A definitive guide to contemporary video game studies, this second edition has been fully revised and updated to address the ongoing theoretical and methodological development of game studies. Expertly compiled by well-known video game scholars Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, the Companion includes comprehensive and interdisciplinary models and approaches for analyzing video games, new perspectives on video games both as an art form and cultural phenomenon, explorations of the technical and creative dimensions of video games, and accounts of the political, social, and cultural dynamics of video games. Brand new to this second edition are essays examining topics such as preservation, augmented, mixed and virtual reality, eSports, disability, diversity, and identity, as well as a new section that specifically examines the industrial aspects of video games including digital distribution, game labor, triple-A games, indie games, and globalization. Each essay provides a lively and succinct summary of its target area, quickly bringing the reader up-to-date on the pertinent issues surrounding each aspect of the field, including references for further reading. A comprehensive overview of the present state of video game studies that will undoubtedly prove invaluable to students, scholars, and game designers alike.

This book provides a unified and insightful treatment of deterministic global optimization. It introduces theoretical and algorithmic advances that address the computation and characterization of global optima, determine valid lower and upper bounds on the global minima and maxima, and enclose all solutions of nonlinear constrained systems of equations. Among its special features, the book: Introduces the fundamentals of deterministic global optimization; Provides a thorough treatment of decomposition-based global optimization approaches for biconvex and bilinear problems; Covers global optimization methods for generalized geometric programming problems Presents in-depth global optimization algorithms for general twice continuously differentiable nonlinear problems; Provides a detailed treatment of global optimization methods for mixed-integer nonlinear problems; Develops global optimization approaches for the enclosure of all solutions of nonlinear constrained systems of equations; Includes many important applications from process design, synthesis, control, and operations, phase equilibrium, design under uncertainty, parameter estimation, azeotrope prediction, structure prediction in clusters and molecules, protein folding, and peptide docking. Audience: This book can be used as a textbook in graduate-level courses and as a desk reference for researchers in all branches of engineering and applied science, applied mathematics, industrial engineering, operations research, computer science, economics, computational chemistry and molecular biology.

This book introduces the basics in game usability and overall game UX mindset and techniques, as well as looking at current industry best practices and trends. Fully updated for its second edition, it includes practical advice on how to include usability in already tight development timelines, and how to advocate for UX and communicate results to higher-ups effectively. The book begins with an introduction to UX strategy considerations for games, and to UX design, before moving on to cover core user research and usability techniques as well as how to fit UX practices into the business process. It provides considerations of player differences and offers strategies for inclusion as well as chapters that give platform and context specific advice. With a wealth of new interviews with industry leaders and contributions from the very best in game UX, the book also includes brand new chapters on: Accessibility Mobile Game Usability Data Science Virtual and Augmented Reality Esports This book will be vital reading for all professional game developers and game UX advocates, as well as those students aspiring to work in game development and game UX.

In the digital age, modern society is exposed to high volumes of multimedia information. In efforts to optimize this information, there are new and emerging methods of information retrieval and knowledge management leading to higher efficiency and a deeper understanding of this data. The Handbook of Research on Biomimicry in Information Retrieval and Knowledge Management is a critical scholarly resource that examines bio-inspired classes that solve computer problems. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as big data analytics, bioinformatics, and black hole optimization, this book is geared towards academicians, practitioners, and researchers seeking current research on the use of biomimicry in information and knowledge management.

The World Wide Web and ubiquitous computing technologies have given a significant boost to the emerging field of XML database research. ""Open and Novel Issues in XML Database Applications: Future Directions and Advanced Technologies"" covers comprehensive issues and challenges discovered through leading international XML database research. A useful reference source for researchers, practitioners, and academicians, this book provides complete references to the latest research in XML technology.

