He didn't know he was playing.Zack was just living his life.It was really a game.When he started to ask questions, everything changed. Zack wasn't supposed to figure it out. He could ruin everything.Zack was disoriented when he woke up. They had welcomed him back. He didn't know where he'd been. He just remembered being 74 and near death.They said he was seventeen.What was this "best score" they kept going on about?Where was this place?Who were these people?And why did they keep talking about the next game?You'll love the first book in the series and get lost in the elaborate world created by Terry Schott. It will keep you turning pages until the end.Get book 1 now.
Principles for designing educational games that integrate content and play and create learning experiences connecting to many areas of learners' lives. Too often educational videogames are narrowly focused on specific learning outcomes dictated by school curricula and fail to engage young learners. This book suggests another approach, offering a guide to designing games that integrates content and play and creates learning experiences that connect to many areas of learners' lives. These games are not gamified workbooks but are embedded in a long-form experience of exploration, discovery, and collaboration that takes into consideration the learning environment. Resonant Games describes twenty essential principles for designing games that offer this kind of deeper learning experience, presenting them in connection with five games or collections of games developed at MIT's educational game research lab, the Education Arcade. Each of the games—which range from Vanished, an alternate reality game for middle schoolers promoting STEM careers, to Ubiquitous Bio, a series of casual mobile games for high school biology students—has a different story, but all spring from these fundamental assumptions: honor the whole learner, as a full human being, not an empty vessel awaiting a fill-up; honor the sociality of learning and play; honor a deep connection between the content and the game; and honor the learning context—most often the public school classroom, but also beyond the classroom.
The pace of modern life is undoubtedly speeding up, yet this acceleration does not seem to have made us any happier or more content. If acceleration is the problem, then the solution, argues Hartmut Rosa in this major new work, lies in “resonance.” The quality of a human life cannot be measured simply in terms of resources, options, and moments of happiness; instead, we must consider our relationship to, or resonance with, the world. Applying his theory of resonance to many domains of human activity, Rosa describes the full spectrum of ways in which we establish our relationship to the world, from the act of breathing to the adoption of culturally distinct worldviews. He then turns to the realms of concrete experience and action – family and politics, work and sports, religion and art – in which we as late modern subjects seek out resonance. This task is proving ever more difficult as modernity’s logic of escalation is both cause and consequence of a distorted relationship to the world, at individual and collective levels. As Rosa shows, all the great crises of modern society – the environmental crisis, the crisis of democracy, the psychological crisis – can also be understood and analyzed in terms of resonance and our broken relationship to the world around us. Building on his now classic work on acceleration, Rosa’s new book is a major new contribution to the theory of modernity, showing how our problematic relation to the world is at the crux of some of the most pressing issues we face today. This bold renewal of critical theory for our times will be of great interest to students and scholars across the social sciences and humanities.
Two worlds are shaken by events set in motion during Zack's final playFans across Tygon watch as the consequences of his actions ripple through both realitiesWill his widow step up to lead the movement that he created?The lives of billions rest on the decisions made by children inside the Game ...
In telling the story of his youth through seven computer games, critically acclaimed author Michael W. Clune (White Out) captures the part of childhood we live alone. You have been awakened. Floppy disk inserted, computer turned on, a whirring, and then this sentence, followed by a blinking cursor. So begins Suspended, the first computer game to obsess seven-year-old Michael, to worm into his head and change his sense of reality. Thirty years later he will write: "Computer games have taught me the things you can't learn from people." Gamelife is the memoir of a childhood transformed by technology. Afternoons spent gazing at pixelated maps and mazes train Michael's eyes for the uncanny side of 1980s suburban Illinois. A game about pirates yields clues to the drama of cafeteria politics and locker-room hazing. And in the year of his parents' divorce, a spaceflight simulator opens a hole in reality.
The Game is Life - Book 7Deceived by a trusted colleague, Loredana Cyber, heir to the world's largest entertainment company, walks away from big business and vows never to return.When a young programmer on the verge of perfecting an incredible new technology comes to her for help, she must decide; remain anonymous, or return to an arena that betrayed her.Also available in The Game is Life series:1- The Game2- Digital Heretic3- Interlude-Brandon4- Virtual Prophet5- Shadows6- Digital Evolution7- Cyber8- Fragmented
Inside the Game, players struggle to survive in a world where technology no longer functions.On Tygon, fans are unable to view what is occurring. Trew and Danielle rush to save both realities, but they are unable to know what the other is doing.The fate of reality depends on a Game, and time is about to run out...
The gods have gotten bored, and humanity is the answer. Charles earns the ultimate surprise one morning when he awakens to discover the world has ended, or rather the gods of old were bored and decided to redesign how it worked. Everyone else got a nice little message that showed up their vision, everyone else woke up when the gods decided to make their decision known. Only Charles gets cursed by the gods, and only Charles gets a visit from one as well. The Game of the Gods has begun and the monsters of old are returning to our world, and all it took was the death of half the worlds population and counting.
Brandon Strayne Brilliant computer programmer, businessman, and world leader.Where did this mysterious man come from? Before there was the Game, there was a boy...This takes the story of the Game even further by showing you how it all started! "A must read for all fans of the Game is Life Series."
Are thousands of orbs, with each containing a reality housing billions of souls, about to burn out and die?Can Trew find his daughter, or will everything he has sacrificed be for nothing?And what impact will a young scientist who believes that his reality exists inside of a computer simulation make on his world?