Work Less

An analysis of wandering within different game worlds, viewed through the lenses of work, colonialism, gender, and death.Wandering in games can be a theme, a formal mode, an aesthetic metaphor, or a player action. It can mean walking, escaping, traversing, meandering, or returning. In this book, game studies scholar Melissa Kagen introduces the concept of “wandering games,” exploring the uses of wandering in a variety of game worlds. She shows how the much-derided Walking Simulator―a term that began as an insult, a denigration of games that are less violent, less task-oriented, or less difficult to complete―semi-accidentally tapped into something brilliant: the vast heritage and intellectual history of the concept of walking in fiction, philosophy, pilgrimage, performance, and protest. Kagen examines wandering in a series of games that vary widely in terms of genre, mechanics, themes, player base, studio size, and funding, giving close readings to Return of the Obra Dinn, Eastshade, Ri

An argument against the ideology of domesticity that separates work from home; lavishly illustrated, with architectural proposals for alternate approaches to working and living.Despite the increasing numbers of people who now work from home, in the popular imagination the home is still understood as the sanctuary of privacy and intimacy. Living is conceptually and definitively separated from work. This book argues against such a separation, countering the prevailing ideology of domesticity with a series of architectural projects that illustrate alternative approaches. Less a monograph than a treatise, richly illustrated, the book combines historical research and design proposals to reenvision home as a cooperative structure in which it is possible to live and work and in which labor is socialized beyond the family―freeing inhabitants from the sense of property and the burden of domestic labor. The projects aim to move the house beyond the dichotomous logic of male/female, husband/wi

Žižek as comedian: jokes in the service of philosophy."A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes." -- Ludwig WittgensteinThe good news is that this book offers an entertaining but enlightening compilation of Žižekisms. Unlike any other book by Slavoj Žižek, this compact arrangement of jokes culled from his writings provides an index to certain philosophical, political, and sexual themes that preoccupy him. Žižek's Jokes contains the set-ups and punch lines -- as well as the offenses and insults -- that Žižek is famous for, all in less than 200 pages.So what's the bad news? There is no bad news. There's just the inimitable Slavoj Žižek, disguised as an impossibly erudite, politically incorrect uncle, beginning a sentence, "There is an old Jewish joke, loved by Derrida..." For Žižek, jokes are amusing stories that offer a shortcut to philosophical insight. He illustrates the logic of the Hegelian triad, for example, with three variations of the "

With more than a billion people now living on less than a dollar a day, and with eight million dying each year because they are simply too poor to live, most would agree that the problem of global pov

With more than a billion people now living on less than a dollar a day, and with eight million dying each year because they are simply too poor to live, most would agree that the problem of global po

Over the course of a little less than twenty years, inventor Frank J. Sprague(1857-1934) achieved an astonishing series of technological breakthroughs--from pioneering work inself-governing motors to

This work is a revision of Basu's "The Less Developed Economy: A Critique of Contemporary Theory". The new edition incorporates recent theoretical advances in its comprehensive treatment of the subjec

This work is an overview of environmental regulation in the United States and a call for a new more effective regulatory model that relies less on top-down intervention and more on collaboration, flex