Power Games

A timely, no-holds barred, critical political history of the modern Olympic Games The Olympics have a checkered, sometimes scandalous, political history. Jules Boykoff, a former US Olympic team member, takes readers from the event’s nineteenth-century origins, through the Games’ flirtation with Fascism, and into the contemporary era of corporate control. Along the way he recounts vibrant alt-Olympic movements, such as the Workers’ Games and Women’s Games of the 1920s and 1930s as well as athlete-activists and political movements that stood up to challenge the Olympic machine.

The phenomenal growth of gaming has inspired plenty of hand-wringing since its inception--from the press, politicians, parents, and everyone else concerned with its effect on our brains, bodies, and hearts. But what if games could be good, not only for individuals but for the world? In Power Play, Asi Burak and Laura Parker explore how video games are now pioneering innovative social change around the world. As the former executive director and now chairman of Games for Change, Asi Burak has spent the last ten years supporting and promoting the use of video games for social good, in collaboration with leading organizations like the White House, NASA, World Bank, and The United Nations. The games for change movement has introduced millions of players to meaningful experiences around everything from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the US Constitution. Power Play looks to the future of games as a global movement. Asi Burak and Laura Parker profile the luminaries behind some of the movement's most iconic games, including former Supreme Court judge Sandra Day O’Connor and Pulitzer-Prize winning authors Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. They also explore the promise of virtual reality to address social and political issues with unprecedented immersion, and see what the next generation of game makers have in store for the future.

Critical and radical perspectives have been central to the emergence of the sociology of sport as a discipline in its own right. This ground-breaking new book is the first to offer a comprehensive theory and method for a critical sociology of sport. It argues that class, political economy, hegemony and other concepts central to the radical tradition are essential for framing, understanding and changing social and political relations within sport and between sport and society. The book draws upon the disciplines of politics, sociology, history and philosophy to provide a critical analysis of power relations throughout the world of sport, while offering important new case studies from such diverse sporting contexts as the Olympics, world football, boxing, cricket, tennis and windsurfing. In the process, it addresses key topics such as: * nations and nationalism * globalisation * race * gender * political economy. Power Games can be used as a complete introduction to the study of sport and society. And will be essential reading for any serious student of sport. At the same time, it is a provocative book that by argument and example challenges those who research and write about sport to make their work relevant to social and political reform.

An exploration of the way videogames mount arguments and make expressive statements about the world that analyzes their unique persuasive power in terms of their computational properties. Videogames are an expressive medium, and a persuasive medium; they represent how real and imagined systems work, and they invite players to interact with those systems and form judgments about them. In this innovative analysis, Ian Bogost examines the way videogames mount arguments and influence players. Drawing on the 2,500-year history of rhetoric, the study of persuasive expression, Bogost analyzes rhetoric's unique function in software in general and videogames in particular. The field of media studies already analyzes visual rhetoric, the art of using imagery and visual representation persuasively. Bogost argues that videogames, thanks to their basic representational mode of procedurality (rule-based representations and interactions), open a new domain for persuasion; they realize a new form of rhetoric. Bogost calls this new form "procedural rhetoric," a type of rhetoric tied to the core affordances of computers: running processes and executing rule-based symbolic manipulation. He argues further that videogames have a unique persuasive power that goes beyond other forms of computational persuasion. Not only can videogames support existing social and cultural positions, but they can also disrupt and change these positions themselves, leading to potentially significant long-term social change. Bogost looks at three areas in which videogame persuasion has already taken form and shows considerable potential: politics, advertising, and learning.

The Olympics have a checkered, sometimes scandalous, political history. Jules Boykoff, a former US Olympic team member, takes readers from the event's nineteenth-century origins, through the Games' flirtation with Fascism, and into the contemporary era of corporate control. Along the way he recounts vibrant alt-Olympic movements, such as the Workers' Games and Women's Games of the 1920s and 1930s as well as athlete-activists and political movements that stood up to challenge the Olympic machine.

