The primary emblem of the feminine in Tibetan Buddhism is the dakini, or "sky-dancer," a semi-wrathful spirit-woman who manifests in visions, dreams, and meditation experiences. Western scholars and interpreters of the dakini, influenced by Jungian psychology and feminist goddess theology, have shaped a contemporary critique of...

I had been playing the Ultima series of games by Richard Garriott since I was in high school, and I was a die-hard fan. Every game he published, I played all the way through, from Ultima I on the Apple ][ to Ultima V on the IBM PC. Ultima VI came out right as I graduated from college, and I noticed that the contact information for Origin...

"FASCINATING . . . MEMORABLE . . . REVEALING . . . PERHAPS THE BEST OF CARL SAGAN'S BOOKS."
--The Washington Post Book World (front page review)

In Cosmos, the late astronomer Carl Sagan cast his gaze over the magnificent mystery of the Universe and made it accessible to millions of people around the...

What really makes a video game story interactive? What's the best way to create an interactive story? How much control should players be given? Do they really want that control in the first place? Do they even know what they want-or are their stated desires at odds with the unconscious preferences? All of these questions and more are...

The challenge of this book is thinking critically about media practices in a setting where they are fast, fun, and ubiquitous. As an avowedly engaged and political approach to thought, critical theory of any sort encounters challenges. Attempting to analyze and intervene in the present, it nonetheless adopts a backward gaze, an idea G.W.F....

A phrase often used when writing about the human ability to become immersed in fantasy is “the willing suspension of disbelief” which Samuel Taylor Coleridge first coined in the early 19th Century as an argument for the fantastical in prosody and poetry. What is a computer game? At base, it is nothing more than a cheap plastic...

A riveting account of the birth and remarkable evolution of the most important development in entertainment since television, Replay: The History of Video Games is the ultimate history of video games. From its origins in the research labs of the 1940s to the groundbreaking success of the Wii, Replay sheds new light on gaming's past. Along...

It was early 1977 and I was lost, deep in an underground cave system. I’d been exploring it for hours, sometimes walking upright but often crawling through tight passages, marveling at its vast caverns of intricate stone formations, and occasionally even stumbling across ancient bits of treasure: coins, some silver bars, a large and...

It's estimated that one million North Americans make their own wine. Relatively inexpensive to make (a homemade bottle costs from $2 to $4), a bottle with your own label (and grapes) is a fantasy even someone with modest aspirations can fulfill. Author Tim Patterson, an...

Whether it's a digital or vinyl track of "Proud Mary," a DJ sets the mood, amps up the excitement, and gets a crowd of revelers rockin'. Often an outsized personality, blessed with a gorgeous...

The Blender 3D suite is probably one of the most used 3D creation and animation tools currently in existence. The reason for that popularity is both its tool set and the extraordinary fact that it can be downloaded free of charge. Blender has been around since 1998 but it was not until it entered the GNU General Public License, open source...

Real time 3D games have been around for well over ten years now. We’ve played them, created assets in the style of our favorites, and maybe even “mod”ed a few of them. But until recently, the cost of licensing one of the premier game engines has ranged from several hundred thousand to several million dollars per title...