Author: Kurt Lancaster
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 9780786406340
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 202
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Book Description
This book offers ten chapters examining contemporary fantasy entertainment forms that use virtual environments to amuse the participant. Called virtual fantasies by the author (as opposed to virtual realities), these entertainment forms are categorized into three main groupings. All include performance and imaginary environments as essential elements--participants are often simultaneously performers and audience. Many involve computer technology such as multimedia, digitized video, and online chatting. Part I covers imaginative fantasy entertainments, where the participants are required to use their imaginations to see the virtual environment. These include paper and pencil role-playing games (Dungeons and Dragons), live-action roleplaying games (International Fantasy Gaming Society rules), and collectible card games (Magic: The Gathering). Part II covers physical fantasy entertainments, where the participants need little imagination to see the virtual environment. These include computer games (Star Trek: Klingon), theme park rides (Disneyland's Star Tours), and immersive museums (National Museum of the American Indian). Part III covers social fantasy entertainments, where participants have built communities based upon the virtual environment (Star Trek fandom, Star Wars influencing Ronald Reagan's Pax Americana).
Author: Chris Bishop
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496808517
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244
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Book Description
The comic book has become an essential icon of the American Century, an era defined by optimism in the face of change and by recognition of the intrinsic value of democracy and modernization. For many, the Middle Ages stand as an antithesis to these ideals, and yet medievalist comics have emerged and endured, even thrived alongside their superhero counterparts. Chris Bishop presents a reception history of medievalist comics, setting them against a greater backdrop of modern American history. From its genesis in the 1930s to the present, Bishop surveys the medievalist comic, its stories, characters, settings, and themes drawn from the European Middle Ages. Hal Foster's Prince Valiant emerged from an America at odds with monarchy, but still in love with King Arthur. Green Arrow remains the continuation of a long fascination with Robin Hood that has become as central to the American identity as it was to the British. The Mighty Thor reflects the legacy of Germanic migration into the United States. The rugged individualism of Conan the Barbarian owes more to the western cowboy than it does to the continental knight-errant. In the narrative of Red Sonja, we can trace a parallel history of feminism. Bishop regards these comics as not merely happenchance, but each success (Prince Valiant and The Mighty Thor) or failure (Beowulf: Dragon Slayer) as a result and an indicator of certain American preoccupations amid a larger cultural context. Intrinsically modernist paragons of pop-culture ephemera, American comics have ironically continued to engage with the European Middle Ages. Bishop illuminates some of the ways in which we use an imagined past to navigate the present and plots some possible futures as we valiantly shape a new century.
Author: Helen Young
Publisher: Cambria Press
ISBN: 1621967476
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
rom advertisements to amusement parks, themed restaurants, and Renaissance fairs twenty-first century popular culture is strewn with reimaginings of the Middle Ages. They are nowhere more prevalent, however, than in the films, television series, books, and video games of speculative genres: fantasy and science fiction. Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit film trilogies and George R. R. Martin's multimedia Game of Thrones franchise are just two of the most widely known and successful fantasy conglomerates of recent decades. Medievalism has often been understood as a defining feature of fantasy, and as the antithesis of science fiction, but such constructs vastly underestimate the complexities of both genres and their interactions. "Medieval" has multiple meanings in fantasy and science fiction, which shift with genre convention, and which bring about their own changes as authors and audiences engage with what has gone before in the recent and deeper pasts. Earlier volumes have examined some of the ways in which contemporary popular culture re-imagines the Middle Ages, offering broad overviews, but none considers fantasy, science fiction, or the two together. The focused approach of this collection provides a directed pathway into the myriad medievalisms of modern popular culture. By engaging directly with genre(s), this book acknowledges that medievalist creative texts and practices do not occur in a vacuum, but are shaped by multiple cultural forces and concerns; medievalism is never just about the Middle Ages.
Author: Robert John Rehak
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479856703
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
Introduction: Seeing past the state of the art -- That which survives: design networks and blueprint culture between fandom and franchise -- Used universes and immaculate realities: appropriation and authorship in the age of previz -- Chains of evidence: augmented performance before and after the digital -- Microgenres in migration: special effects and transmedia travel -- Conclusion: The effects of special effects.
