Since the emergence of digital game studies, a number of debates have engaged scholars. The debate between ludic (play) and narrative (story) paradigms remains the one that famously ""never happened."" This collection of new essays critically frames that debate and urges game scholars to consider it central to the field. The contributors examine various digital games, assessing the applicability of play versus narrative approaches or considering the failure of each. The essays consider the broader history of game studies, while applying notions of play and story to recent games in an attempt to foster serious debate and analysis.

As part of the Pocket Primer series, this book provides an overview of the major concepts to program Microsoft Access/VBA. The focus of this book is on basic programming instructions for both Access 2013 and previous versions. Features: Provides an overview of the most important Access/VBA programming techniques Covers both Access 2013 and 2010 versions Includes CD with source code, projects, and figures

This book takes the practicality of other "Gems" series such as "Graphics Gems" and "Game Programming Gems" and provide a quick reference for novice and expert programmers alike to swiftly track down a solution to a task needed for their VR project. Reading the book from cover to cover is not the expected use case, but being familiar with the territory from the Introduction and then jumping to the needed explanations is how the book will mostly be used. Each chapter (other than Introduction) will contain between 5 to 10 "tips", each of which is a self-contained explanation with implementation detail generally demonstrated as pseudo code, or in cases where it makes sense, actual code. Key Features Sections written by veteran virtual reality researchers and developers Usable code snipits that readers can put to immediate use in their own projects. Tips of value both to readers entering the field as well as those looking for solutions that expand their repertoire.

Have you ever wanted to learn how to program but never found quite the right book to get you started? Programming: A Primer gets you going straight away with the fundamentals of what programming is, basic programming with Python and the fundamental aspects of practical web development. In this book, you'll learn about:Programming: A Primer offers an easy way into coding for anyone with an interest in using technology to solve problems, whether a school or new undergraduate computer science student or a working professional. It gives everyone, regardless of background, the ideal foundations and motivation needed to get to grips with programming.A companion website can be found here: .

Have you ever wanted to learn how to program but never found quite the right book to get you started? Programming: A Primer gets you going straight away with the fundamentals of what programming is, basic programming with Python and the fundamental aspects of practical web development. In this book, you'll learn about:Programming: A Primer offers an easy way into coding for anyone with an interest in using technology to solve problems, whether a school or new undergraduate computer science student or a working professional. It gives everyone, regardless of background, the ideal foundations and motivation needed to get to grips with programming.A companion website can be found here: .

Imagine a time in the not too distant future when not only game companies but also the human resources, marketing and product development divisions of major corporations are hiring game designers. The time is coming when companies large and small, creative agencies, school systems, museums, libraries and public and governmental institutions will employ game designers to engage employees, customers, students and volunteers to generate new audiences and deepen commitments. The skills that a game designer brings, organizing and presenting a body of information in the most appropriate and entertaining way, are the ones needed by the twenty-first century organization. Designing Gamified Systems is a practical guide for practicing and aspiring game designers to put their unique and valuable skills to work to drive engagement, build motivation, and facilitate positive behavior.

Rather than the overused ideas of pervasive games or "gamification," this book uniquely focuses first and foremost on the partnership between the content expert or client and the game designer. It assumes that game systems are one more meaningful tool that can now be used to help organizations and individuals encourage people to care about them and support them. Providing a solid introduction to the fundamental principles of the game layer, it also offers a practical set of tools and activities to contextualize the practice within a variety of different scenarios. It includes interviews with industry leaders, content experts, game designers, museum professionals, and educators who are all using game practices and ideas in new and innovative ways. Catching a snapshot of this exciting moment while delivering enduring fundamentals, the book can be used in the classroom or can be read as a trade book, and will appeal to industry professionals, game designers and game design students."

