This book will sketch the dynamics of infrastructure in video games, focusing on the relationship between game rules, fictional world, and player interaction. It will discuss a variety of commercial video games, both mainstream and somewhat niche, that use infrastructure in different ways: Control, Wolfenstein, Fallout, This War of Mine, Exocolonist, Cyberpunk, and Frostpunk.Video games offer a particularly rich field f...

There is a broad consensus that digital narrative is "spatial," but what this critical term means and how it is used varies greatly depending on the discipline from which it is approached. Digital Narrative Spaces brings together essays by prominent scholars in electronic literature and other forms of digital authorship to explore the relationship between story and space across these disciplines. This volume includes an introduction with Marie-Laure Ryan’s typology of space, follo...

In Playing at Narratology Daniel Punday bridges the worlds of digital media studies and narrative studies by arguing that digital media allows us to see unresolved tensions, ambiguities, and gaps in core narrative concepts. Rather than developing new terms to account for web-based storytelling, Punday uses established narrative forms to better understand how digital media exposes faulty gaps in narrative theory. Punday’s Playing at Narratology shows that artists, video ga...

This book examines the common metaphor that equates computing and writing, tracing it from the naming of devices (“notebook” computers) through the design of user interfaces (the “desktop”) to how we describe the work of programmers (“writing” code). Computing as Writing ponders both the implications and contradictions of the metaphor.During the past decade, analysis of digital media honed its focus on particular hardware and software platforms. Daniel Punday argues that s...

This priceless teaching tool features more than 70 proven-effective programs from the country’s leading graphic design schools. Spanning from traditional, bricks and mortar” approaches to the ever-widening digital frontier of graphic design, these syllabi include detailed introductions, weekly breakdowns, project suggestions, and selected readings, as well as offer valued background material on the history, social responsibility, and cultural impact of design. More than an instructor’s gu...

A stimulating, eclectic accountof new media that finds its origins in old media, particularly the cinema.In this book Lev Manovich offers the first systematic and rigorous theory of new media. He places new media within the histories of visual and media cultures of the last few centuries. He discusses new media's reliance on conventions of old media, such as the rectangular frame and mobile camera, and shows how new media works create the illusion of reality, addre...

In Always On, Naomi S. Baron reveals that online and mobile technologies--including instant messaging, cell phones, multitasking, Facebook, blogs, and wikis--are profoundly influencing how we read and write, speak and listen, but not in the ways we might suppose. Baron draws on a decade of research to provide an eye-opening look at language in an online and mobile world. She reveals for instance that email, IM, and text messaging have had surprisingly little impact on student writing. Electro...

MP3: The Meaning of a Format recounts the hundred-year history of the world's most common format for recorded audio. Understanding the historical meaning of the MP3 format entails rethinking the place of digital technologies in the larger universe of twentieth-century communication history, from hearing research conducted by the telephone industry in the 1910s, through the mid-century development of perceptual coding (the technology underlying the MP3), to the format's promiscuous...

Research consistently shows how through the years more of our time gets spent using media, how multitasking our media has become a regular feature of everyday life, and that consuming media for most people increasingly takes place alongside producing media.Media Life is a primer on how we may think of our lives as lived in rather than with media. The book uses the way media function today as a prism to understand key issues in contemporary society, where reality is open so...

Like Henry Petroski’s The Pencil, David Levy’s Scrolling Forward takes a common, everyday object, the document, and illuminates what it reveals about us, both in the past and in the digital age.We are surrounded daily by documents of all kinds-letters and credit card receipts, business memos and books, television images and web pages-yet we rarely stop to reflect on their significance. Now, in this period of digital transition, our written forms as well as our rea...

This second edition of Jay David Bolter's classic text expands on the objectives of the original volume, illustrating the relationship of print to new media, and examining how hypertext and other forms of electronic writing refashion or "remediate" the forms and genres of print. Reflecting the dynamic changes in electronic technology since the first edition, this revision incorporates the Web and other current standards of electronic writing. As a text for students in composition, new tech...

"Shows the reader how to harness new technology while upholding the highest standards of research. The result is a joy to read . . . a boon for students." —Robert J. Sampson, professor of the social sciences at Harvard UniversityToday's researchers have access to more information than ever before. Yet the new material is both overwhelming in quantity and variable in quality. How can scholars survive these twin problems and produce groundbreaking research using the p...