Serial Experiments Lain Game

Anime and Manga

Video Games & Addiction

How many hours have you spent playing? Do you know how many times you stayed up late to finish a level? What is the sum of money you have invested in games, consoles, equipment? Most people will not be able to answer any of these questions accurately. It is likely, in fact, that those inquiries have never been raised. When this happens in the most thriving digital industry of the moment, such as the video games one is, the reasons for such ignorance should be considered. Video Games & Addiction, tells a series of logical stories about the evolution, progress, and revolution of digital playful entertainment. However, instead of just a mere historicist analysis, it puts the most important people, the players, first. Narrating, in turn, numerous real-life anecdotes. Reflecting in perspective the difference between passion and vice, taste and necessity, choice and escapism. Confessional at parts, with its good dose of thought, more than one reader will be thinking about the final conclusions or recognizing attitudes common to all video gamers. When not, feeling identified in the anecdotes. Or at least informed about the changes, for better and worse, from pixel to polygon over the past 50 years. And how addictive components have always been there through different names and mechanics, including: Continue?, the perpetuation of the game through uninterrupted attempts. Player 2, going from playing in the living room to the massive rooms of online competitiveness. Inventory, our digital and physical equipment, brands, and gaming inequalities. Replay, the gamer culture consumed on platforms, videos, streamers. Insert Coin, the industry understood as a validation and a game format from the very arcades. Game Over, when the game doesn't end and ceases to be one. Insert a coin and go through this book-made-deconstruction, which analyzes at what level we like, and how much we get entertained or trapped in that world behind screens.

Animated Landscapes

Winner of the 2017 McLaren-Lambart Award for Best Book on the Subject of Animation Studying landscape in cinema isn't quite new; it'd be hard to imagine Woody Allen without New York, or the French New Wave without Paris. But the focus on live-action cinema leaves a significant gap in studying animated films. With the almost total pervasiveness of animation today, this collection provides the reader with a greater sense of how the animated landscapes of the present relate to those of the past. Including essays from international perspectives, Animated Landscapes introduces an idea that has seemed, literally, to be in the background of animation studies. The collection provides a timely counterpoint to the dominance of character (be that either animated characters such as Mickey Mouse or real world personalities such as Walt Disney) that exists within animation scholarship (and film studies more generally). Chapters address a wide range of topics including history, case studies in national contexts (including Australia, Japan, China and Latvia), the traversal of animated landscape, the animation of fantastical landscapes, and the animation of interactive landscapes. Animated Landscapes promises to be an invaluable addition to the existing literature, for the most overlooked aspect of animation.