An essential exploration of video game aesthetic that decenters the human player and challenges what it means to play. Do we play video games or do video games play us? Is nonhuman play a mere paradox or the future of gaming? And what do video games have to do with quantum theory? In Playing at a Distance, Sonia Fizek engages with these and many more daunting questions, forging new ways to think and talk about games and play that decenter the human player and explore a variety of play formats and practices that require surprisingly little human action. Idling in clicker games, wandering in walking simulators, automating gameplay with bots, or simply watching games rather than playing them—Fizek shows how these seemingly marginal cases are central to understanding how we play in the digital age. Introducing the concept of distance, Fizek reorients our view of computer-mediated play. To “play at a distance,” she says, is to delegate the immediate action to the machine and to become participants in an algorithmic spectacle. Distance as a media aesthetic framework enables the reader to come to terms with the ambiguity and aesthetic diversity of play. Drawing on concepts from philosophy, media theory, and posthumanism, as well as cultural and film studies, Playing at a Distance invites a wider understanding of what digital games and gaming are in all their diverse experiences and forms. In challenging the common perception of video games as inherently interactive, the book contributes to our understanding of the computer’s influence on practices of play—and prods us to think more broadly about what it means to play.

Do you like to play games outside? Have you ever played the egg relay or ball balance? Does your school hold a field day where you can do just that? In this book you will learn about distance, rate, and time while playing these and other field day games along with middle school students. Additional mathematical concepts include proportions, ratios, and cross products. Ready, set, go!

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th IFIP WG 12.5 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Applications and Innovations, AIAI 2013, held in Paphos, Cyprus, in September/October 2013. The 26 revised full papers presented together with a keynote speech at the main event and 44 papers of 8 collocated workshops were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the volume. The papers of the main event are organized in topical sections on data mining, medical informatics and biomedical engineering, problem solving and scheduling, modeling and decision support systems, robotics, and intelligent signal and image processing.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning, EC-TEL 2012, held in Saarbrücken, Germany, in September 2012. The 26 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 130 submissions. The book also includes 12 short papers, 16 demonstration papers, 11 poster papers, and 1 invited paper. Specifically, the programme and organizing structure was formed through the themes: mobile learning and context; serious and educational games; collaborative learning; organisational and workplace learning; learning analytics and retrieval; personalised and adaptive learning; learning environments; academic learning and context; and, learning facilitation by semantic means.

This book evaluates the newest efforts and initiative aimed at preventing burglary, discusses their merits and short- comings, and suggests how improvements might be incorporated in burglary prevention programs.