Perhaps no arcade game is so nostalgically remembered, yet so critically bemoaned, as Dragon's Lair. A bit of a technological neanderthal, the game implemented a unique combination of videogame components and home video replay, garnering great popular media and user attention in a moment of contracted economic returns and popularity for the videogame arcade business. But subsequently, writers and critics have cast the game aside as a cautionary tale of bad game design. In Dragon's Lair and the Fantasy of Interactivity, MJ Clarke revives Dragon's Lair as a fascinating textual experiment interlaced with powerful industrial strategies, institutional discourse, and textual desires around key notions of interactivity and fantasy. Constructing a multifaceted historical study of the game that considers its design, its makers, its recording medium, and its in-game imagery, Clarke suggests that the more appropriate metaphor for Dragon's Lair is not that of a neanderthal, but a socio-technical network, infusing and advancing debates about the production and consumption of new screen technologies. Far from being the gaming failure posited by evolutionary-minded lay critics, Clarke argues, Dragon's Lair offers a fascinating provisional solution to still-unsettled questions about screen media.

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.

This collection of essays, written by former pupils, celebrates the career of Jasper Griffin, one of the foremost modern scholars of classical epic. The volume surveys the epic tradition from the eighth century BC to the nineteenth century of our era. Individual chapters focus on: Homer and the oral epic tradition; Homer in his religious context; Herodotus and Homer; Hellenistic epic; Virgil in his literary context; Virgil in his political-cultural context; the Augustan poets and the Aeneid; Statius' Thebaid; Old English and Old Irish epic; Renaissance epic: Tasso and Milton; and the Victorians. The aim of the book is to situate writers of epic in their literary and cultural contexts--an enterprise captured in the term "interaction" in the title. The chapters singly offer insights into some of the foundational poems of the European epic tradition and together take a bold, holistic look at that tradition.

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.

Faced with what many were calling a dying medium, US network television producers became much more aggressive in seeking out alternative business and artistic models in the beginning of this century. Most significantly, many of these producers turned to the emerging field of transmedia (ancillary texts in comicbooks, novels and new media) as a way to bolster and support television products. In this book, the author examines four such programs (24, Alias, Heroes and Lost) and investigates how transmedia was incorporated into both the work and the art of network television production. Split into two complementary parts, the book first paints a picture of how transmedia producers were, or were not, incorporated into creative decision-making centers of these serialized programs. The second section explains how the presence of off-site transmedia texts begins to alter the very narrative construction of the on-air series themselves. Including interviews with the transmedia workers, this groundbreaking study extends the field of television studies into brand new areas, and brings a 'dying medium' into the 21st Century.

"Did you just tell me to shut up? " "How can I lead unless I'm giving directions and teaching others how to do things?" "Isn't that what a good leader does?" From CEOs to secretaries, this straightforward, sometimes amusing, always motivational book is for you. "Shut Up And Lead: A Communicator's Guide to Quiet Leadership" takes you on a journey of self-discovery framed by researched principles about how to communicate more effectively-and quietly-in your business and personal life so you can become a more effective leader. Just because you consider yourself a communicator doesn't mean you have to talk the most. Filled with insight and anecdotes, professional speaker, leadership consultant, and executive coach M.J. Clark makes you more aware of how you communicate most effectively with others, moving you closer to becoming balanced, successful, and truly happy.