We the Gamers

We the Gamers PDF Author: Karen Schrier
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190926139
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Distrust. Division. Disparity. Is our world in disrepair? Ethics and civics have always mattered, but perhaps they matter now more than ever before. Recently, with the rise of online teaching and movements like #PlayApartTogether, games have become increasingly acknowledged as platforms for civic deliberation and value sharing. We the Gamers explores these possibilities by examining how we connect, communicate, analyze, and discover when we play games. Combining research-based perspectives and current examples, this volume shows how games can be used in ethics, civics, and social studies education to inspire learning, critical thinking, and civic change. We the Gamers introduces and explores various educational frameworks through a range of games and interactive experiences including board and card games, online games, virtual reality and augmented reality games, and digital games like Minecraft, Executive Command, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, Fortnite, When Rivers Were Trails, Politicraft, Quandary, and Animal Crossing: New Horizons. The book systematically evaluates the types of skills, concepts, and knowledge needed for civic and ethical engagement, and details how games can foster these skills in classrooms, remote learning environments, and other educational settings. We the Gamers also explores the obstacles to learning with games and how to overcome those obstacles by encouraging equity and inclusion, care and compassion, and fairness and justice. Featuring helpful tips and case studies, We the Gamers shows teachers the strengths and limitations of games in helping students connect with civics and ethics, and imagines how we might repair and remake our world through gaming, together.

We the Gamers

We the Gamers PDF Author: Karen Schrier
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190926139
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Get Book Here

Book Description
Distrust. Division. Disparity. Is our world in disrepair? Ethics and civics have always mattered, but perhaps they matter now more than ever before. Recently, with the rise of online teaching and movements like #PlayApartTogether, games have become increasingly acknowledged as platforms for civic deliberation and value sharing. We the Gamers explores these possibilities by examining how we connect, communicate, analyze, and discover when we play games. Combining research-based perspectives and current examples, this volume shows how games can be used in ethics, civics, and social studies education to inspire learning, critical thinking, and civic change. We the Gamers introduces and explores various educational frameworks through a range of games and interactive experiences including board and card games, online games, virtual reality and augmented reality games, and digital games like Minecraft, Executive Command, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, Fortnite, When Rivers Were Trails, Politicraft, Quandary, and Animal Crossing: New Horizons. The book systematically evaluates the types of skills, concepts, and knowledge needed for civic and ethical engagement, and details how games can foster these skills in classrooms, remote learning environments, and other educational settings. We the Gamers also explores the obstacles to learning with games and how to overcome those obstacles by encouraging equity and inclusion, care and compassion, and fairness and justice. Featuring helpful tips and case studies, We the Gamers shows teachers the strengths and limitations of games in helping students connect with civics and ethics, and imagines how we might repair and remake our world through gaming, together.

