This in-depth resource teaches you to craft mechanics that generate challenging, enjoyable, and well-balanced gameplay. You’ll discover at what stages to prototype, test, and implement mechanics in games and learn how to visualize and simulate game mechanics in order to design better games. Along the way, you’ll practice what you’ve learned with hands-on lessons. A free downloadable simulation tool developed by Joris Dormans is also available in order to follow along with exercises in the ...

**A New York Times BestsellerFrom one of our leading technology thinkers and writers, a guide through the twelve technological imperatives that will shape the next thirty years and transform our lives**Much of what will happen in the next thirty years is inevitable, driven by technological trends that are already in motion. In this fascinating, provocative new book, Kevin Kelly provides an optimistic road map for the future, showing how the coming changes in our li...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • How will Artificial Intelligence affect crime, war, justice, jobs, society and our very sense of being human? The rise of AI has the potential to transform our future more than any other technology—and there’s nobody better qualified or situated to explore that future than Max Tegmark, an MIT professor who’s helped mainstream research on how to keep AI beneficial.How can we grow our prosperity through automation without leaving ...

He is one of the most famous, most wealthy people on the planet, and yet he remains little-known and understood as a personality. At long last, Paul McCartney is the subject of a major, deeply researched, psychologically acute biography. It tells a story that will illuminate and surprise.The publication finds McCartney - who turns 70 in 2012 - revitalized as a performer (touring with a set of mostly Beatles songs) and a man buffeted by profound changes in recent years: the death of...

Elon Musk named Our Final Invention one of five books everyone should read about the future—a Huffington Post Definitive Tech Book of 2013.Artificial Intelligence helps choose what books you buy, what movies you see, and even who you date. It puts the "smart" in your smartphone and soon it will drive your car. It makes most of the trades on Wall Street, and controls vital energy, water, and transportation infrastructure. But Artificial Intelligence can also...

We typically think of psychics as "special" or "gifted" with unusual abilities. But David Morehouse teaches that all human beings, including you, have the inborn capacity for Remote Viewing—the ability to see across space and time.With Remote Viewing: The Complete User's Manual for Coordinate Remote Viewing, he presents comprehensive instruction in this scientifically designed method for tapping your ability to transcend your physical senses. By adapting the training he un...

Drawn from the pages of Scientific American and collected here for the first time, this work contains updated and condensed information, made accessible to a general popular science audience, on the subject of artificial intelligence.

Weighing in from the cutting-edge frontiers of science, today’s most forward-thinking minds explore the rise of “machines that think.”Stephen Hawking recently made headlines by noting, “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.” Others, conversely, have trumpeted a new age of “superintelligence” in which smart devices will exponentially extend human capacities. No longer just a matter of science-fiction fantasy (2001, Blade Runner, The T...

Exploring the cultural and technical influence of the Atari VCS video game console, with examples from 6 famous game cartridges like Pac-Man, Combat, and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back!The Atari Video Computer System dominated the home video game market so completely that “Atari” became the generic term for a video game console. The Atari VCS was affordable and offered the flexibility of changeable cartridges. Nearly a thousand of the...

Robotics is a key technology in the modern world. Robots are a well-established part of manufacturing and warehouse automation, assembling cars or washing machines, and, for example, moving goods to and from storage racks for Internet mail order. More recently robots have taken their first steps into homes and hospitals, and seen spectacular success in planetary exploration. Yet, despite these successes, robots have failed to live up to the predictions of the 1950s and 60s, when it was wid...

Many aspiring game designers have crippling misconceptions about the process involved in creating a game from scratch, believing a "big idea" is all that is needed to get started. But game design requires action as well as thought, and proper training and practice to do so skillfully. In this indispensible guide, a published commercial game designer and longtime teacher offers practical instruction in the art of video and tabletop game design. The topics explored include the varying types ...

**An illuminating look at smart technology, by the legendary designer and author of The Design of Everyday Things.“Written with wit, authority and the pragmatic, everyman touch that probably made Norman so good at his job in the first place.”—BBC Focus Magazine**In The Design of Future Things, bestselling author Donald A. Norman presents a revealing examination of smart technology, from smooth-talking GPS units to cantankerous refrigerators. Explo...