Find at Drury: SWAN Library Catalog
You can find books, DVDs, CDs, and more. If you can't locate a book from our library try getting it from MOBIUS.
On the Second Floor of the library:
QA Mathematics
QA75.5 - QA76.95 Computer Science
Making Videogames by
An in-depth visual guide presenting the captivating creative journeys behind the world's leading videogames. Making Videogames is an unprecedented snapshot of modern interactive entertainment, with insight from true pioneers about the most important games in the world. Illustrated with some of the most arresting in-game images ever seen in print, the book explores the unique alchemy of technical and artistic endeavour that constitutes the magic of videogames, striking a captivating balance between insight and accessibility. Across eleven chapters, each focusing on a specific game from AAA blockbusters such as Control and Half-Life: Alyx to cult breakthrough games including No Man's Sky and Return of the Obra Dinn, the book will document the incredible craft of videogame worldbuilding and visual storytelling via the world's most popular, but seldom fully understood, entertainment medium. The book's text orbits breathtaking, specially created imagery 'photographed' in-engine by the author, demonstrating the magic and method behind each studio's work. A book not only for die-hard videogame fanatics, but also for designer-creatives and the visually curious, Making Videogames is a thrilling showcase of the boundless creativity of this amazing industry.
The Charisma Machine by
A fascinating examination of technological utopianism and its complicated consequences. In The Charisma Machine, Morgan Ames chronicles the life and legacy of the One Laptop per Child project and explains why--despite its failures--the same utopian visions that inspired OLPC still motivate other projects trying to use technology to "disrupt" education and development. Announced in 2005 by MIT Media Lab cofounder Nicholas Negroponte, One Laptop per Child promised to transform the lives of children across the Global South with a small, sturdy, and cheap laptop computer, powered by a hand crank. In reality, the project fell short in many ways--starting with the hand crank, which never materialized. Yet the project remained charismatic to many who were captivated by its claims of access to educational opportunities previously out of reach. Behind its promises, OLPC, like many technology projects that make similarly grand claims, had a fundamentally flawed vision of who the computer was made for and what role technology should play in learning. Drawing on fifty years of history and a seven-month study of a model OLPC project in Paraguay, Ames reveals that the laptops were not only frustrating to use, easy to break, and hard to repair, they were designed for "technically precocious boys"--idealized younger versions of the developers themselves--rather than the children who were actually using them. The Charisma Machine offers a cautionary tale about the allure of technology hype and the problems that result when utopian dreams drive technology development.
The Future Is Faster Than You Think by
From the New York Times bestselling authors of Abundance and Bold comes a practical playbook for technological convergence in our modern era. In their book Abundance, bestselling authors and futurists Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler tackled grand global challenges, such as poverty, hunger, and energy. Then, in Bold, they chronicled the use of exponential technologies that allowed the emergence of powerful new entrepreneurs. Now the bestselling authors are back with The Future Is Faster Than You Think, a blueprint for how our world will change in response to the next ten years of rapid technological disruption. Technology is accelerating far more quickly than anyone could have imagined. During the next decade, we will experience more upheaval and create more wealth than we have in the past hundred years. In this gripping and insightful roadmap to our near future, Diamandis and Kotler investigate how wave after wave of exponentially accelerating technologies will impact both our daily lives and society as a whole. What happens as AI, robotics, virtual reality, digital biology, and sensors crash into 3D printing, blockchain, and global gigabit networks? How will these convergences transform today's legacy industries? What will happen to the way we raise our kids, govern our nations, and care for our planet? Diamandis, a space-entrepreneur-turned-innovation-pioneer, and Kotler, bestselling author and peak performance expert, probe the science of technological convergence and how it will reinvent every part of our lives--transportation, retail, advertising, education, health, entertainment, food, and finance--taking humanity into uncharted territories and reimagining the world as we know it. As indispensable as it is gripping, The Future Is Faster Than You Think provides a prescient look at our impending future.