Gamers at Work

Gamers at Work PDF Author: Morgan Ramsay
Publisher: Apress
ISBN: 1430233524
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
"Gamers at Work is a critical resource for new and experienced business leaders—for anyone who feels unprepared for the demanding and seemingly insurmountable trials ahead of them." —Peter Molyneux OBE, founder, Lionhead Studios "Gamers at Work explores every imaginable subtlety of the video-game industry through the fascinating stories of those who took the risks and reaped the rewards." —Hal Halpin, president, Entertainment Consumers Association "This is the sort of book that can tear the most hardcore gamers away from their PCs, Macs, or consoles for a few hours of rewarding reading." —North County Times "Gamers at Work is truly an invaluable resource that's well worth adding to your personal library." —Wii Love It There are few companies in the video-game industry that have withstood the test of time; most startups exit as quickly as they enter. In Gamers at Work: Stories Behind the Games People Play, the countless challenges of building successful video-game developers and publishers in this unstable industry are explored through interviews containing entertaining stories, humorous anecdotes, and lessons learned the hard way. Gamers at Work presents an inside look at how 18 industry leaders play the odds, seize opportunities, and transform small businesses into great businesses. Here, in Gamers at Work, you will find their stories replete with their personal struggles, corporate intrigue, and insights into strategy, leadership, and management. Gamers at Work: Explores the formation of entertainment software companies from the perspectives of successful founders who played the odds Provides insight into why experienced professionals sacrifice the comfort of gainful employment for the uncertainty and risk of the startup Shares the experiences and lessons that shape the lives, decisions, and struggles of entrepreneurs in this volatile business As an added bonus, check out Online Game Pioneers at Work, published in 2015, for even more incredible stories from leaders in the mobile space. Featured Entrepreneurs: Trip Hawkins, Electronic Arts (Madden NFL) Nolan Bushnell, Atari (Pong) Wild Bill Stealey, MicroProse Software (Sid Meier's Civilization) Tony Goodman, Ensemble Studios (Age of Empires) Feargus Urquhart, Obsidian Entertainment (Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II) Tim Cain, Troika Games (Arcanum, Vampire: the Masquerade—Bloodlines) Warren Spector, Junction Point Studios (Disney Epic Mickey) Doug & Gary Carlston, Broderbund Software (Prince of Persia, Carmen Sandiego) Don Daglow, Stormfront Studios (Neverwinter Nights, Tony La Russa Baseball) John Smedley, Verant Interactive (EverQuest, PlanetSide) Ken Williams, Sierra On-Line (King's Quest, Leisure Suit Larry) Lorne Lanning, Oddworld Inhabitants (Oddworld) Chris Ulm, Appy Entertainment (FaceFighter, Trucks & Skulls) Tobi Saulnier, 1st Playable (Kung Zhu, Yogi Bear) Christopher Weaver, Bethesda Softworks (The Elder Scrolls) Jason Rubin, Naughty Dog (Crash Bandicoot, Uncharted) Ted Price, Insomniac Games (Spyro, Resistance) Other books in the Apress At Work Series: Coders at Work, Seibel, 978-1-4302-1948-4 Venture Capitalists at Work, Shah & Shah, 978-1-4302-3837-9 CIOs at Work, Yourdon, 978-1-4302-3554-5 CTOs at Work, Donaldson, Seigel, & Donaldson, 978-1-4302-3593-4 Founders at Work, Livingston, 978-1-4302-1078-8 European Founders at Work, Santos, 978-1-4302-3906-2 Women Leaders at Work, Ghaffari, 978-1-4302-3729-7 Advertisers at Work, Tuten, 978-1-4302-3828-7

The PlayStation Dreamworld

The PlayStation Dreamworld PDF Author: Alfie Bown
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509518061
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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Book Description
From mobile phones to consoles, tablets and PCs, we are now a generation of gamers. The PlayStation Dreamworld is – to borrow a phrase from Slavoj Zizek – the pervert's guide to videogames. It argues that we can only understand the world of videogames via Lacanian dream analysis. It also argues that the Left needs to work inside this dreamspace – a powerful arena for constructing our desires – or else the dreamworld will fall entirely into the hands of dominant and reactionary forces. While cyberspace is increasingly dominated by corporate organization, gaming, at its most subversive, can nevertheless produce radical forms of enjoyment which threaten the capitalist norms that are created and endlessly repeated in our daily relationships with mobile phones, videogames, computers and other forms of technological entertainment. Far from being a book solely for dedicated gamers, this book dissects the structure of our relationships to all technological entertainment at a time when entertainment has become ubiquitous. We can no longer escape our fantasies but rather live inside their digital reality.

Getting Gamers

Getting Gamers PDF Author: Jamie Madigan
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 9781538121337
Category : Video games
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A psychologist and life-long fan of video games helps you understand what psychology has to say about why video games and mobile game apps are designed the way they are, why players behave as they do, and the psychological tricks used to market and sell them.