Author: Drew Davidson
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 0557285658
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 296
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Book Description
This text is an introduction to the future of mass media and mass communications - cross-media communications. Cross-media is explained through the presentation and analysis of contemporary examples and project-based tutorials in cross-media development. The text introduces fundamental terms and concepts, and provides a solid overview of cross-media communications, one that builds from a general introduction to a specific examination of media and genres to a discussion of the concepts involved in designing and developing cross-media communications. There is also an accompanying DVD-ROM full of hands-on exercises that shows how cross-media can be applied. For the DVD-ROM: http: //www.lulu.com/content/817927
Author: Frans Johansson
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
ISBN: 1633692957
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 286
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Book Description
Why do so many world-changing insights come from people with little or no related experience? Charles Darwin was a geologist when he proposed the theory of evolution. And it was an astronomer who finally explained what happened to the dinosaurs. Frans Johansson's The Medici Effect shows how breakthrough ideas most often occur when we bring concepts from one field into a new, unfamiliar territory and offers examples of how we can turn the ideas we discover into path-breaking innovations. Clayton M. Christensen, bestselling author of The Innovator's Dilemma, has described The Medici Effect as "one of the most insightful books about managing innovation I have ever read. Its assertion that breakthrough principles of creativity occur at novel intersections is an enduring principle of creativity that should guide innovators in every field." Now with a new preface and a discussion guide, and a foreword by Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile, The Medici Effect is a timeless classic that will help you reach your innovative peak.
Author: Markus Montola
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 0080889794
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
Games are no longer confined to card tables and computer screens. Emmy award winning games like "The Fallen Alternate Reality Game" (based on the ABC show) or "The Lost Experience" (based on the CBS hit show)- are pervasive games in that they blur traditional boundaries of game play. This book gives game designers the tools they need to create cutting edge pervasive games.
Author: José P. Zagal
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040029760
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 588
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Book Description
This Handbook provides a comprehensive guide to the latest research on role-playing games (RPGs) across disciplines, cultures, and media in one single, accessible volume. Collaboratively authored by more than 40 key scholars, it traces the history of RPGs, from wargaming precursors to tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons to the rise of live-action role-play and contemporary computer RPG and massively multiplayer online RPG franchises, like Baldur’s Gate, Genshin Impact, and World of Warcraft. Individual chapters survey the perspectives, concepts, and findings on RPGs from key disciplines, like performance studies, sociology, psychology, education, economics, game design, literary studies, and more. Other chapters integrate insights from RPG studies around broadly significant topics, like worldbuilding, immersion, and player-character relations, as well as explore actual play and streaming, diversity, equity, inclusion, jubensha, therapeutic uses of RPGs, and storygames, journaling games, and other forms of text-based RPGs. Each chapter includes definitions of key terms and recommended readings to help students and scholars new to RPG studies find their way into this interdisciplinary field. A comprehensive reference volume ideal for students and scholars of game studies and immersive experiences and those looking to learn more about the ever-growing, interdisciplinary field of RPG studies.
Author: Kimberly Tony Korol-Evans
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786454695
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 217
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Book Description
This ethnographic study of contemporary American Renaissance fairs focuses on the Maryland Renaissance Festival, in which participants recreate sixteenth-century England through performances of theater, combat-at-arms, processions, street hawking, and meticulously faithful historical reconstructions. It is also partly an autobiographical account of interactive improvisation, subcultures within the festival framework, the delineation between living history and historical elaboration, and a new understanding of performers and patrons.
Author: Carl A. Young
Publisher: IAP
ISBN: 1623960878
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 342
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Book Description
This book brings together the voices of leading English Education researchers who work to offer views into the changing landscape of English as a result of the use of digital media in classrooms, out of school settings, universities and other contexts in which readers and writers work. But, as in most useful texts, the purpose is more nuanced and far reaching than simply offering a glimpse into where we currently find ourselves as a field. In sum, the collection brings together and interweaves what we are coming to know and understand about teaching English within a shifting digital landscape as well as the implications for teacher education and the discipline of English Education specifically. The intended audience for this particular book is English educators, doctoral candidates in the field of English education, researchers and scholars in the field, and English language arts teachers – especially those interested in the impact digital technologies can have in our field.