You don't have to accept slow Ruby or Rails performance. In this comprehensive guide to Ruby optimization, you'll learn how to write faster Ruby code--but that's just the beginning. See exactly what makes Ruby and Rails code slow, and how to fix it. Alex Dymo will guide you through perils of memory and CPU optimization, profiling, measuring, performance testing, garbage collection, and tuning. You'll find that all those "hard" things aren't so difficult after all, and your code will run orders of magnitude faster. This is the first book ever that consolidates all the Ruby performance optimization advice in one place. It's your comprehensive guide to memory optimization, CPU optimization, garbage collector tuning, profiling, measurements, performance testing, and more. You'll go from performance rookie to expert. First, you'll learn the best practices for writing Ruby code that's easy not only on the CPU, but also on memory, and that doesn't trigger the dreaded garbage collector. You'll find out that garbage collection accounts for 80% of slowdowns, and often takes more than 50% of your program's execution time.And you'll discover the bottlenecks in Rails code and learn how selective attribute loading and preloading can mitigate the performance costs of ActiveRecord. As you advance to Ruby performance expert, you'll learn how profile your code, how to make sense out of profiler reports, and how to make optimization decisions based on them. You'll make sure slow code doesn't creep back into your Rails application by writing performance tests, and you'll learn the right way to benchmark Rails. And finally, you'll dive into the Ruby interpreter internals to really understand why garbage collection makes Ruby so slow, and how you can tune it up. What You Need: Some version of Ruby. The advice from this book applies to all modern Ruby versions from 1.9 to 2.2. 80% of the material will also be useful for legacy Ruby 1.8 users, and there is 1.8-specific advice as well.

Introduction to Computational Models with Python explains how to implement computational models using the flexible and easy-to-use Python programming language. The book uses the Python programming language interpreter and several packages from the huge Python Library that improve the performance of numerical computing, such as the Numpy and Scipy modules. The Python source code and data files are available on the author's website. The book's five sections present: An overview of problem solving and simple Python programs, introducing the basic models and techniques for designing and implementing problem solutions, independent of software and hardware tools Programming principles with the Python programming language, covering basic programming concepts, data definitions, programming structures with flowcharts and pseudo-code, solving problems, and algorithms Python lists, arrays, basic data structures, object orientation, linked lists, recursion, and running programs under Linux Implementation of computational models with Python using Numpy, with examples and case studies The modeling of linear optimization problems, from problem formulation to implementation of computational models This book introduces the principles of computational modeling as well as the approaches of multi- and interdisciplinary computing to beginners in the field. It provides the foundation for more advanced studies in scientific computing, including parallel computing using MPI, grid computing, and other methods and techniques used in high-performance computing.

One side-effect of having made great leaps in computing over the last few decades, is the resulting over-abundance in software tools created to solve the diverse problems. Problem solving with computers has, in consequence, become more demanding; instead of focusing on the problem when conceptualizing strategies to solve them, users are side-tracked by the pursuit of even more programming tools (as available).Computer-Based Problem Solving Process is a work intended to offer a systematic treatment to the theory and practice of designing, implementing, and using software tools during the problem solving process. This method is obtained by enabling computer systems to be more Intuitive with human logic rather than machine logic. Instead of software dedicated to computer experts, the author advocates an approach dedicated to computer users in general. This approach does not require users to have an advanced computer education, though it does advocate a deeper education of the computer user in his or her problem domain logic.This book is intended for system software teachers, designers and implementers of various aspects of system software, as well as readers who have made computers a part of their day-today problem solving.

Videogames and Agency explores the trend in videogames and their marketing to offer a player higher volumes, or even more distinct kinds, of player freedom. The book offers a new conceptual framework that helps us understand how this freedom to act is discussed by designers, and how that in turn reflects in their design principles. What can we learn from existing theories around agency? How do paratextual materials reflect design intention with regards to what the player can and cannot do in a videogame? How does game design shape the possibility space for player action? Through these questions and selected case studies that include AAA and independent games alike, the book presents a unique approach to studying agency that combines game design, game studies, and game developer discourse. By doing so, the book examines what discourses around player action, as well as a game's design can reveal about the nature of agency and videogame aesthetics. This book will appeal to readers specifically interested in videogames, such as game studies scholars or game designers, but also to media studies students and media and screen studies scholars less familiar with digital games.

Over the last three decades, Professor Peter Cheung has made significant contributions to a variety of areas, such as analogue and digital computer-aided design tools, high-level synthesis and hardware/software codesign, low-power and high-performance circuit architectures for signal and image processing, and mixed-signal integrated-circuit design.However, the area that has attracted his greatest attention is reconfigurable systems and their design, and his work has contributed to the transformation of this important and exciting discipline. This festschrift contains a unique collection of technical papers based on presentations at a workshop at Imperial College London in May 2013 celebrating Professor Cheung's 60th birthday. Renowned researchers who have been inspired and motivated by his outstanding research in the area of reconfigurable systems are brought together from across the globe to offer their latest research in reconfigurable systems. Professor Cheung has devoted much of his professional career to Imperial College London, and has served with distinction as the Head of Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering for several years. His outstanding capability and his loyalty to Imperial College and the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering are legendary. Professor Cheung has made tremendous strides in ensuring excellence in both research and teaching, and in establishing sound governance and strong financial endowment; but above all, he has made his department a wonderful place in which to work and study.