Future Gaming

Future Gaming PDF Author: Paolo Ruffino
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 1906897557
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description
A sophisticated critical take on contemporary game culture that reconsiders the boundaries between gamers and games. This book is not about the future of video games. It is not an attempt to predict the moods of the market, the changing profile of gamers, the benevolence or malevolence of the medium. This book is about those predictions. It is about the ways in which the past, present, and future notions of games are narrated and negotiated by a small group of producers, journalists, and gamers, and about how invested these narrators are in telling the story of tomorrow. This new title from Goldsmiths Press by Paolo Ruffino suggests the story could be told another way. Considering game culture, from the gamification of self-improvement to GamerGate's sexism and violence, Ruffino lays out an alternative, creative mode of thinking about the medium: a sophisticated critical take that blurs the distinctions among studying, playing, making, and living with video games. Offering a series of stories that provide alternative narratives of digital gaming, Ruffino aims to encourage all of us who study and play (with) games to raise ethical questions, both about our own role in shaping the objects of research, and about our involvement in the discourses we produce as gamers and scholars. For researchers and students seeking a fresh approach to game studies, and for anyone with an interest in breaking open the current locked-box discourse, Future Gaming offers a radical lens with which to view the future.

Gamer Army

Gamer Army PDF Author: Trent Reedy
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
ISBN: 1338045318
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
In this timely and thrilling novel, Ender's Game meets Ready Player One and several terabytes of fast-paced video game action as five gamers are recruited into a tech giant's secret program. After Rogan Webber levels up yet again on his favorite video game, Laser Viper, the world-famous creator of the game invites him to join the five best players in the country for an exclusive tournament. The gamers are flown to the tech mogul's headquarters, where they stay in luxury dorms and test out cutting edge virtual-reality gaming equipment, doing digital battle as powerful fighting robots. It's the ultimate gaming experience.But as the contest continues, the missions become harder, losing gamers are eliminated, and the remaining contestants face the growing suspicion that the game may not be what it seems. Why do the soldiers and robots they fight in Laser Viper act so weird? What's behind the strange game glitches? And why does the game feel so... real?Rogan and his gamer rivals must come together, summoning the collective power of their Gamer Army to discover the truth and make things right... in a dangerous world where video games have invaded reality.

A Play of Bodies

A Play of Bodies PDF Author: Brendan Keogh
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262345447
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
An investigation of the embodied engagement between the playing body and the videogame: how player and game incorporate each other. Our bodies engage with videogames in complex and fascinating ways. Through an entanglement of eyes-on-screens, ears-at-speakers, and muscles-against-interfaces, we experience games with our senses. But, as Brendan Keogh argues in A Play of Bodies, this corporal engagement goes both ways; as we touch the videogame, it touches back, augmenting the very senses with which we perceive. Keogh investigates this merging of actual and virtual bodies and worlds, asking how our embodied sense of perception constitutes, and becomes constituted by, the phenomenon of videogame play. In short, how do we perceive videogames? Keogh works toward formulating a phenomenology of videogame experience, focusing on what happens in the embodied engagement between the playing body and the videogame, and anchoring his analysis in an eclectic series of games that range from mainstream to niche titles. Considering smartphone videogames, he proposes a notion of co-attentiveness to understand how players can feel present in a virtual world without forgetting that they are touching a screen in the actual world. He discusses the somatic basis of videogame play, whether games involve vigorous physical movement or quietly sitting on a couch with a controller; the sometimes overlooked visual and audible pleasures of videogame experience; and modes of temporality represented by character death, failure, and repetition. Finally, he considers two metaphorical characters: the “hacker,” representing the hegemonic, masculine gamers concerned with control and configuration; and the “cyborg,” less concerned with control than with embodiment and incorporation.