3D rotation analysis is widely encountered in everyday problems thanks to the development of computers. Sensing 3D using cameras and sensors, analyzing and modeling 3D for computer vision and computer graphics, and controlling and simulating robot motion all require 3D rotation computation. This book focuses on the computational analysis of 3D rotation, rather than classical motion analysis. It regards noise as random variables and models their probability distributions. It also pursues statistically optimal computation for maximizing the expected accuracy, as is typical of nonlinear optimization. All concepts are illustrated using computer vision applications as examples. Mathematically, the set of all 3D rotations forms a group denoted by SO(3). Exploiting this group property, we obtain an optimal solution analytical or numerically, depending on the problem. Our numerical scheme, which we call the "Lie algebra method," is based on the Lie group structure of SO(3). This book also proposes computing projects for readers who want to code the theories presented in this book, describing necessary 3D simulation setting as well as providing real GPS 3D measurement data. To help readers not very familiar with abstract mathematics, a brief overview of quaternion algebra, matrix analysis, Lie groups, and Lie algebras is provided as Appendix at the end of the volume.

The primary purpose of this book is to present the state-of-the-art of mobile cloud computing and applications with an emphasis on energy-efficiency. The future research directions are also highlighted in this book to enrich the global market-place of mobile cloud computing services facilitating the scientific, industrial, business, and consumer applications. We expect that the book will serve as a reference to a large number of readers including researchers, system architects, practitioners, and graduate-level students. This book focuses on an emerging area that has considerable research interest, momentum, and interest of commercial developers. The target reader of this book are professional developers, under-graduate and post-graduate students, and researchers. As mobile cloud computing, as well as green computing, will have a major impact on the quality of science and society over the next few years, its knowledge will enrich our readers to be at the forefront of the field. This book reports the latest research advances in the area of green mobile cloud computing. The book covers the architecture, services, methods, applications, and future research directions of green mobile cloud computing.

Working with Sound is an exploration of the ever-changing working practices of audio development in the era of hybrid collaboration in the games industry. Through learnings from the pre-pandemic remote and isolated worlds of audio work, sound designers, composers and dialogue designers find themselves equipped uniquely to thrive in the hybrid, remote, and studio-based realms of today's fast-evolving working landscapes. With unique insights into navigating the worlds of isolation and collaboration, this book explores ways of thinking and working in this world, equipping the reader with inspiration to sustainably tackle the many stages of the development process. Working with Sound is an essential guide for professionals working in dynamic audio teams of all sizes, as well as the designers, producers, artists, animators and programmers who collaborate closely with their colleagues working on game audio and sound.

This book provides basic and practical techniques of parallel computing and related methods of numerical analysis for researchers who conduct numerical calculation and simulation. Although the techniques provided in this book are field-independent, these methods can be used in fields such as physics, chemistry, biology, earth sciences, space science, meteorology, disaster prevention, and manufacturing. In particular, those who develop software code in these areas will find this book useful. The contents are suitable for graduate students and researchers in computational science rather than novices at programming or informed experts in computer science.Starting with an introduction to the recent trends in computer architecture and parallel processing, Chapter 1 explains the basic knowledge of speedup programs with simple examples of numerical computing. Chapters 2 - 4 detail the basics of parallel programming, the message passing interface (MPI), and OpenMP and discuss hybrid parallelization techniques. Showing an actual example of adaptation, Chapter 5 gives an overview of performance tuning and communication optimizations. To deal with dense matrix calculations, Chapter 6 details the basics and practice of linear algebra calculation libraries BLAS and LAPACK, including some examples that can be easily reproduced by readers using free software. Focusing on sparse matrix calculations, Chapter 7 explains high performance algorithms for numerical linear algebra. Chapter 8 introduces the fast Fourier transform in large-scale systems from the basics. Chapter 9 explains optimization and related topics such as debug methods and version control systems. Chapter 10 discusses techniques for increasing computation accuracy as an essential topic in numerical calculation. This is the first of the two volumes that grew out of a series of lectures in the K computer project in Japan. The second volume will focus on advanced techniques and examples of applications in materials science.

"Pro Java EE 5 Performance Management and Optimization" features proven methodology to guarantee top-performing Java EE 5 applications, and explains how to measure performance in your specific environment. The book also details performance integration points throughout the development and deployment lifecycles that are crucial for application success.