When traditional web development techniques don't cut it, try React. Use React to create highly interactive web pages faster and with fewer errors. With a little JavaScript experience under your belt, you'll be up and running in no time creating dynamic web applications. Craft isolated components that make your apps easier to develop and maintain, with plenty of guidance on best practices. Set up automated tests, and make pages render fast for your users. See how to use your React skills to integrate with other front-end technologies when needed. Dive right into React by defining components, the basic building blocks of a React application. Integrate modern JavaScript language features such as classes and arrow functions in your app. Analyze the relationships in your data to isolate state, and sync the data model with what your users see. Once you're familiar with how a React application works, organize your code base with modules. Configure a production build and deliver your app as efficiently as possible with Webpack. Master testing with React-specific advice and tools to catch the most bugs with the least amount of code. Learn the basics of the Redux library. Define actions and manage an immutable central state with reducers, then connect Redux to your React components to build even larger and more complex interfaces. Package your React code as a standalone widget so anyone can use it in their own applications. Reuse existing JavaScript code in your React components, and build a new React view on top of an existing data model shared with a legacy application. When you finish this book, you'll be well on your way to solving your front-end problems with React. What You Need: Node.js 6.x or later, and a modern web browser

Are you interested in learning to program computers? PROGRAMMING FOR THE ABSOLUTE BEGINNER, SECOND EDITION is a friendly guide that will teach you the fundamentals of computer programming through the hands-on (and fun!) development of computer games. This book teaches programming using Just BASIC, a free, easy-to-learn software that lets you create programs for computers running Windows. Popular author and educator Jerry Ford, Jr., teaches you fundamental programming principles and gives you a broad view of computer programming and its many possibilities. As you work through this book, you will not only learn the basics of programming, but you'll also build a foundation from which you can advance into other programming languages with confidence. Get started programming today with PROGRAMMING FOR THE ABSOLUTE BEGINNER, SECOND EDITION.

Gambling is both a multi-billion dollar international industry and a ubiquitous social and cultural phenomenon. It is also undergoing significant change, with new products and technologies, regulatory models, changing public attitudes and the sheer scale of the gambling enterprise necessitating innovative and mixed methodologies that are flexible, responsive and 'agile'. This book seeks to demonstrate that researchers should look beyond the existing disciplinary territory and the dominant paradigm of 'problem gambling' in order to follow those changes across territorial, political, technical, regulatory and conceptual boundaries. The book draws on cutting-edge qualitative work in disciplines including anthropology, history and media studies to explore the production and consumption of risk, risky places, risk technology, the gambling industry, and connections between gambling and other kinds of speculation such as financial derivatives. In doing so it addresses some of the most important issues in contemporary social science, including the challenges of studying deterritorialised social phenomena; globalizing technologies and local markets; regulation as it operates across local, regional and international scales; globalization, and the rise of games, virtual worlds, and social media.

This book covers the distinguishing characteristics and tropes of visual novels (VNs) as choice-based games and analyzes VNs like 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors; Hatoful Boyfriend; and Monster Prom, some of the best examples of the genre as illustrations. The author covers structuring branching narrative and plot, designing impactful and compelling choices, writing entertaining relationships and character interactions, understanding the importance of a VN's prose, and planning a VN's overall narrative design and story delivery. The book contains exercises at the end of chapters to practice the techniques discussed. By the end of the book, if the reader finishes all the exercises, they may have several portfolio pieces or a significant portion of their own VN project designed. Features: Discusses different aspects and genres of VNs, what makes them enjoyable, and successful techniques developers can incorporate into their own games Analyzes various VNs and choice-based games that use these successful techniques Shares tips from developers on portfolio pieces, hiring a team to work on VNs, and plotting and outlining VNs Branching Story, Unlocked Dialogue: Designing and Writing Visual Novels is a valuable resource for developers and narrative designers interested in working on VNs. The book will show them how they can design their own VN projects, design branching narratives, develop entertaining plots and relationships, design impactful and compelling choices, and write prose that's a pleasure to read.

