Gamification marks a major change to everyday life. It describes the permeation of economic, political, and social contexts by game-elements such as awards, rule structures, and interfaces that are inspired by video games. Sometimes the term is reduced to the implementation of points, badges, and leaderboards as incentives and motivations to be productive. Sometimes it is envisioned as a universal remedy to deeply transform society toward more humane and playful ends. Despite its use by corporations to manage brand communities and personnel, however, gamification is more than just a marketing buzzword. States are beginning to use it as a new tool for governing populations more effectively. It promises to fix what is wrong with reality by making every single one of us fitter, happier, and healthier. Indeed, it seems like all of society is up for being transformed into one massive game. The contributions in this book offer a candid assessment of the gamification hype. They trace back the historical roots of the phenomenon and explore novel design practices and methods. They critically discuss its social implications and even present artistic tactics for resistance. It is time to rethink gamification!

Rethinking Gamification

Computers & Technology

Graphics & Design

Meson Press Eg

"Technologists only change the world in various ways in generalized indifference; the point is to think the world and interpret the changes in its unfathomability, to perceive and experience the difference binding being to the nothing." Anticipating the age of planetary technology Kostas Axelos, a Greek-French philosopher, approaches the technological question in this book, first published in 1966, by connecting the thought of Karl Marx and Martin Heidegger. Marx famously declared that philosophers had only interpreted the world, but the point was to change it. Heidegger on his part stressed that our modern malaise was due to the forgetting of being, for which he thought technological questions were central. Following from his study of Marx as a thinker of technology, and foreseeing debates about globalization, Axelos recognizes that technology now determines the world. Providing an introduction to some of his major themes, including the play of the world, Axelos asks if planetary technology requires a new, a future way of thought which in itself is planetary.

Introduction to a Future Way of Thought: On Marx and Heidegger

Politics & Social Sciences

Axelos, Kōstas

Philosophy

"Wäre die Philosophie auch nur eine Stunde der Mühe wert, wenn sie uns nicht für das Leben rüstete?" Gezielten Schrittes entwirft der französische Philosoph Étienne Souriau in diesem dicht gedrängten Buch eine Grammatik der Existenz. Im Fokus steht nicht nur ihre Theorie, sondern auch die tatsächliche Ausübung der "Kunst des Existierens". Wie Gilles Deleuze und William James vertritt Souriau dabei die These eines existenziellen Pluralismus: Es gibt Phänomene, Dinge, das Virtuelle, fiktionale Wesen - die Existenz ist polyphon. Souriaus radikale Herangehensweise hat auch Bruno Latour und Isabelle Stengers entscheidend beeinflusst. In ihrer ausführlichen Einleitung zu Souriaus Text von 1943 und dem ebenfalls zum ersten Mal in deutscher Sprache veröffentlichten Vortrag "Über den Modus der Existenz des zu vollbringenden Werks" (1956) zeigt sich eindrucksvoll die Aktualität seines Denkens.

Die verschiedenen Modi der Existenz (German Edition)

Souriau, Étienne

In 1985, the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard curated a groundbreaking exhibition called Les Immatériaux at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The exhibition showed how telecommunication technologies were beginning to impact every aspect of life. At the same time, it was a material demonstration of what Lyotard called the postmodern condition. This book features a previously unpublished report by Jean-François Lyotard on the conception of Les Immatériaux and its relation to postmodernity. Reviewing the historical signifi cance of the exhibition, his text is accompanied by twelve contemporary meditations. The philosophers, art historians, and artists - among them Bernard Stiegler, Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Anne-Elisabeth Sejten and Jean-Louis Boissier - analyse this important moment in the history of media and theory, and refl ect on the new material conditions brought about by digital technologies in the last 30 years.

30 Years after Les Immatériaux: Art, Science, and Theory

Arts & Photography

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Preferable Futures (Digital Cultures)

Social Sciences

Kritik postdigital (Digital Cultures) (German Edition)

How is human embodiment transformed in an age of algorithms? How do post-cinematic media technologies such as AI, VR, and robotics target and re-shape our bodies? Post-Cinematic Bodies grapples with these questions by attending both to mundane devices-such as smartphones, networked exercise machines, and smart watches and other wearables equipped with heartrate sensors-as well as to new media artworks that rework such equipment to reveal to us the ways that our fleshly existences are increasingly up for grabs. Through an equally philosophical and interpretive analysis, the book aims to develop a new aesthetics of embodied experience that is attuned to a new age of predictive technology and metabolic capitalism.\n"We have long been feeling how the type of embodied identification suggested by the Hollywood classics was in a process of dissolution. Thanks to a sophisticated mediation between the phenomenology of perception and theories of digital media, Shane Denson provides us with concepts and a first understanding of this transition and its far-reaching existential consequences." 
-Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Stanford University\n"What if digital media changed not only traditional forms of communication, but also our very bodies, because of the way they address us? In this brilliant study, Shane Denson suggests that, from a phenomenological perspective, our bodies are always at the forefront of our mediation with the world; digital media involve our sensorium in an unprecedented way and this commitment represents their true "revolution." A myriad of examples, including screens in gyms aimed at enhancing our exercises, are proof of this. Philosophically dense, analytically sharp, this book unearths what lies beneath our digital experiences." 
-Francesco Casetti, Yale University\n"Refusing both the perfunctory valorization of the body as site of resistive potentiality and the diametric reflex to dismiss theories of embodiment as exercises in the foreclosure of criticality, Shane Denson advances a rigorous theory of mediated corporeality within the metabolic life of post-cinema, with profound implications for the politics of (counter-)capture across microtemporalities and planetary scales." 
-Rizvana Bradley, University of California, Berkeley

Post-Cinematic Bodies

Denson, Shane

Photography & Video

In 1999 David Elstein delivered a lecture series examining the evolvement of UK broadcasting policy from 1949 to 1999. His sharp analysis is a valuable contribution to the post-war development of the British broadcasting system and unfolds many topical issues in current media policy debates. For many years, David Elstein has been one of the most rigorous and controversial commentators on British broadcasting. These lectures contain historical insights, which also have a great deal of contemporary relevance. - Martin Cave, Visiting Professor, Imperial College Business School David Elstein's high level experience in advertising, subscription and publicly funded broadcasting gives his account of post WWII British broadcasting policy a unique authority - Richard Collins, Honorary Visiting Professor at the Universities of Exeter and City University London David Elstein's penetrating critique of the six post war inquiries into UK broadcasting is a real contribution to a history of flawed forecasts and missed opportunities. - Richard Tait, Professor of Journalism, Cardiff University

The Political Structure of UK Broadcasting 1949-1999

Humor & Entertainment

Elstein, David

Radio

Diversity of Play

Programming

This book explores the future of critique in view of our planetary condition. How are we to intervene in contemporary constellations of finance capitalism, climate change and neoliberalism? Think we must! To get to the symptoms, the book's 38 terms ranging from affect and affirmation to world and work provide the reader with a critical toolbox to be continued. Negativity, judgment and opposition as modes of critique have run out of steam. Critique as an attitude and a manner of enquiry has not.

Symptoms of the Planetary Condition: A Critical Vocabulary

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

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