Author: Alenda Y. Chang
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 145296226X
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 293
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Book Description
A potent new book examines the overlap between our ecological crisis and video games Video games may be fun and immersive diversions from daily life, but can they go beyond the realm of entertainment to do something serious—like help us save the planet? As one of the signature issues of the twenty-first century, ecological deterioration is seemingly everywhere, but it is rarely considered via the realm of interactive digital play. In Playing Nature, Alenda Y. Chang offers groundbreaking methods for exploring this vital overlap. Arguing that games need to be understood as part of a cultural response to the growing ecological crisis, Playing Nature seeds conversations around key environmental science concepts and terms. Chang suggests several ways to rethink existing game taxonomies and theories of agency while revealing surprising fundamental similarities between game play and scientific work. Gracefully reconciling new media theory with environmental criticism, Playing Nature examines an exciting range of games and related art forms, including historical and contemporary analog and digital games, alternate- and augmented-reality games, museum exhibitions, film, and science fiction. Chang puts her surprising ideas into conversation with leading media studies and environmental humanities scholars like Alexander Galloway, Donna Haraway, and Ursula Heise, ultimately exploring manifold ecological futures—not all of them dystopian.
Author: Gerald Farca
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3839445973
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 435
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Book Description
Video games permeate our everyday existence. They immerse players in fascinating gameworlds and exciting experiences, often inviting them in various ways to reflect on the enacted events. Gerald Farca explores the genre of dystopian video games and the player's aesthetic response to their nightmarish gameworlds. Players, he argues, will gradually come to see similarities between the virtual dystopia and their own ›offline‹ environment, thus learning to stay wary of social and political developments. In his analysis, Farca draws from a variety of research fields, such as literary theory and game studies, combining them into a coherent theory of aesthetic response to dystopian games.
Author: Jason Thompson
Publisher: Quarto Publishing Group USA
ISBN: 1616738588
Category : Crafts & Hobbies
Languages : en
Pages : 153
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Book Description
A guide to repurposing used books and pages into unique, accessible art projects—the perfect gift for artists, crafters and book lovers. In these pages, Jason Thompson has curated an extensive and artistic range of both achievable upcycled crafts made from books and book pages and an amazing gallery that contains thought-provoking and beautiful works that transform books into art. The content encompasses a wide range of techniques and step-by-step projects that deconstruct and rebuild books and their parts into unique, recycled objects. The book combines in equal measure bookbinding, woodworking, paper crafting, origami, and textile and decorative arts techniques, along with a healthy dose of experimentation and fun. The beautiful high-end presentation and stunning photography make this book a delightful, must-have volume for any book-loving artist or art-loving book collector.
Author: Alex R. Kahler
Publisher: Albert Whitman & Company
ISBN: 0807587400
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 35
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Book Description
No matter who you are, sometimes it's fun to pretend to be wicked! Dante loves playing make believe. When he's with his friends, he's the wizened wizard or regal ruler. But when he's by himself, Dante would rather be the wicked queen. Then, one day, his dress and makeup are just so perfect that he braves the outdoors, delighting in his playful evilness. Will Dante find someone to play the hero to his villain?
Author: Souvik Mukherjee
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137525053
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 327
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Book Description
The potential of video games as storytelling media and the deep involvement that players feel when they are part of the story needs to be analysed vis-à-vis other narrative media. This book underscores the importance of video games as narratives and offers a framework for analysing the many-ended stories that often redefine real and virtual lives.
Author: Jon Peterson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780615642048
Category : Computer games
Languages : en
Pages : 698
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Book Description
Explore the conceptual origins of wargames and role-playing games in this unprecedented history of simulating the real and the impossible. From a vast survey of primary sources ranging from eighteenth-century strategists to modern hobbyists, Playing at the World distills the story of how gamers first decided fictional battles with boards and dice, and how they moved from simulating wars to simulating people. The invention of role-playing games serves as a touchstone for exploring the ways that the literary concept of character, the lure of fantastic adventure and the principles of gaming combined into the signature cultural innovation of the late twentieth century.
