San Antonio College Library

"Millions of children visit virtual worlds every day. In such virtual play spaces as Habbo Hotel, Toontown, and Whyville, kids chat with friends from school, meet new people, construct avatars, and earn and spend virtual currency. In 'Connected Play', Yasmin Kafai and Deborah Fields investigate what happens when kids play in virtual worlds, how this matters for their offline lives, and what this means for the design of educational opportunities in...

Surveys the cultural, political, and economic context of how this dynamic industry evolved, emphasizing both artistic and technical achievements from around the world--from Hollywood to Tokyo, from Moscow to Sydney. Featuring a timeline for each of its six parts, A New History of Animation provides readers with a clear and accessible chronology of events. A Global Storyline, highlighting the major themes of the era, opens each chapter, and an end-of-book...

Computers have changed our lives; with virtual reality, they will change our very experience, recreating it in an image of our choosing. That, at least, is what the champions of virtual reality claim. It will not simply reshape our view of technology, they say, but our view of ourselves and the world we live in. It is about the increasing power of information technology to create simulated environments, new universes that are neither actual nor fictional,...

The strong psychological power of games can have both positive and negative consequences for the workplace. That's why it's important to put them into practice correctly from the beginning--and Reeves and Read explain how by showing which good design principles are a powerful antidote to the addictive and stress-inducing potential of games.

"Deeply insightful and significant investigation of how the science and rhetoric of cybernetics have reshaped the boundaries of human identity." Village Voice.

Most writing on cyberculture is dominated by two almost mutually exclusive visions: the heroic image of the male outlaw hacker and the utopian myth of a gender-free cyber world. reload offers an alternative picture of cyberspace as a complex and contradictory place where there is oppression as well as liberation. It shows how cyberpunk's revolutionary claims conceal its ultimate conservatism on matters of class, gender, and race. The cyberfeminists...