SLAY

SLAY PDF Author: Brittney Morris
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
ISBN: 1534445420
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2019! “Gripping and timely.” —People “The YA debut we’re most excited for this year.” —Entertainment Weekly “A book that knocks you off your feet while dropping the kind of knowledge that’ll keep you down for the count. Prepare to BE slain.” —Nic Stone, New York Times bestselling author of Dear Martin and Odd One Out Ready Player One meets The Hate U Give in this dynamite debut novel that follows a fierce teen game developer as she battles a real-life troll intent on ruining the Black Panther–inspired video game she created and the safe community it represents for Black gamers. By day, seventeen-year-old Kiera Johnson is an honors student, a math tutor, and one of the only Black kids at Jefferson Academy. But at home, she joins hundreds of thousands of Black gamers who duel worldwide as Nubian personas in the secret multiplayer online role-playing card game, SLAY. No one knows Kiera is the game developer, not her friends, her family, not even her boyfriend, Malcolm, who believes video games are partially responsible for the “downfall of the Black man.” But when a teen in Kansas City is murdered over a dispute in the SLAY world, news of the game reaches mainstream media, and SLAY is labeled a racist, exclusionist, violent hub for thugs and criminals. Even worse, an anonymous troll infiltrates the game, threatening to sue Kiera for “anti-white discrimination.” Driven to save the only world in which she can be herself, Kiera must preserve her secret identity and harness what it means to be unapologetically Black in a world intimidated by Blackness. But can she protect her game without losing herself in the process?

The Gamer's Brain

The Gamer's Brain PDF Author: Celia Hodent
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1351650769
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description
Making a successful video game is hard. Even games that are successful at launch may fail to engage and retain players in the long term due to issues with the user experience (UX) that they are delivering. The game user experience accounts for the whole experience players have with a video game, from first hearing about it to navigating menus and progressing in the game. UX as a discipline offers guidelines to assist developers in creating the experience they want to deliver, shipping higher quality games (whether it is an indie game, AAA game, or "serious game"), and meeting their business goals while staying true to their design and artistic intent. In a nutshell, UX is about understanding the gamer’s brain: understanding human capabilities and limitations to anticipate how a game will be perceived, the emotions it will elicit, how players will interact with it, and how engaging the experience will be. This book is designed to equip readers of all levels, from student to professional, with neuroscience knowledge and user experience guidelines and methodologies. These insights will help readers identify the ingredients for successful and engaging video games, empowering them to develop their own unique game recipe more efficiently, while providing a better experience for their audience. Key Features Provides an overview of how the brain learns and processes information by distilling research findings from cognitive science and psychology research in a very accessible way. Topics covered include: "neuromyths", perception, memory, attention, motivation, emotion, and learning. Includes numerous examples from released games of how scientific knowledge translates into game design, and how to use a UX framework in game development. Describes how UX can guide developers to improve the usability and the level of engagement a game provides to its target audience by using cognitive psychology knowledge, implementing human-computer interaction principles, and applying the scientific method (user research). Provides a practical definition of UX specifically applied to games, with a unique framework. Defines the most relevant pillars for good usability (ease of use) and good "engage-ability" (the ability of the game to be fun and engaging), translated into a practical checklist. Covers design thinking, game user research, game analytics, and UX strategy at both a project and studio level. Offers unique insights from a UX expert and PhD in psychology who has been working in the entertainment industry for over 10 years. This book is a practical tool that any professional game developer or student can use right away and includes the most complete overview of UX in games existing today.

Play like a Feminist.

Play like a Feminist. PDF Author: Shira Chess
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262360446
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
An important new voice provides an empowering look at why video games need feminism—and why all of us should make space for more play in our lives. You play like a girl: It’s meant to be an insult, accusing a player of subpar, un-fun playing. If you’re a girl, and you grow up, do you “play like a woman”—whatever that means? In this provocative and enlightening book, Shira Chess urges us to play like feminists. Playing like a feminist is empowering and disruptive—it exceeds the boundaries of gender yet still advocates for gender equality. Roughly half of all players identify as female, and “Gamergate” galvanized many of gaming’s disenfranchised voices. Chess argues games are in need of a creative platform-expanding, metaphysical explosion—and feminism can take us there. She reflects on the importance of play, playful protest, and how feminist video games can help us rethink the ways that we tell stories. Feminism needs video games as much as video games need feminism. Play and games can be powerful. Chess’s goal is for all of us—regardless of gender orientation, ethnicity, ability, social class, or stance toward feminism—to spend more time playing as a tool of radical disruption.