Gaia Saga is a universal role-playing system that focuses on as much flexibility for character creation as possible. Using an interesting and unique set of rules, Gaia Saga allows players and game masters alike to experience an ever-changing dice system that grows and develops as your story moves along. This flexible dice system allows characters to endlessly evolve into more powerful beings than you could ever imagine possible in a table top game. The manual includes over thirteen playable races to choose from, each with their own set of ethnic classes to broaden your horizons. It also features lists for job professions, skills, special abilities, spell schools, a personality and emotions engine as well as a leveling system based upon the spending of accrued experience points to any area you desire. You get to upgrade your characters when you want to, as often as you want to, and without the hassle of waiting for multiple game sessions to end just to reach that next level.

GURPS Voodoo: The Shadow War takes the myths of the mystical religions known as Voudoun and Santeria and gives them a twist, placing the believers and practitioners of Voodoo in the middle of a cosmic struggle. Voodoo priests and the shamans of many ancients cultures have unique views in how they can shape the world; this supplement includes a magic system to replicate those beliefs. The Shadow War is a conflict fought on many fronts. Voodoo Initiates contend with the Lodges, which consist of European magicians who have kept their occult power hidden and consider themselves the secret masters of the Western world. Beneath that struggle, some Initiates have begun to realize, lies a battle between Humankind and beings that have no use for power or wealth - only destruction. Unlike many "dark" RPGs, Voodoo is not about enduring horror, but fighting it. Human Spirit Warriors, monstrous In-Betweener renegades, and even ghosts can join forces and stop the manipulators and deceivers. The world of the Shadow War needs heroes, however frail or flawed they may be. Your characters may just be those heroes.

This is the first textbook dedicated to explaining how artificial intelligence (AI) techniques can be used in and for games. After introductory chapters that explain the background and key techniques in AI and games, the authors explain how to use AI to play games, to generate content for games and to model players. The book will be suitable for undergraduate and graduate courses in games, artificial intelligence, design, human-computer interaction, and computational intelligence, and also for self-study by industrial game developers and practitioners. The authors have developed a website (http://www.gameaibook.org) that complements the material covered in the book with up-to-date exercises, lecture slides and reading.

Examines the history and phenomenal success of video games, and argues that the popular games are on the way to becoming a legitimate art form, much in the same way movies did a century earlier.

Describes how patterns of information, knowledge, and cultural production are changing. The author shows that the way information and knowledge are made available can either limit or enlarge the ways people create and express themselves. He describes the range of legal and policy choices that confront.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The Uninhabitable Earth hits you like a comet, with an overflow of insanely lyrical prose about our pending Armageddon.”—Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New Yorker • The New York Times Book Review • Time • NPR • The Economist • The Paris Review • Toronto Star • GQ • The Times Literary Supplement • The New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible—food shortages, refugee emergencies, climate wars and economic devastation. An “epoch-defining book” (The Guardian) and “this generation’s Silent Spring” (The Washington Post), The Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it—the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress. The Uninhabitable Earth is also an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation—today’s. LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/E.O. WILSON LITERARY SCIENCE WRITING AWARD “The Uninhabitable Earth is the most terrifying book I have ever read. Its subject is climate change, and its method is scientific, but its mode is Old Testament. The book is a meticulously documented, white-knuckled tour through the cascading catastrophes that will soon engulf our warming planet.”—Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times “Riveting. . . . Some readers will find Mr. Wallace-Wells’s outline of possible futures alarmist. He is indeed alarmed. You should be, too.”—The Economist “Potent and evocative. . . . Wallace-Wells has resolved to offer something other than the standard narrative of climate change. . . . He avoids the ‘eerily banal language of climatology’ in favor of lush, rolling prose.”—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times “The book has potential to be this generation’s Silent Spring.”—The Washington Post “The Uninhabitable Earth, which has become a best seller, taps into the underlying emotion of the day: fear. . . . I encourage people to read this book.”—Alan Weisman, The New York Review of Books

This volume presents an original framework for the study of video games that use visual materials and narrative conventions from ancient Greece and Rome. It focuses on the culturally rich continuum of ancient Greek and Roman games, treating them not just as representations, but as functional interactive products that require the player to interpret, communicate with and alter them. Tracking the movement of such concepts across different media, the study builds an interconnected picture of antiquity in video games within a wider transmedial environment. Ancient Greece and Rome in Videogames presents a wide array of games from several different genres, ranging from the blood-spilling violence of god-killing and gladiatorial combat to meticulous strategizing over virtual Roman Empires and often bizarre adventures in pseudo-ancient places. Readers encounter instances in which players become intimately engaged with the “epic mode” of spectacle in God of War, moments of negotiation with colonised lands in Rome: Total War and Imperium Romanum, and multi-layered narratives rich with ancient traditions in games such as Eleusis and Salammbo. The case study approach draws on close analysis of outstanding examples of the genre to uncover how both representation and gameplay function in such “ancient games”.