(3) Reality is Broken: Why Games Make us Better and How They Can Change the World.
About the author:
Jane McGonigal, PhD is a world-renowned designer of alternate reality games. She has created and deployed award-winning games and secret missions in more than 30 countries on six continents. She specializes in games that challenge players to tackle real-world problems, such as poverty, hunger and climate change, through planetary-scale collaboration. Jane is also a future forecaster. Her research focuses on how games are transforming the way we lead our real lives, and how they can be used to increase our resilience and well-being.
Book Description:
With 174 million gamers in the United States alone, we now live in a world where every generation will be a gamer generation. In this groundbreaking book, McGonigal shows how we can leverage the power of games to fix what is wrong with the real world-from social problems like depression and obesity to global issues like poverty and climate change-and introduces us to cutting-edge games that are already changing the business, education, and nonprofit worlds. Written for gamers and non-gamers alike, Reality Is Broken shows that the future will belong to those who can understand, design, and play games.
(4) Tom Boellstorff. Coming of Age in Second Life
About the author:
Tom Boellstorff is an anthropologist currently based at the University of California, Irvine. In his career to date, his interests have included the anthropology of sexuality, the anthropology of globalization, the anthropology of virtual worlds, Southeast Asian studies, the anthropology of HIV/AIDS, and linguistic anthropology. He is the winner of the Ruth Benedict Prize given by the Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists.
Book Description:
Millions of people around the world today spend portions of their lives in online virtual worlds. Second Life is one of the largest of these virtual worlds. The residents of Second Life create communities, buy property and build homes, go to concerts, meet in bars, attend weddings and religious services, buy and sell virtual goods and services, find friendship, fall in love--the possibilities are endless, and all encountered through a computer screen. Coming of Age in Second Life is the first book of anthropology to examine this thriving alternate universe.
Tom Boellstorff conducted more than two years of fieldwork in Second Life, living among and observing its residents in exactly the same way anthropologists traditionally have done to learn about cultures and social groups in the so-called real world.
Coming of Age in Second Life shows how virtual worlds can change ideas about identity and society. Bringing anthropology into territory never before studied, this book demonstrates that in some ways humans have always been virtual, and that virtual worlds in all their rich complexity build upon a human capacity for culture that is as old as humanity itself.