Many of today's most commercially successful videogames, from Call of Duty to Company of Heroes, are war-themed titles that play out in what are framed as authentic real-world settings inspired by recent news headlines or drawn from history. While such games are marketed as authentic representations of war, they often provide a selective form of realism that eschews problematic, yet salient aspects of war. In addition, changes in the way Western states wage and frame actual wars makes contemporary conflicts increasingly resemble videogames when perceived from the vantage point of Western audiences. This interdisciplinary volume brings together scholars from games studies, media and cultural studies, politics and international relations, and related fields to examine the complex relationships between military-themed videogames and real-world conflict, and to consider how videogames might deal with history, memory, and conflict in alternative ways. It asks: What is the role of videogames in the formation and negotiation of cultural memory of past wars? How do game narratives and designs position the gaming subject in relation to history, war and militarism? And how far do critical, anti-war/peace games offer an alternative or challenge to mainstream commercial titles?

The newest addition to our Influential Video Game Designers series explores the work of Todd Howard, executive producer at Bethesda Studios, known for how he consistently pushes the boundaries of open-world gaming and player agency. Howard’s games create worlds in which players can design their own characters and tell their own stories. While many games tell the story of the game’s main character, Todd Howard’s worldbuilding approach to game design focuses more on telling the story of the game’s world, whether it be the high fantasy environments of the Elder Scrolls series or the post-apocalyptic wasteland of the Fallout series. This focus on sculpting the world allows for remarkable amounts of player freedom and choice in an expansive game environment by creating a landscape rich with open opportunity. Drawing on both academic discussions of narrative, world design, and game design, as well as on officially released interviews, speeches, and presentations given by Howard and other designers at Bethesda Games, Wendi Sierra highlights three core areas set Howard’s design perspective apart from other designers: micronarratives, iterative design, and the sharing of design tools. Taken as a whole, these three elements demonstrate how Howard has used a worldbuilding perspective to shape his games. In doing so, he has impacted not only Bethesda Studios, but also the landscape of game design itself.

Das Lehrbuch gibt eine anwendungsorientierte Einfuhrung in alle wichtigen Teilbereiche des Operation Research. Im Einzelnen werden lineare, ganzzahlige und nichtlineare Optimierungsansatze, Methoden der Projektplanung und Netzplantechnik, stochastische Modelle sowie nichtexakte Losungsverfahren behandelt. Die jeweiligen Methoden werden anhand zahlreicher betrieblicher Anwendungsbeispiele aus den Bereichen Produktion, Logistik, Marketing und Finanzwirtschaft illustriert. Entsprechende Ubungsaufgaben mit ausfuhrlichen Losungen tragen zur Vertiefung des Stoffes bei und helfen bei der Vorbereitung auf Klausuren.

Nash equilibrium is the central solution concept in Game Theory. Since Nash's original paper in 1951, it has found countless applications in modeling strategic behavior of traders in markets, (human) drivers and (electronic) routers in congested networks, nations in nuclear disarmament negotiations, and more. A decade ago, the relevance of this solution concept was called into question by computer scientists, who proved (under appropriate complexity assumptions) that computing a Nash equilibrium is an intractable problem. And if centralized, specially designed algorithms cannot find Nash equilibria, why should we expect distributed, selfish agents to converge to one? The remaining hope was that at least approximate Nash equilibria can be efficiently computed.Understanding whether there is an efficient algorithm for approximate Nash equilibrium has been the central open problem in this field for the past decade. In this book, we provide strong evidence that even finding an approximate Nash equilibrium is intractable. We prove several intractability theorems for different settings (two-player games and many-player games) and models (computational complexity, query complexity, and communication complexity). In particular, our main result is that under a plausible and natural complexity assumption ("Exponential Time Hypothesis for PPAD"), there is no polynomial-time algorithm for finding an approximate Nash equilibrium in two-player games. The problem of approximate Nash equilibrium in a two-player game poses a unique technical challenge: it is a member of the class PPAD, which captures the complexity of several fundamental total problems, i.e., problems that always have a solution; and it also admits a quasipolynomial time algorithm. Either property alone is believed to place this problem far below NP-hard problems in the complexity hierarchy; having both simultaneously places it just above P, at what can be called the frontier of intractability. Indeed, the tools we develop in this book to advance on this frontier are useful for proving hardness of approximation of several other important problems whose complexity lies between P and NP: Brouwer's fixed point, market equilibrium, CourseMatch (A-CEEI), densest k-subgraph, community detection, VC dimension and Littlestone dimension, and signaling in zero-sum games.