Despite the proliferation of video games in the twenty-first century, the theory of game design is largely underdeveloped, leaving designers on their own to understand what games really are. Helping you produce better games, Game Design Theory: A New Philosophy for Understanding Games presents a bold new path for...

Information granules, as encountered in natural language, are implicit in nature. To make them fully operational so they can be effectively used to analyze and design intelligent systems, information granules need to be made explicit. An emerging discipline, granular computing focuses on formalizing information granules and unifying them to...

This book by the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) Game Writing Special Interest Group focuses on various aspects of working as a professional game writer, including how to break in to game writing, writing manuals, narrative design, writing in a team, working as a freelancer, working with new intellectual property, and more....

How can video games be fun and immerse players in fantastic worlds where anything seems possible? How can they be so engaging to have become the main entertainment product for children and adults alike? In On the Way to Fun, the author proposes a possible answer to these questions by going back to the roots of gaming and showing how...

Too often, healthcare workers are led to believe that medical informatics is a complex field that can only be mastered by teams of professional programmers. This is simply not the case. With just a few dozen simple algorithms, easily implemented with open source programming languages, you can fully utilize the medical information contained in...

It is amusing that the first part of this book to be read is the last part to be written. It provides, however, an opportunity to share with you a little about how writing and editing this book has changed my thinking not just about enterprise architecture (EA), or about the role of information technology (IT) and IT professionals in...

Telecommunications has evolved and grown at an explosive rate in recent years and will undoubtedly continue to do so. As its functions, applications, and technology grow, it becomes increasingly complex and difficult, if not impossible, to meet the demands of a global network using conventional computing technologies. Computational...

Through the combination of the latest imaging modalities and microdevice delivery, interventional neuroradiologic techniques are currently revolutionizing the therapy for many of the most common neurological and neurosurgical disorders. Crossing the boundaries of classically delineated medical and surgical specialties including neurosurgery,...

All too often, a simple lack of understanding of fundamental business concepts is enough to prevent capable scientists and engineers from receiving otherwise deserved promotions. These days, technical merit and hard work alone no longer guarantee upward mobility. For scientists and engineers with aspirations of moving up the corporate ladder...

Meeting the growing demands for speed and quality in rendering computer graphics images requires new techniques. Practical parallel rendering provides one of the most practical solutions. This book addresses the basic issues of rendering within a parallel or distributed computing environment, and considers the strengths and weaknesses of...

The authors show that there are underlying mathematical reasons for why games and puzzles are challenging (and perhaps why they are so much fun). They also show that games and puzzles can serve as powerful models of computation―quite different from the usual models of automata and circuits―offering a new way of thinking about...