Computer games represent a significant software application domain for innovative research in software engineering techniques and technologies. Game developers, whether focusing on entertainment-market opportunities or game-based applications in non-entertainment domains, thus share a common interest with software engineers and developers on how to best engineer game software. Featuring contributions from leading experts in software engineering, the book provides a comprehensive introduction to computer game software development that includes its history as well as emerging research on the interaction between these two traditionally distinct fields. An ideal reference for software engineers, developers, and researchers, this book explores game programming and development from a software engineering perspective. It introduces the latest research in computer game software engineering (CGSE) and covers topics such as HALO (Highly Addictive, sociaLly Optimized) software engineering, multi-player outdoor smartphone games, gamifying sports software, and artificial intelligence in games. The book explores the use of games in software engineering education extensively. It also covers game software requirements engineering, game software architecture and design approaches, game software testing and usability assessment, game development frameworks and reusability techniques, and game scalability infrastructure, including support for mobile devices and web-based services.

The Handbook of Logic in Computer Science is a multi-volume work covering all the major areas of the application of logic to theoretical computer science. It comprises six volumes, each containing five or six chapters giving an in-depth overview of one of the major topics in the field. The handbook is the result of many years of cooperative effort by eminent researchers in the area, and will no doubt be the standard reference work in logic and theoretical computer science for years to come. Volume 4: Semantic Modelling covers the fundamental topics of semantic modelling in logic and computation. Contents include models for concurrency, concrete process algebra, correspondence between operational and denotational semantics, effective algebras, and abstract interpretation.

In social sciences the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) is an ever growing phenomenon. Emanating from the need of knowledge about society and economy, we are constantly striving to create ideas and methods for a better use of information. This study analyses different practices such as business process management, business process modelling or relationship marketing. It also discusses the use of ICT in a variety of examples taken from different fields such as education, web clipping, public safety, tactic knowledge, or protection of intellectual property and offers an outline of state-of-the-art applications of ICT in social sciences.

Computational Social Science is an interdisciplinary field where social science questions are investigated with modern computational tools. The book provides insight into different social problems and calls for new practices offered by computational social science, discussing methods for efficient management of complex engineering design, cybersecurity and the prediction of malicious threads of information systems. It is also a study of awareness of privacy in social networks, prosodic modelling for speech synthesis, the structure of co-occurrence networks and cloud applications. The authors propose an extension of synergy models in IMC environment to n-communication channels, and identification and evaluation of knowledge management through information system analysis.

Heterogeneous Computing with OpenCL 2.0 teaches OpenCL and parallel programming for complex systems that may include a variety of device architectures: multi-core CPUs, GPUs, and fully-integrated Accelerated Processing Units (APUs). This fully-revised edition includes the latest enhancements in OpenCL 2.0 including: * Shared virtual memory to increase programming flexibility and reduce data transfers that consume resources * Dynamic parallelism which reduces processor load and avoids bottlenecks * Improved imaging support and integration with OpenGL Designed to work on multiple platforms, OpenCL will help you more effectively program for a heterogeneous future. Written by leaders in the parallel computing and OpenCL communities, this book explores memory spaces, optimization techniques, extensions, debugging and profiling. Multiple case studies and examples illustrate high-performance algorithms, distributing work across heterogeneous systems, embedded domain-specific languages, and will give you hands-on OpenCL experience to address a range of fundamental parallel algorithms.

In this book, Graham Mayeda demonstrates how Watsuji Tetsuro and Kuki Shuzo, two twentieth-century Japanese philosophers, criticize and interpret Heideggerian philosophy, articulating traditional Japanese ethics in a modern idiom.

Chaocan Xiang is an Associate Professor at the College of Computer Science, Chongqing University, China. He received his bachelor’s degree and Ph.D. from Nanjing Institute of Communication Engineering, China, in 2009 and 2014, respectively. He subsequently studied at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor in 2017 (supervised by Prof. Kang G. Shin, IEEE Life Fellow, ACM Fellow). His research interests mainly include UAVs/vehicle-based crowdsensing, urban computing, Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, and big data. He has published more than 50 papers, including over 20 in leading venues such as IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, IEEE INFOCOM, and ACM Ubicomp. He has received a best paper award and a best poster award at two international conferences. Panlong Yang is a full Professor at the University of Science and Technology of China. He has been supported by the NSF Jiangsu through a Distinguished Young Scholarship and was honored as a CCF Distinguished Lecturer in 2015. He has published over 150 papers, including 40 in CCF Class A. Since 2012, he has supervised 14 master’s and Ph.D. candidates, including two excellent dissertation winners in Jiangsu Province and the PLA education system. He has been supported by the National Key Development Project and NSFC projects. He has nominated by ACM MobiCom 2009 for the best demo honored mention awards, and won best paper awards at the IEEE MSN and MASS. He has served as general chair of BigCom and TPC chair of IEEE MSN. In addition, he has served as a TPC member of INFOCOM (CCF Class A) and an associate editor of the Journal of Communication of China. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE (2019). Fu Xiao received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Technology from the Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, China, in 2007. He is currently a Professor and Dean of the School of Computer, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications. He has authored more than 60 papers in respected conference proceedings and journals, including IEEE INFOCOM, ACM Mobihoc, IEEE JASC, IEEE/ACM ToN, IEEE TPDS, IEEE TMC, etc. His main research interest is in the Internet of Things. He is a member of the IEEE Computer Society and the Association for Computing Machinery. Xiaochen Fan received his B.S. degree in Computer Science from Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China, in 2013, and his Ph.D. from the University of Technology Sydney, NSW, Australia, in 2021. His research interests include mobile/pervasive computing, deep learning, and Internet of Things (IoT). He has published over 25 peer-reviewed papers in high-quality journals and IEEE/ACM international conference proceedings.