For QA and preproduction stages, this book guides you through testing and optimally deploying your Java EE 5 applications, with a focus on assessing capacity and discovering saturation points. It defines the concept and application of wait-based tuningone of the most effective approaches to application server tuning.

The book also helps you assess and improve the health of your applications upon deployment. The topics covered include trending, forecasting, and capacity assessing and planning. When production issues arise, youll be armed with troubleshooting methodology and solutions to common problems that have been observed in real-world environments. This book even guides you through the creation of a formal Java EE 5 Performance Management Plancustomized to your environment to help you interpret and react to changing trends in usage patterns.

This book argues that videogames address contemporary, middle-class anxieties about poverty in the United States. The early chapters consider gaming as a modern form of slumming and explore the ways in which titles like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and World of Warcraft thematize poverty. The argument turns to the field of literary studies to identify analytical frameworks for addressing and understanding these themes. Throughout, the book considers how the academic area of inquiry known as game studies has developed over time, and makes use of such scholarship to present, frame, and value its major claims and findings. In its conclusion, the book models how poverty themes might be identified and associated for the purpose of gaining greater insights into how games can shape, and also be shaped by, the player's economic expectations.

The Game Music Toolbox provides readers with the tools, models and techniques to create and expand a compositional toolbox, through a collection of 20 iconic case studies taken from different eras of game music. Discover many of the composition and production techniques behind popular music themes from games such as Cyberpunk 2077, Mario Kart 8, The Legend of Zelda, Street Fighter II, Diablo, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, The Last of Us, and many others. The Game Music Toolbox features: Exclusive interviews from industry experts Transcriptions and harmonic analyses 101 music theory introductions for beginners Career development ideas and strategies Copyright and business fundamentals An introduction to audio implementation for composers Practical takeaway tasks to equip readers with techniques for their own game music The Game Music Toolbox is crucial reading for game music composers and audio professionals of all backgrounds, as well as undergraduates looking to forge a career in the video game industry.

This book uses automotive embedded systems as an example to introduce functional safety assurance and safety-aware cost optimization. The book explores functional safety assurance from the perspectives of verification, enhancement, and validation. The functional safety assurance methods implement a safe and efficient assurance system that integrates safety verification, enhancement, and validation. The assurance methods offered in this book could provide a reasonable and scientific theoretical basis for the subsequent formulation of automotive functional safety standards. The safety-aware cost optimization methods divide cost types according to the essential differences of various costs in system design and establish reasonable models based on different costs. The cost optimization methods provided in this book could give appropriate cost optimization solutions for the cost-sensitive automotive industry, thereby achieving effective cost management and control. Functional safety assurance methods and safety-aware cost optimization support each other and jointly build the architecture of functional safety design methodologies for automotive embedded systems. The work aspires to provide a relevant reference for students, researchers, engineers, and professionals working in this area or those interested in hardware cost optimization and development cost optimization design methods based on ensuring functional safety in general.

Fortran remains one of the principal programming languages used in high-performance scientific, numerical, and engineering computing. A series of significant revisions to the standard versions of the language have progressively enhanced its capabilities and the latest standard, Fortran 2008, includes many modern features, such as object orientation, coarrays for parallel programming, interoperability with C and various other enhancements.
Modern Fortran Explained expands on its predecessor, Fortran 95/2003 Explained. The opening chapters contain a complete description of Fortran 95, extended by Fortran 2003 allocatable array features. Coverage of the other additional features of Fortran 2003 follows, before new chapters on coarrays and the many other enhancements of Fortran 2008. The distinction between the three language levels is maintained throughout, allowing readers to understand and amend legacy code as well as the new features.
Authored by three experts in the field, two of whom have actively contributed to Fortran 2008, this is a complete and authoritative description of Fortran in its modern form. It is intended for new and existing users of the language and for all those involved in scientific and numerical computing. It is suitable as a textbook for teaching and, with its extensive Appendices and an Index, as a handy reference for practitioners.

