When her cousin is slain by an unknown assassin, Ariel Behn becomes the sole heir to a family legacy: a sinister cache of manuscripts that thrusts her into the deadly center of international intrigue--and an age-old enigma that spans the centuries. Whoever assembles and interprets the cryptic clues of this ancient mystery will possess the power to control the fate of the world. What strange powers lie hidden within the manuscripts? Splashed against a lavish backdrop that sweeps from the rise of the Roman Empire to the fall of the Berlin Wall, THE MAGIC CIRCLE finds one woman standing at the center of it all: Ariel Behn. As she races across continents to reveal the dark secrets buried in her family's past, she begins to unlock the chilling truth of the coming millennium. . . .

The purpose of this unique book is to outline the core of game science by presenting principles underlying the design and use of games and simulations. Game science covers three levels of discourse: the philosophy of science level, the science level, and the application or practical level. The framework presented will help to grasp the interplay between forms of knowledge and knowledge content, interplay that evolves through the action of the players. Few scientists have witnessed such a radical change in their area of research and practice as those who engaged in play and gaming since the 1950s. Since that time game scientists from a whole variety of disciplines started adopting gaming and simulation methods in their research. Rapid advances in information technology and computer science are producing a tool rich environment for the design and use of games, and for humanities studies of games as digital arts and interactive narratives. Game science is advancing through these waves of change, driven by the digital computer game industry, enhanced through computer and information science, as well as through advances in professional gaming such as in education, public and business management, policy development, health care, eco-systems management, and so on. When asking game scientists about the core of their science, one should expect to hear diverging answers. The common questions about the core of game and play are not new. They refer to: What is the meaning of game and play? What is real and what is virtual reality? How could we build simple and effective games from complex social systems? Are we able to bring forward a general theory of games? Are we able to help players (social actors) to find smart solutions and approaches to complex issues? How do games enhance learning and how do they improve our thinking capacity and action repertoire? Current answers to these questions are scattered and inadequate. This book offers a frame-of-reference that will enlighten the characteristics of particular games and simulations from a common perspective. The author pays less attention to instrumental reasoning than on theoretical and methodological questions. Answers will provide a suitable context for addressing design science and analytical science approaches to artifact design and assessment, and theory development and testing. Due to the high diversity of approaches that game science has to accommodate the author chooses an interdisciplinary and where appropriate a meta-disciplinary approach.

Three female academics devote themselves to the study and design of daring games based on the history of Columbia University's neighborhood, but the games go too far when the mysterious brother of one of the girls gets involved.

Winner of the 1986 Alabama Library Author Award, Outside the Magic Circle tells the remarkable story of Virginia Foster Durr, a southern white woman born into privilige who (along with her husband Clifford Durr, a lawyer best known for defending Rosa Parks), nonetheless devoted her life to Civil Rights activism. "Outside the Magic Circle is a valuable document...engaging, warm, and shrewd. [Durr's] odyssey of political commitment belongs in the collective biography of a remarkable generation of Southern liberals and radicals." --Southern Exposure

No one expressed the heart and soul of the Sixties as powerfully as the Beatles did through the words, images, and rhythms of their music. In Magic Circles Devin McKinney uncovers the secret history of a generation and a pivotal moment in twentieth-century culture. He reveals how the Beatles enacted the dream life of their time and shows how they embodied a kaleidoscope of desire and anguish for all who listened--hippies or reactionaries, teenage fans or harried parents, Bob Dylan or Charles Manson. The reader who dares to re-enter the vortex that was the Sixties will appreciate, perhaps for the first time, much of what lay beneath the social trauma of the day. Delving into concerts and interviews, films and music, outtakes and bootlegs, Devin McKinney brings to bear the insights of history, aesthetics, sociology, psychology, and mythology to account for the depth and resonance of the Beatles' impact. His book is also a uniquely multifaceted appreciation of the group's artistic achievement, exploring their music as both timeless expression and visceral response to their historical moment. Starting in the cellars of Liverpool and Hamburg, and continuing through the triumph of Beatlemania, the groundbreaking studio albums, and the last brutal, sorrowful thrust of the White Album, Magic Circles captures both the dream and the reality of four extraordinary musicians and their substance as artists. At once an entrancing narrative and an analytical montage, the book follows the drama, comedy, mystery, irony, and curious off-ramps of investigation and inquiry that contributed to one of the most amazing odysseys in pop culture.

Four young misfits find themselves living in a strictly disciplined temple community where they become friends while also learning to do crafts and to use their powers, especially magic