers, there are video games. Ariel just wants to start a business translating alien games so they can be played on human computers. But a simple cultural exchange turns up ancient secrets, government conspiracies, and unconventional anthropology techniques that threaten humanity as we know it. If Ariel wants his species to have a future, he's going to have to take the step that nothing on Earth could make him take. He'll have to grow up.
Download or read book Software Takes Command written by Lev Manovich and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-07-04 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers the first look at the aesthetics of contemporary design from the theoretical perspectives of media theory and 'software studies'.
Download or read book The Playful Citizen written by René Glas and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume collects current research by academics and practitioners on playful citizen participation through digital media technologies.
Download or read book The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress written by Robert A. Heinlein and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1997-06-15 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science fiction-roman.
Download or read book Manga s Cultural Crossroads written by Jaqueline Berndt and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-03-14 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the art and literary form of manga, this volume examines the intercultural exchanges that have shaped manga during the twentieth century and how manga’s culturalization is related to its globalization. Through contributions from leading scholars in the fields of comics and Japanese culture, it describes "manga culture" in two ways: as a fundamentally hybrid culture comprised of both subcultures and transcultures, and as an aesthetic culture which has eluded modernist notions of art, originality, and authorship. The latter is demonstrated in a special focus on the best-selling manga franchise, NARUTO.
Download or read book General Will 2 0 written by Hiroki Azuma and published by Kodansha USA. This book was released on 2014-11-25 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stay informed. Talk about the issues. Always be engaged. Liberal societies have encouraged their members to take part—or at least interest—in politics. Yet, even in developed nations where it is said to work, the democratic process as we know it routinely fails to give voice, on the one hand, and to appeal at all, on the other hand, to a good number of citizens. Whatever countervailing hopes the worldwide web gave rise to in its dawning years, far from restoring the “public sphere” of yore, the internet has completed its fragmentation. According to Japanese thinker Hiroki Azuma, the way forward must be sought through what network technology is actually good at: aggregating and processing the traces we leave (without always meaning to) every time we wade into the world of connectivity. Harking back to Rousseau and his idea of the general will, dropping by Freud and his discovery of the unconscious, taking inspiration from Google and the tenor of its innovations, revisiting Christopher Alexander and his highway planning, and making curious bedfellows of Twitter, Rorty, and Nozick, General Will 2.0 is a wild ride bound to delight not just citizens who “care” but those who find doing so to be increasingly difficult and false.
Download or read book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind written by Julian Jaynes and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2000-08-15 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry
Download or read book Gaming written by Alexander R. Galloway and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2006-05-27 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Video games have been a central feature of the cultural landscape for over twenty years and now rival older media like movies, television, and music in popularity and cultural influence. Yet there have been relatively few attempts to understand the video game as an independent medium. Most such efforts focus on the earliest generation of text-based adventures (Zork, for example) and have little to say about such visually and conceptually sophisticated games as Final Fantasy X, Shenmue, Grand Theft Auto, Halo, and The Sims, in which players inhabit elaborately detailed worlds and manipulate digital avatars with a vast—and in some cases, almost unlimited—array of actions and choices. In Gaming, Alexander Galloway instead considers the video game as a distinct cultural form that demands a new and unique interpretive framework. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines, particularly critical theory and media studies, he analyzes video games as something to be played rather than as texts to be read, and traces in five concise chapters how the “algorithmic culture” created by video games intersects with theories of visuality, realism, allegory, and the avant-garde. If photographs are images and films are moving images, then, Galloway asserts, video games are best defined as actions. Using examples from more than fifty video games, Galloway constructs a classification system of action in video games, incorporating standard elements of gameplay as well as software crashes, network lags, and the use of cheats and game hacks. In subsequent chapters, he explores the overlap between the conventions of film and video games, the political and cultural implications of gaming practices, the visual environment of video games, and the status of games as an emerging cultural form. Together, these essays offer a new conception of gaming and, more broadly, of electronic culture as a whole, one that celebrates and does not lament the qualities of the digital age. Alexander R. Galloway is assistant professor of culture and communication at New York University and author of Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization.
Download or read book Halo and Philosophy written by Luke Cuddy and published by Open Court Publishing. This book was released on 2011 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "To the uninitiated--and even some initiates--First Person Shooter (FPS) games are sordid exercises in mindless violence, destroying the sensibilities of teenage videogame addicts. But there's more to Halo than this superficial stereotype. For many former youthful devotees, Halo has been the cosmic bridge to understanding and even wisdom." --