Computational Optimization: A Tribute to Olvi Mangasarian serves as an excellent reference, providing insight into some of the most challenging research issues in the field. This collection of papers covers a wide spectrum of computational optimization topics, representing a blend of familiar nonlinear programming topics and such novel paradigms as semidefinite programming and complementarity-constrained nonlinear programs. Many new results are presented in these papers which are bound to inspire further research and generate new avenues for applications. An informal categorization of the papers includes: Algorithmic advances for special classes of constrained optimization problems Analysis of linear and nonlinear programs Algorithmic advances B- stationary points of mathematical programs with equilibrium constraints Applications of optimization Some mathematical topics Systems of nonlinear equations.

In both video games and animated films, worlds are constructed through a combination of animation, which defines what players see on the screen, and music and sound, which provide essential cues to action, emotion, and narrative. This book offers a rich exploration of the intersections between animation, video games, and music and sound, bringing together a range of multidisciplinary lenses. In fourteen chapters, the contributors consider similarities and differences in how music and sound structure video games and animation, as well as the animation within video games, and explore core topics of nostalgia, adaptation, gender and sexuality. Offering fresh insights into the aesthetic interplay of animation, video games, and sound, this volume provides a gateway into new areas of study that will be of interest to scholars and students across musicology, animation studies, game studies, and media studies more broadly.

The papers in this volume comprise the refereed proceedings of the Second IFIP International Conference on Computer and Computing Technologies in Agriculture (CCTA2008), in Beijing, China, 2008. The conference on the Second IFIP International Conference on Computer and Computing Technologies in Agriculture (CCTA 2008) is cooperatively sponsored and organized by the China Agricultural University (CAU), the National Engineering Research Center for Information Technology in Agriculture (NERCITA), the Chinese Society of Agricultural Engineering (CSAE) , International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP), Beijing Society for Information Technology in Agriculture, China and Beijing Research Center for Agro-products Test and Farmland Inspection, China. The related departments of China's central government bodies like: Ministry of Science and Technology, Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, Ministry of Education and the Beijing Municipal Natural Science Foundation, Beijing Academy of Agricultural and Forestry Sciences, etc. have greatly contributed and supported to this event. The conference is as good platform to bring together scientists and researchers, agronomists and information engineers, extension servers and entrepreneurs from a range of disciplines concerned with impact of Information technology for sustainable agriculture and rural development. The representatives of all the supporting organizations, a group of invited speakers, experts and researchers from more than 15 countries, such as: the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Mexico, Germany, Greece, Australia, Estonia, Japan, Korea, India, Iran, Nigeria, Brazil, China, etc.

This comprehensive guide walks readers through the entire process of getting and keeping a writing job in the games industry. It outlines exactly what a beginner needs to know about education requirements, finding opportunities, applying for roles, and acing studio interviews. Professional writers will learn how to navigate studio hierarchies, transfer roles and companies, work overseas, and keep developing their careers. Written by an experienced games writer with nearly two decades of industry knowledge, the book contains a wealth of interviews and perspectives with industry leaders, hiring managers, and developers from marginalized communities, all offering their tips and insights. Included are examples of materials such as job posts, writing samples, and portfolios, as well as chapter end challenges for readers to directly apply the skills they have learnt. This book will be of great interest to all beginner and aspiring games writers and narrative designers, as well as more experienced writers looking to hone their skills.

