The Race Game

The pioneering game-chip engineers behind the revolutionary Cell microprocessor tell the story of its creation in this “fast-paced tell-all” (Steve Cherry, IEEE Spectrum Magazine). The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 game systems have changed the face of home entertainment. But few know the amazing story inside the consoles—how David Shippy and his team of engineers at the Sony/Toshiba/IBM Design Center (STI) forged the tiny miracle at the core of it all: a revolutionary microprocessor chip that set a new paradigm in personal computing. In The Race for a New Gaming Machine, Shippy tells the dramatic story in his own words. Here is a dazzling, behind-the-scenes account of life in the tech world, featuring memorable characters, high-level corporate intrigue, and cutthroat business dealings. At stake were the livelihoods—and sanity—of an unsung group of tireless visionaries. At war were the giants Microsoft and Sony. It's a story that's never been told—until now.

1999 North American Society for Sports History Book of the Year Douglas Booth looks at the role of sport in the fostering of a new national identity in South Africa. He analyzes the effect of the 30-year sport boycott but concludes that sport will never unite South Africans except in the most fleeting and superficial manner.

How games have been used to establish and combat Asian American racial stereotypes As Pokémon Go reshaped our neighborhood geographies and the human flows of our cities, mapping the virtual onto lived realities, so too has gaming and game theory played a role in our contemporary understanding of race and racial formation in the United States. From the Chinese Exclusion Act and Japanese American internment to the model minority myth and the globalization of Asian labor, Tara Fickle shows how games and game theory shaped fictions of race upon which the nation relies. Drawing from a wide range of literary and critical texts, analog and digital games, journalistic accounts, marketing campaigns, and archival material, Fickle illuminates the ways Asian Americans have had to fit the roles, play the game, and follow the rules to be seen as valuable in the US. Exploring key moments in the formation of modern US race relations, The Race Card charts a new course in gaming scholarship by reorienting our focus away from games as vehicles for empowerment that allow people to inhabit new identities, and toward the ways that games are used as instruments of soft power to advance top-down political agendas. Bridging the intellectual divide between the embedded mechanics of video games and more theoretical approaches to gaming rhetoric, Tara Fickle reveals how this intersection allows us to overlook the predominance of game tropes in national culture. The Race Card reveals this relationship as one of deep ideological and historical intimacy: how the games we play have seeped into every aspect of our lives in both monotonous and malevolent ways.

1999 North American Society for Sports History Book of the Year Douglas Booth looks at the role of sport in the fostering of a new national identity in South Africa. He analyzes the effect of the 30-year sport boycott but concludes that sport will never unite South Africans except in the most fleeting and superficial manner.

Hello there! Have you ever run in a race? How did you prepare for it? Was there a time when you lost your focus because something distracted you? Did that affect you reach your goal? Well, if your answer is YES, then this book is for you. Read the story and learn a thing or two about it. Enjoy!

What if your human nature was more than you think it is? What is the mirror effect, and how does it help you to evolve the human race game? How do you know if you are being a conscious creator in your world? Evolving the Human Race Game: A Spiritual and Soul-Centered Perspective provides a spiritual framework for evolving one's consciousness as it relates to what author Carroy Ferguson calls the "human race game." Beyond family members, most of us wonder why different and/or specific people from our own and other racial and ethnic groups enter into our lives. Ferguson explains how and why this happens through what he calls the "mirror effect." He also introduces readers to various human and interracial games we play; how to transform those human race games that keep us stuck, individually and collectively, in unhealthy realities; and how to evolve our consciousness in such a way that we become conscious creators in our individual and collective soul-linked dramas.

This study of a unique social world probes beneath the thrill and spectacle of horse racing into the lives of the "honest boys," the "gyps," the "manipulators," the "stoops," and the "Chalk eaters"--the constituents of race track society and the players of the racing game. With scientific precision and journalistic vigor, Scott describes the everyday activities--the objectives and strategies--of those whose lives are organized around track proceedings and who compete with chance and one another. The players in the racing game range from track owners to stable boys, from law enforcers to lawbreakers, and from casual sportsmen to pathologically addicted gamblers. Considering the self-interests, the normative and operational codes, and the interactional relationships among the major types and subtypes of participants, the author defines the components of strategic movement within the framework of rules and resources to show how a player's relations to the "means of production" governs his behavior. The fruitful application of sociological theory and method to an unusually interesting social context makes this particularly useful still for courses in social problems and the sociology of organizations and of leisure. "...when he was teaching at Berkeley, Goffman asked me to come to his seminar to hear a student, Marvin Scott, present his research on horse racing. ...in the course of his presentation, Scott suggested in passing that gamblers, including horse players, sometimes had winning streaks' or losing streaks.' Goffman, who had been listening appreciatively until that point, interrupted to say that of course Scott meant that they thought they had such streaks of good or bad luck. But Scott said no, these were observable facts.' Goffman, unwilling to accept such supernatural talk, persisted, appealing to the laws of probability to assure Scott that such streaks' were natural occurrences in any long run of tries in such a game as blackjack or craps."--Howard Becker Marvin B. Scott retired in 2001 as professor of sociology at Hunter College, City University of New York. He previously taught at San Francisco State College and received his Ph.D. in 1966 at the University of California, Berkeley. Jaime Suchlicki is Bacardi Professor of History at the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Miami, and executive director of its Cuban-American and Cuban Center.

A study of the relationship between platform and creative expression in the Atari VCS, the gaming system for popular games like Pac-Man and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. The Atari Video Computer System dominated the home video game market so completely that “Atari” became the generic term for a video game console. The Atari VCS was affordable and offered the flexibility of changeable cartridges. Nearly a thousand of these were created, the most significant of which established new techniques, mechanics, and even entire genres. This book offers a detailed and accessible study of this influential video game console from both computational and cultural perspectives. Studies of digital media have rarely investigated platforms—the systems underlying computing. This book, the first in a series of Platform Studies, does so, developing a critical approach that examines the relationship between platforms and creative expression. Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost discuss the Atari VCS itself and examine in detail six game cartridges: Combat, Adventure, Pac-Man, Yars' Revenge, Pitfall!, and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. They describe the technical constraints and affordances of the system and track developments in programming, gameplay, interface, and aesthetics. Adventure, for example, was the first game to represent a virtual space larger than the screen (anticipating the boundless virtual spaces of such later games as World of Warcraft and Grand Theft Auto), by allowing the player to walk off one side into another space; and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back was an early instance of interaction between media properties and video games. Montfort and Bogost show that the Atari VCS—often considered merely a retro fetish object—is an essential part of the history of video games.