Is there a significant difference in attitude between immersion in a game and immersion in a movie or novel? The author demonstrates in this book that the questions raised by new, interactive technologies have their precursors and echoes in pre-electronic literary and artistic traditions.

Although many people view virtual reality as a totally new phenomenon, it has its foundations in an unrecognised history of immersive images. Indeed, the search for illusionary visual space can be traced back to antiquity. In this book Oliver Grau shows how virtual art fits into the art history of illusion and immersion. He describes the metamorphosis of the concepts of art and the image and ...

This is the first major collection of media studies scholarship on video games as a unique medium and object of study.

This book includes many seminal articles by film scholars such as Christian Metz, Jean-Louis Baudry, Stephen Heath, Peter Wollen, Laura Mulvey, and Noe l Burch. Also included are articles by the era's leading cultural thinkers: Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and Jean-Franccois Lyotard, to name a few.

Here, Murray shows how the computer is reshaping the stories we live by and discusses the properties and pleasures of digital environments and connects them with the traditional satisfactions of narrative.

Separating hype from fact, this text investigates the fate of embodiment in an information age. It relates three issues: information as an entity separate from the material forms that carry it; the construction of the Cyborg; and the dismantling of the humanist subject in cybernetic discourse.