A host of digital affordances, including reduced cost production tools, open distribution platforms, and ubiquitous connectivity, have engendered the growth of indie games among makers and users, forcing critics to reconsider the question of who makes games and why. Taking seriously this new mode of cultural produciton compells analysts to reconsider the blurred boundaries and relations of makers, users and texts as well as their respective relationship to cultural power and hierarchy. The contributions to Indie Games in the Digital Age consider these questions and examine a series of firms, makers, games and scenes, ranging from giants like Nintendo and Microsoft to grassroots games like Cards Against Humanity and Stardew Valley, to chart more precisely the productive and instructive disruption that this new site of cultural production offers.

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.

The description for this book, Advances in Game Theory. (AM-52), will be forthcoming.

The description for this book, Contributions to the Theory of Games (AM-40), Volume IV, will be forthcoming.

This book gives a concise presentation of the mathematical foundations of Game Theory, with an emphasis on strategic analysis linked to information and dynamics. It is largely self-contained, with all of the key tools and concepts defined in the text. Combining the basics of Game Theory, such as value existence theorems in zero-sum games and equilibrium existence theorems for non-zero-sum games, with a selection of important and more recent topics such as the equilibrium manifold and learning dynamics, the book quickly takes the reader close to the state of the art. Applications to economics, biology, and learning are included, and the exercises, which often contain noteworthy results, provide an important complement to the text. Based on lectures given in Paris over several years, this textbook will be useful for rigorous, up-to-date courses on the subject. Apart from an interest in strategic thinking and a taste for mathematical formalism, the only prerequisite for reading the book is a solid knowledge of mathematics at the undergraduate level, including basic analysis, linear algebra, and probability.

This book provides a timely overview of fuzzy graph theory, laying the foundation for future applications in a broad range of areas. It introduces readers to fundamental theories, such as Craine's work on fuzzy interval graphs, fuzzy analogs of Marczewski's theorem, and the Gilmore and Hoffman characterization. It also introduces them to the Fulkerson and Gross characterization and Menger's theorem, the applications of which will be discussed in a forthcoming book by the same authors. This book also discusses in detail important concepts such as connectivity, distance and saturation in fuzzy graphs. Thanks to the good balance between the basics of fuzzy graph theory and new findings obtained by the authors, the book offers an excellent reference guide for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in mathematics, engineering and computer science, and an inspiring read for all researchers interested in new developments in fuzzy logic and applied mathematics.