In 2011, Markus Persson was a bored IT-developer in Stockholm. In the evenings, he toiled away on a labour of love: a game with a tiny but dedicated online following. It was called Minecraft and Markus released it to the world in early 2009. The game itself looks deceptively simple. It resembles a digital version of Lego – bricks stacked on top of each other, giving players a world where they build whatever structures their mind can conjure. A breath of fresh air compared to the i...

FEATURING: IAN BOGOST - LEIGH ALEXANDER - ZOE QUINN - ANITA SARKEESIAN & KATHERINE CROSS - IAN SHANAHAN - ANNA ANTHROPY - EVAN NARCISSE - HUSSEIN IBRAHIM - CARA ELLISON & BRENDAN KEOGH - DAN GOLDING - DAVID JOHNSTON - WILLIAM KNOBLAUCH - MERRITT KOPAS - OLA WIKANDERThe State of Play is a call to consider the high stakes of video game culture and how our digital and real lives collide. Here, video games are not hobbies or pure recreation; they are ...

Over the past forty years, the health humanities, previously called the medical humanities, has emerged as one of the most exciting fields for interdisciplinary scholarship, advancing humanistic inquiry into bioethics, human rights, health care, and the uses of technology. It has also helped inspire medical practitioners to engage in deeper reflection about the human elements of their practice.In Health Humanities Reader, editors Therese Jones, Delese Wear, and Lester D. F...

Focussing on proven techniques for most real-world data sets, this book presents an overview of the analysis of health data involving a geographic component, in a way that is accessible to any health scientist or student comfortable with large data sets and basic statistics, but not necessarily with any specialized training in geographic information systems (GIS). Providing clear, straightforward explanations with worldwide examples and solutions, the book describes applications of GIS in ...

REDISCOVER THE FORGOTTEN ART OF ASKING IN THIS NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING BOOK'Amanda Palmer joyfully shows a generation how to change their lives' Caitlin Moran'To read Amanda Palmer's remarkable memoir about asking and giving is to tumble headlong into her world' Elizabeth Gilbert'The Art of Asking is a book about cultivating trust and getting as close as possible to lov...

The instant New York Times bestseller from “queen of the geeks” Felicia Day, You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) is a “relentlessly funny and surprisingly inspirational” (Forbes) memoir about her unusual upbringing, her rise to internet stardom, and embracing her weirdness to find her place in the world.When Felicia Day was a girl, all she wanted was to connect with other kids (desperately). Growing up in the Deep South, where she...

The final gripping instalment of the bestselling Four Streets trilogy which began with THE FOUR STREETS and continued in HIDE HER NAME.Christmas morning, 1963. Fifteen-year-old Kitty Doherty gives birth in a cold, unfriendly Irish convent. She knows her beautiful baby boy presents a huge danger to her family's Catholic community back in Liverpool's Four Streets. When her baby is adopted by a wealth...

People spent the twentieth century obsessed with the future. We created technologies that would help connect us faster, gather news, map the planet, and compile knowledge. We strove for an instantaneous network where time and space could be compressed. Well, the future's arrived. We live in a continuous now enabled by Twitter, email, and a so-called real-time technological shift. Yet this "now" is an elusive goal that we can never quite reach. And the dissonance between our digital selves ...

Learn How to Make Your First Draft Easy!Award-winning author K.M. Weiland’s previous book, the bestselling Outlining Your Novel, showed writers how to embrace outlines in a way that makes the writing process fun, inspiring, and easy.Now it’s time to put those lessons to use! Building upon the principles you’ve already learned, the Outlining Your Novel Workbook presents a guided approach to getting the bones of your story down on paper, ide...

Tom Bissell is a prizewinning writer who published three widely acclaimed books before the age of thirty-four. He is also an obsessive gamer who has spent untold hours in front of his various video game consoles, playing titles such as Far Cry 2, Left 4 Dead, BioShock, and Oblivion for, literally, days. If you are reading this flap copy, the same thing can probably be said of you, or of someone you know.Until recently, Bissell was somewhat reluctant to admit to hi...

From the ‘Wired’ and ‘New York Times Magazine’ contributor, a brilliant examination into how the internet is profoundly changing the way we think.In this groundbreaking book, Clive Thompson argues that the internet is boosting our brainpower, encouraging new ways of thinking, and making us more – not less – intelligent as is so often claimed.Our lives have been changed irrevocably by the rise of the internet. But as we rely more and more on machines to help us think, our th...

Do you feel overwhelmed trying to revise your novel? Faced with a hot mess of rough draft, maybe you feel confused, unsure of what to fix -- or rather, what to fix first! Editing fiction takes a slightly different mindset than writing the first rough pass of a novel. There are a lot of moving parts in a work of fiction. The trick is to not try and tackle everything at once. ROCK YOUR REVISIONS: A Simple System for Revising Your Novel