Two MIT economists show how game theory--the ultimate theory of rationality--explains irrational behavior We like to think of ourselves as rational. This idea is the foundation for classical economic analysis of human behavior, including the awesome achievements of game theory. But as behavioral economics shows, most behavior doesn't seem rational at all--which, unfortunately, to cast doubt on game theory's real-world credibility. In Hidden Games, Moshe Hoffman and Erez Yoeli find a surprising middle ground between the hyperrationality of classical economics and the hyper-irrationality of behavioral economics. They call it hidden games. Reviving game theory, Hoffman and Yoeli use it to explain our most puzzling behavior, from the mechanics of Stockholm syndrome and internalized misogyny to why we help strangers and have a sense of fairness. Fun and powerfully insightful, Hidden Games is an eye-opening argument for using game theory to explain all the irrational things we think, feel, and do.

Washington, D.C. The one city that affects all our lives. The one city where the game has only one name: Power. Hedrick Smith, the Pulitzer Prize-winning ex-Washington bureau chief of The New York Times, takes us inside the beltway to show who wields the most power—and for what ends. The Power Game explains how some members of Congress have built personal fortunes on PAC money, how Michael Deaver was just the tip of the influence-peddling iceberg, how “dissidents” in the Pentagon work to keep the generals honest, how insiders and “leakers” use the Times and The Washington Post and their personal bulletin boards. Congressional staffers more powerful than their bosses, media advisors more powerful than the media, money that not only talks but intimidated and threatens. That’s Washington. That’s The Power Game. Praise for Power Game “The Power Game may be the most sweeping and in many ways the most impressive portrait of the culture of the federal government to appear in a single work in many decades. . . . Knowledgeable and informative.”—The New York Times Book Review “There are oodles of good yarns in this book about the nature of power and the eccentricities that accompany it. . . . Delightfully fresh . . . [Hedrick] Smith is a superb writer.”—The Washington Post “Not only the inside stuff, but the insightful stuff—an original view of the power playing.”—William Safire

In this sizzling and suspenseful GhostWalker novel by the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Spider Game, two lovers discover there’s no telling who will come out on top. When radical terrorists take hostages in Indonesia, Captain Ezekiel Fortunes is called to lead the rescue team. Part of a classified government experiment, Zeke is a supersoldier with enhanced abilities. He can see better and run faster than the enemy, disappear when necessary and hunt along any terrain. There are those in the world willing to do anything for power like that... A formidable spy genetically engineered to hide in plain sight, Bellisia rarely meets a man who doesn’t want to control her or kill her. But Zeke is different. His gaze, his touch—they awaken feelings inside her that she never thought possible. He’s the kind of man she could settle down with—if she can keep him alive...

The dissolution of the Soviet Union into independent states was among the most momentous political phenomena of the twentieth century. This book provides the first comprehensive study of Azerbaijan's post-independence foreign policy in relation to its much stronger neighbours - Russia, Turkey and Iran - and the role that the West brought to bear in helping Azerbaijan to counterbalance the influence of Russia. Complex and subtle diplomatic negotiations enabled the exploitation of Azerbaijan's substantial oil and gas resources and the implementation of transit projects that Azerbaijan's leadership considered critical - the construction of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline bypassing Russia being one example. The case of Azerbaijan demonstrates how in the post-Cold War order a small state has been able to advance its interests internationally even when they contradicted those of the hegemon. The book includes a wealth of new sources and extensive interviews with national policymakers and experts.

Politicians, social scientists, entrepreneurs, trade unionists, church leaders, philosophers, all of us in fact have caused such vast vague ness and confusion about the term 'power' that this can hardly be attributed to mere chance. Apparently, there is so much at stake, whenever we think about power or are involved, that it may be worth our while to keep the concept blurred. This is most clearly seen in social science. Power, inequality in power, struggle for power are a kind of prime movers in social life, but power problems have seldom been studied, compared to the research done on other subjects, such as satisfaction about personal achievement, perception, mental processes, achievement motivation, cultural differences, etc. Power appears to be under a taboo in society and most social scientists agree not to discuss it (ref. 23, pp. 55 and 56). Whatever research there has been reveals the peculiar trend of restricting itself to the study of power differences and power struggles as world- or macro-problems. Studies of mondial problems have covered rela tions between America and the Soviet Union, or between rich and poor countries. China has also been included of late. The studies on macrostructural problems will cover subjects like the power of particular groups within the nation, such as retired army generals and politicians working in various sectors of trade and industry (ref. 21, pp. 11 and 281), or the number of representatives of large banks on the advisory boards of other companies (ref. 22).