A decade ago, it was still somewhat conventional to start a study by writ-ing how “esports is a novel phenomenon.” As we write this introduction in 2021, that is no longer true. Today, more than a thousand studies have been published on esports, including several books and special issues. Moreover, the work is no longer conducted purely in the “game studies” related fields, bu…
Watership Down, the 1978 British cel-animated feature produced, directed and written by Martin Rosen, and the bestselling 1972 novel by Richard Adams on which it is based are indeed relatively anomalous. The novel is often considered uncategorizable: an adventure story about rabbits that might be a comfortable bedfellow with the works of Beatrix Potter and other children’…
The computer science department at Stanford University offers a course called Computer Graphics: Animation and Simulation. Many departments at other universities have offered a similar course, including the University of North Carolina, University of California, California Polytechnic, and Carnegie Mellon. A title like Animation and Simulation will sound to some like a betra…
My experience with StarCraft could be mapped into three periods that represent the history of the game itself. I was introduced to real-time strat-egy (RTS) games when my cousin brought their copy of Warcraft: Orcs & Humans (Blizzard Entertainment 1994) at my grandparents’ house. My brother and I got the game quickly after and, as most players from the early 1990s, I was playing es…
Within Western institutional thinking, the human is constituted through an abil-ity to speak, defined as the sole creature who holds language and consequently is capable of articulating, representing, and reflecting upon the world. Along with language comes the power of naming, of choreographing the semantic categories put in place, continually reproduced and negotiated to make sense…
Large?scale urban parks have been used as a concept for contemporary land?scape planning and design. These parks are intrinsically tied to the development ofcontemporary cities, the various conceptions of dynamic urban landscapes, and thesustainable, cost?effective, and process?oriented transformation of post?industrialsites.This book offers one of the first thorough analyses of contemporary la…
This report of a fire without serious casualties at Grenfell Tower in June 1979 assumes an entirely new and frightening meaning in the context of the tragic events of 14 June 2017, when a horrific cladding fire at the same tower caused the deaths of seventy- two people. Tucked into a folder of newspaper cuttings in the archives of the Royal Borough of Ken sington and Chelsea (RBKC), the articl…
Composer, pianist, editor, writer, and pedagogue Mario Lavista (1943-2021) was a central figure of the cultural and artistic scene in Mexico and one of the leading Ibero-American composers of his generation. His music is often described as evocative and poetic, noted for his meticulous attention to timbre and motivic permutation, and his creative trajectory was characterized by its intersection…
Empires are large. It is one of their signature qualities. As assemblages of different peoples and polities, empires link distant territories to each other by their very def inition: they are ‘large political units, expansionist or with a memory of power extended over space’; consequently, when studying empires, ‘[s]pace matters, size matters, and so does the character of space and size…
On March 1, 1954, the United States detonated its most power ful thermo-nuclear weapon, code- named “ Castle Bravo,” at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Situated to the southeast of Bikini, the populations of Rongelap Atoll, including people residing on Ailingnae and Utrik Atolls, watched in confusion as the sun seemed to rise in the west. On Utrik, Rijen Michael, eigh teen years ol…