Introduction
There has been much interest in recent years in online games as an economic and social force. Virtual currencies such as Bitcoin were first created inside online games, and have been the focus of a significant study by the ECB (2012). Many researchers and policy analysts are interested in using games for serious purposes. There are games for education, games for science, games for health, and games for public policy.1 Meanwhile, the commercial digital game sector remains very strong, even as other media industries suffer decline.2

All of this activity suggests that many observers believe that games represent a powerful cultural forc [...]

As children, we were fascinated by seemingly everyday objects that turned out to be magic. The heroes of fairytales, legends, and myths would routinely surmount the difficulties they faced with the help of some magic item whose hidden powers defied the laws of nature.

In modern popular culture this motif is perhaps best embodied in Disney films where inanimate objects become sentient beings who come to the aid of the main character. The prime exponent might be the brooms in the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” sequence in Fantasia, which sweep the floor all on their own; other examples that spring to mind are the magic mirror in Snow White or the ta [...]

The Web as I envisaged it, we have not seen it yet. The future is still so much bigger than the past.
Tim Berners-Lee
This book, Ch@nge: 19 Key Essays on How Internet Is Changing Our Lives, is the sixth installment in BBVA’s annual series devoted to the exploration of the most important issues of our time. We seek out the world’s leading experts and ask them to use a straightforward approach and language accessible to laypeople to explore the best and most current knowledge on topics that matter to us all. Over these past few years, we have been incredibly fortunate to have presented the work of more than 130 authors at the forefront of their [...]

Robotics and brain computer interfaces hold the promise of making patients with paralysis walk again. Scientists and engineers are currently developing exoskeletons that respond to the patient’s brain orders and help them move their limbs. In the future, these technologies could dr [...]

Wallace Broecker Interview

On August 8, 1975, Wallace Broecker published a prophetic text in the magazine Science. The article entitled Climate Change: Are we on the brink of a pronounced global warming? warned that the temperature of the planet would increase over the coming decades [...]

Introduction
The Internet is the decisive technology of the Information Age, as the electrical engine was the vector of technological transformation of the Industrial Age. This global network of computer networks, largely based nowadays on platforms of wireless communication, provides ubiquitous capacity of multimodal, interactive communication in chosen time, transcending space. The Internet is not really a new technology: its ancestor, the Arpanet, was first deployed in 1969 (Abbate 1999). But it was in the 1990s when it was privatized and released from the control of the U.S. Department of Commerce that it diffused around the world at extraord [...]