Your software needs to leverage multiple cores, handle thousands of users and terabytes of data, and continue working in the face of both hardware and software failure. Concurrency and parallelism are the keys, and Seven Concurrency Models in Seven Weeks equips you for this new world. See how emerging technologies such as actors and functional programming address issues with traditional threads and locks development. Learn how to exploit the parallelism in your computer's GPU and leverage clusters of machines with MapReduce and Stream Processing. And do it all with the confidence that comes from using tools that help you write crystal clear, high-quality code. This book will show you how to exploit different parallel architectures to improve your code's performance, scalability, and resilience. Learn about the perils of traditional threads and locks programming and how to overcome them through careful design and by working with the standard library. See how actors enable software running on geographically distributed computers to collaborate, handle failure, and create systems that stay up 24/7/365. Understand why shared mutable state is the enemy of robust concurrent code, and see how functional programming together with technologies such as Software Transactional Memory (STM) and automatic parallelism help you tame it. You'll learn about the untapped potential within every GPU and how GPGPU software can unleash it. You'll see how to use MapReduce to harness massive clusters to solve previously intractible problems, and how, in concert with Stream Processing, big data can be tamed. With an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of each of the different models and hardware architectures, you'll be empowered to tackle any problem with confidence. What You Need: The example code can be compiled and executed on *nix, OS X, or Windows. Instructions on how to download the supporting build systems are given in each chapter.

This is the first of two comprehensive volumes that provide a thorough and multi-faceted research into the emerging field of augmented reality games and consider a wide range of its major issues. These first ever research monographs on augmented reality games have been written by a team of 70 leading researchers, practitioners and artists from 20 countries. In Volume I, the phenomenon of the Pokemon GO game is analysed in theoretical, cultural and conceptual contexts, with emphasis on its nature and the educational use of the game in children and adolescents. Game transfer phenomena, motives for playing Pokemon GO, players' experiences and memorable moments, social interaction, long-term engagement, health implications and many other issues raised by the Pokemon GO game are systematically examined and discussed. Augmented Reality Games I is essential reading not only for researchers, practitioners, game developers and artists, but also for students (graduates and undergraduates) and all those interested in the rapidly developing area of augmented reality games.

PRAISE FOR Professional Services Automation

"SPO/PSA should be viewed by the market as a cost of doing business or, in other words, a competitive necessity for conducting business in the services economy."
–Ted Kempf, Principal Analyst, Gartner

"The depth and breadth of coverage is extraordinary. Any professional or firm considering the implementation of PSA must stop here first–to make a PSA decision without consulting this book first would be foolish."
–Rick Freedman, author, The IT Consultant and The eConsultant

"I have requested each and every department in my organization to look at their respective chapters for incredible insight and concrete solutions."
–Jean Denis Talon, President and CEO, AXA

"This is the reference book that you need to pick up and consider periodically as you plan, analyze, select, and roll out enterprise software."
–Stuart Sackman, Vice President, ADP

"This book is a perfect starting point for any organization wishing to improve their services delivery through the implementation of a PSA product. It provides a clear overview of all of the aspects to consider when evaluating PSA products as well as how to avoid the stumbling blocks to successful PSA implementation."
–Michael Lines, PMP, Publisher, allPM.com–The Project Manager’s Homepage

"This guide addresses appropriately the subject of project management as an integral component of the PSA business environment–a sensible and pragmatic approach."
–Lloyd Bartlett, P. Eng., MBA, PMP, Lecturer in Project Management, McGill University