Pervasive Computing: Next Generation Platforms for Intelligent Data Collection presents current advances and state-of-the-art work on methods, techniques, and algorithms designed to support pervasive collection of data under ubiquitous networks of devices able to intelligently collaborate towards common goals. Using numerous illustrative examples and following both theoretical and practical results the authors discuss: a coherent and realistic image of today's architectures, techniques, protocols, components, orchestration, choreography, and developments related to pervasive computing components for intelligently collecting data, resource, and data management issues; the importance of data security and privacy in the era of big data; the benefits of pervasive computing and the development process for scientific and commercial applications and platforms to support them in this field. Pervasive computing has developed technology that allows sensing, computing, and wireless communication to be embedded in everyday objects, from cell phones to running shoes, enabling a range of context-aware applications. Pervasive computing is supported by technology able to acquire and make use of the ubiquitous data sensed or produced by many sensors blended into our environment, designed to make available a wide range of new context-aware applications and systems. While such applications and systems are useful, the time has come to develop the next generation of pervasive computing systems. Future systems will be data oriented and need to support quality data, in terms of accuracy, latency and availability. Pervasive Computing is intended as a platform for the dissemination of research efforts and presentation of advances in the pervasive computing area, and constitutes a flagship driver towards presenting and supporting advanced research in this area. Indexing: The books of this series are submitted to EI-Compendex and SCOPUS

Measuring the User Experience: Collecting, Analyzing, and Presenting UX Metrics, Third Edition provides the quantitative analysis training that students and professionals need. This book presents an update on the first resource that focused on how to quantify user experience. Now in its third edition, the authors have expanded on the area of behavioral and physiological metrics, splitting that chapter into sections that cover eye-tracking and measuring emotion. The book also contains new research and updated examples, several new case studies, and new examples using the most recent version of Excel.

Program analysis concerns static techniques for computing reliable approximate information about the dynamic behaviour of programs. Applications include compilers (for code improvement), software validation (for detecting errors in algorithms or breaches of security) and transformations between data representation (for solving problems such as the Y2K problem). This book is unique in giving an overview of the four major approaches to program analysis: data flow analysis, constraint based analysis, abstract interpretation, and type and effect systems. The presentation demonstrates the extensive similarities between the approaches; this will aid the reader in choosing the right approach and in enhancing it with insights from the other approaches. The book covers basic semantic properties as well as more advanced algorithmic techniques. The book is aimed at M.Sc. and Ph.D. students but will be valuable also for experienced researchers and professionals.

JavaScript is the programming language of the web and is used by more software developers today than any other programming language. For nearly 25 years this best seller has been the go-to guide for JavaScript programmers. The seventh edition is fully updated to cover the 2020 version of JavaScript, and new chapters cover classes, modules, iterators, generators, Promises, async/await, and metaprogramming. You'll find illuminating and engaging example code throughout. This book is for programmers who want to learn JavaScript and for web developers who want to take their understanding and mastery to the next level. It begins by explaining the JavaScript language itself, in detail, from the bottom up. It then builds on that foundation to cover the web platform and Node.js. Topics include: Types, values, variables, expressions, operators, statements, objects, and arrays Functions, classes, modules, iterators, generators, Promises, and async/await JavaScript's standard library: data structures, regular expressions, JSON, i18n, etc. The web platform: documents, components, graphics, networking, storage, and threads Node.js: buffers, files, streams, threads, child processes, web clients, and web servers Tools and language extensions that professional JavaScript developers rely on

Are you thinking about working in the board game industry? Here's what you need to know. There are so many jobs and roles that need to be filled in the board game industry. You might just have the right skills and experience to excel. But first you need to know what opportunities exist and what the hardest gaps are to fill! In this book, you'll discover * What jobs are really in demand * How you can get your foot in the door with a publisher * Jobs in the industry you've never even thought of * What other opportunities exist for people with skills just like yours With insights from over 40 industry pros, as well as the author's many years of experience, you'll be able to put your own skills and experience to great use in an amazing, growing industry.

Making a great board game and pitching it to publishers are two completely different things. If you've got a game that you want to share with the world but don't know what to do next, this book will help you navigate through exactly what steps to take. You'll discover: How to find the right publisher Exactly what publishers are looking for How to create a sell sheet that will actually sell your game How to negotiate the best deal and get paid more for your game What to look out for in contracts to make sure you don't get exploited You'll learn from Joe's experiences as a full-time board game designer and instructor, along with tips and stories from a dozen other published designers, plus the exact things that publishers want. Direct from 16 established publishers.