Bücher von Peter Nelson

This book proposes that computer games are the paradigmatic form of contemporary landscape and offers a synthesis of art history, geography, game studies and play. Like paint on canvas, the game engine is taken as the underlying medium, and using the Valve Source Engine as the primary case study, it analyses landscapes according to the technical, economic and cultural features this medium affords. It presents the single-player first-person shooter (Half-Life 2) as a Promethean safari, examines how the economics of gambling and product placement shaped the eSports landscapes of Counter-Strike and reveals how sandboxes such as Garry's Mod visualise the radical landscape of Web 2.0. This book explores how our relationship to the environment is changing, how we express this through computer games and how we can move beyond examining artistic influences on games to examining how historical connections flow through games and the history of landscape images.

Some of the greatest minds of the century have predicted that computers or artificial intelligence will replace 80 percent, if not more, of the world's workforce. The only uncertainty is the time frame, with the average prediction at about 30 years, although many believe it will be sooner. No matter the exact period, the impact on our planet will eventually be enormous because governments will still need to find a way to provide the unemployed with money on which to live and a Universal Basic Income (UBI), or something similar, is proposed to be paid to everyone without means test. That solution might appear well in theory, but the large numbers of unemployed will not want to be marginalized and will demand over time that the UBI be increased. Following human nature, under a democratic system as we know it, supposedly based on one person one vote, people will vote for whoever gives them more, and more, until the economic system breaks down, unable to afford the payments. The question is whether democracy will survive the challenge or whether we finish with a benign group of bureaucrats at the top who decide what is in the best interests of the majority and the rest of the global population simply accepts it.

The year 2120 may appear a long way into the future but will come quickly. The global population reached one billion in 1804, four billion in 1974, six billion in 1999, seven billion in 2012, and nine billion predicted for 2020. Given the speed of current development under the threat of changing climate, this book attempts to project ahead but with a particular focus. Housing and feeding so many people is about saving the planet while laying the foundations for a quality of life that is within what people in 2120 will want in their living conditions. One factor has not been considered, namely, how each new generation comes in at a different reference point. Previously, the ideal home might have had a house, a garden, perhaps a swimming pool or tennis court. Teenagers today don't care about these amenities as long as they have access to their electronic devices. Grandparents might resent living in one-room apartments, while young people could find this acceptable. The planning conundrum is to anticipate the expectations of future generations. This text looks at best theories of urban development, attempting to integrate future expectations in the hope of guiding governments to think outside the box.

There have been many books written about negotiation techniques, but all of these have been turned on their head by the ability of Donald Trump to make it to the White House. Ignoring all precedents and defying even his own party, he has opened an era where neither tradition nor precedent remains the order of the day. Fake news has become the entertainment watchword in an era where a president can send out his own daily tweets to millions of followers and the world press, and no one is able to pre-empt his message or know how to respond. In what would be described negotiation madness, Trump incites confrontation into intransient situations: opening an American embassy in Jerusalem and provoking a North Korean leader by a silly name, which nevertheless still initiates first-time discussions between north and south. If he doesn't get his wish through Congress, he pretends to give up, plays the man not the issue, going against what all the negotiation books tell you, then comes in again to get what he wants. At every turn the standards of negotiation need to be rewritten in what has become as much politics as entertainment, ego rather than substance, and this is what is targeted in Peter Nelson's Negotiation Madness.