Steven Poole’s book Trigger Happy was one of the first books giving a history and aesthetics of videogames – and it’s very accessibly written too. We’ve used it successfully in teaching a couple of times at humanistic informatics. Now he’s offering a free (as in free beer) PDF of the British, 2000-edition of the book, under a Creative Commons license – for a limited, though unspecified, period.

I’ve asked our library to see whether the library can legally archive a copy so that readers can access the book digitally even after Poole removes the file from his server. The paper edition of the book’s currently on loan at about half the Norwegian libraries that own a copy, so it’s clearly popular.

1 Comment

  1. Liz Lawley

    CC licenses are perpetual and irrevocable. So if you download it now, under the terms of the license you can redistribute the original work (though not a derivative work, based on the license he’s chosen) indefinitely.

    See section 3 and 4 of http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/legalcode for details.

Leave A Comment

Recommended Posts

Image on a black background of a human hand holding a graphic showing the word AI with a blue circuit board pattern inside surrounded by blurred blue and yellow dots and a concentric circular blue design.
AI and algorithmic culture Machine Vision

Four visual registers for imaginaries of machine vision

I’m thrilled to announce another publication from our European Research Council (ERC)-funded research project on Machine Vision: Gabriele de Setaand Anya Shchetvina‘s paper analysing how Chinese AI companies visually present machine vision technologies. They find that the Chinese machine vision imaginary is global, blue and competitive.  […]