Author: Editors of the American Heritage Di
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 054756323X
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : es
Pages : 11
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Book Description
La popular serie Good Beginnings de Houghton Mifflin Harcourt en ediciones de cartón presenta dos títulos nuevos en 2004, cada uno publicado solo en inglés y en ediciones bilingües español-inglés. Continuando con el cautivador formato en serie, estos libros encantadores contestan la pregunta en sus títulos con palabras que han sido seleccionadas de los diccionarios American Heritage® por su familiaridad y para las edades apropiadas. Y como en el libro previo, una extravagante colección de osos, cerdos, perros y hasta un elefante jugador de fútbol le da vida a las palabras en las irresistibles ilustraciones a todo color de Pamela Zagarenski. En ¿Qué juego?, las respuestas incluyen una gama de deportes y juegos, desde juegos de pelota al aire libre y actividades en el patio de juegos hasta actividades puertas adentro como rompecabezas y marionetas. ¿Qué puedo hacer cuando llueve? Incluye simples frases con verbos como “jugar con amigos” y “saltar en charcos”, para responder a la pregunta, haciendo de este un excelente libro para presentarle hasta a los más pequeños la estructura básica de una oración. Houghton Mifflin’s popular Good Beginnings series of board books introduces two new titles for 2004, each of them published in English-only and bilingual English-Spanish editions. Continuing the engaging series format, these delightful books answer the question in their title with words that have been selected by the editors of the American Heritage® Dictionaries for their familiarity and age-appropriateness. And as in the previous books, a whimsical menagerie of bears, pigs, dogs, and even a soccer-playing elephant brings the words to life in Pamela Zagarenski’s irresistible full-color drawings. In What Am I Playing? (zQué juego?), the answers include a range of sports and games, from outdoor ball games and playground activities to indoor pursuits such as puzzles and puppets. What Can I Do When It Rains? (zQué puedo hacer cuando llueve?) includes simple verb phrases, such as “play with friends” and “jump in puddles,” to answer its question, making this an excellent book to introduce even very young children to basic sentence structure.
Author: Julian Togelius
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262350157
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 188
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Book Description
THE FUTURE OF GAME DESIGN IN THE AGE OF AI: Can games measure intelligence? And how will artificial intelligence inform games of the future? In Playing Smart, Julian Togelius explores the connections between games and intelligence to offer a new vision of future games and game design. Video games already depend on AI. We use games to test AI algorithms, challenge our thinking, and better understand both natural and artificial intelligence. In the future, Togelius argues, game designers will be able to create smarter games that make us smarter in turn, applying advanced AI to help design games. In this book, he tells us how. Games are the past, present, and future of artificial intelligence. In 1948, Alan Turing, one of the founding fathers of computer science and artificial intelligence, handwrote a program for chess. Today we have IBM’s Deep Blue and DeepMind’s AlphaGo, and huge efforts go into developing AI that can play such arcade games as Pac-Man. Programmers continue to use games to test and develop AI, creating new benchmarks for AI while also challenging human assumptions and cognitive abilities. Game design is at heart a cognitive science, Togelius reminds us—when we play or design a game, we plan, think spatially, make predictions, move, and assess ourselves and our performance. By studying how we play and design games, Togelius writes, we can better understand how humans and machines think. AI can do more for game design than providing a skillful opponent. We can harness it to build game-playing and game-designing AI agents, enabling a new generation of AI-augmented games. With AI, we can explore new frontiers in learning and play.
Author: Fran Blumberg
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 019989664X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 386
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Book Description
There is a growing recognition in the learning sciences that video games can no longer be seen as impediments to education, but rather, they can be developed to enhance learning. Educational and developmental psychologists, education researchers, media psychologists, and cognitive psychologists are now joining game designers and developers in seeking out new ways to use video game play in the classroom. In Learning by Playing, a diverse group of contributors provide perspectives on the most current thinking concerning the ramifications of leisure video game play for academic classroom learning. The first section of the text provides foundational understanding of the cognitive skills and content knowledge that children and adolescents acquire and refine during video game play. The second section explores game features that captivate and promote skills development among game players. The subsequent sections discuss children and adolescents' learning in the context of different types of games and the factors that contribute to transfer of learning from video game play to the classroom. These chapters then form the basis for the concluding section of the text: a specification of the most appropriate research agenda to investigate the academic potential of video game play, particularly using those games that child and adolescent players find most compelling. Contributors include researchers in education, learning sciences, and cognitive and developmental psychology, as well as instructional design researchers.
Author: Karen Collins
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262312301
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 199
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Book Description
An examination of the player's experience of sound in video games and the many ways that players interact with the sonic elements in games. In Playing with Sound, Karen Collins examines video game sound from the player's perspective. She explores the many ways that players interact with a game's sonic aspects—which include not only music but also sound effects, ambient sound, dialogue, and interface sounds—both within and outside of the game. She investigates the ways that meaning is found, embodied, created, evoked, hacked, remixed, negotiated, and renegotiated by players in the space of interactive sound in games. Drawing on disciplines that range from film studies and philosophy to psychology and computer science, Collins develops a theory of interactive sound experience that distinguishes between interacting with sound and simply listening without interacting. Her conceptual approach combines practice theory (which focuses on productive and consumptive practices around media) and embodied cognition (which holds that our understanding of the world is shaped by our physical interaction with it). Collins investigates the multimodal experience of sound, image, and touch in games; the role of interactive sound in creating an emotional experience through immersion and identification with the game character; the ways in which sound acts as a mediator for a variety of performative activities; and embodied interactions with sound beyond the game, including machinima, chip-tunes, circuit bending, and other practices that use elements from games in sonic performances.
