The Infinite Playground

The Infinite Playground

Author: Bernard De Koven

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2022-06-21

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 0262543869

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In his final work, a visionary game designer reveals how a surprising range of play-based experiences can unlock our imagination and help us capture the power of fun and delight. Bernard De Koven (1941–2018) was a pioneering designer of games and theorist of fun. He studied games long before the field of game studies existed. For De Koven, games could not be reduced to artifacts and rules; they were about a sense of transcendent fun. This book, his last, is about the imagination: the imagination as a playground, a possibility space, and a gateway to wonder. The Infinite Playground extends a play-centered invitation to experience the power and delight unlocked by imagination. It offers a curriculum for playful learning. De Koven guides the readers through a series of observations and techniques, interspersed with games. He begins with the fundamentals of play, and proceeds through the private imagination, the shared imagination, and imagining the world—observing, “the things we imagine can become the world.” Along the way, he reminisces about playing ping-pong with basketball great Bill Russell; begins the instructions for a game called Reception Line with “Mill around”; and introduces blathering games—Blather, Group Blather, Singing Blather, and The Blather Chorale—that allow the player's consciousness to meander freely. Delivered during the last months of his life, The Infinite Playground has been painstakingly cowritten with Holly Gramazio, who worked together with coeditors Celia Pearce and Eric Zimmerman to complete the project as Bernie De Koven's illness made it impossible for him to continue writing. Other prominent game scholars and designers influenced by De Koven, including Katie Salen Tekinbaş, Jesper Juul, Frank Lantz, and members of Bernie's own family, contribute short interstitial essays.


Joker's Playground

Joker's Playground

Author: Lynn Hale Shauingér

Publisher: AuthorHouse

Published: 2015-02-20

Total Pages: 57

ISBN-13: 149697056X

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This book begins with the childhood sweetheart husband who was having strange behavior and nightmare flashbacks of Vietnam leaving his home. His wife and four young children are now stranded and alone. The wife is filled with two overwhelming emotions: (1) freedom, as no longer would she have to deal with this unfathomable behavior, and (2) extreme fear, fear of how she and the children would pay for food and rent in this most expensive city. As the endless calls come in from doctors, lawyers, police, and random women, the wife decides to test the citys infinite possibilities of love and hope. This puts her on the brink of insanity.


Playground

Playground

Author: Richard Powers

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2024-09-24

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 1039011551

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LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 BOOKER PRIZE From the Pulitzer Prize-winning and #1 internationally bestselling author of The Overstory comes an epic tale of love, friendship and humanity’s next great adventure. When two brilliant misfits bond at an elite Chicago private school—one a white legacy kid named Todd Keane and the other, Rafi Young, a Black scholarship student from the South Side—their friendship seems as boundary-breaking and limitless as the 3,000-year-old board game that brings them together. For a time, not even simultaneously falling in love with Ina Aroita, who grew up in naval bases across the Pacific, shakes them. Until finally it does, with a betrayal that launches all three of them on radically different paths. Rafi disappears into literature, and Ina into art. Todd, who once dreamed of escape into the world beneath the surface of the ocean, revealed to him by the legendary Canadian diver and marine biologist Evie Beaulieu, becomes instead one of the most powerful tech billionaires on the planet whose social media empire, Playground, is remaking the global order with its AI breakthroughs. But not even wild success can insulate Todd from mortality. As illness eats away at the brain that built it all, he dreams of the life that could’ve been and the relationships he should never have let go. Before Todd’s final act is up, past loves and present ambitions collide on the ravaged Polynesian island of Makatea, where an unnamed corporation hopes to build the first floating, autonomous city on the open sea. Traversing borders and oceans, connection and loss, ingenuity and transcendence, Playground brings to light the systems of competition, cooperation, commerce, exploration and love that tie the fates of unlikely humans together, in Richard Powers’ most transporting work of fiction yet.


Heaven is a Playground

Heaven is a Playground

Author: Rick Telander

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 1995-01-01

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 9780803294271

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In 1974, Rick Telander intended to spend a few days doing a magazine piece on the court wizards of Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant. He ended up staying the entire summer, becoming part of the players' lives and eventually the coach of a loose aggregation known as the Subway Stars. Telander tells of everything he saw: the on-court flash, the off-court jargon, the late-night graffiti raids, the tireless efforts of one promoter-hustler-benefactor to get these kids a chance at a college education. He lets the kids speak for themselves, revealing their grand dreams and ambitions. But he never flinches from showing us how far their dreams are from reality. The roots of today's inner-city basketball can be traced to the world Telander presents in "Heaven is a Playground," the first book of its kind. Rick Telander is a senior writer for "Sports Illustrated" and the winner of the 1987 Notre Dame Club Award for Excellence in Sports Journalism.


Business Playground

Business Playground

Author: Dave Stewart

Publisher: Pearson Education

Published: 2010-07-13

Total Pages: 398

ISBN-13: 0132118432

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The Business Playground is the definitive guide to creativity and innovation Written by musician/entrepreneur Dave Stewart and branding expert Mark Simmons, The Business Playground offers a revealing look at what creativity is and how to apply it in business through an inspiring mix of scientific studies, anecdotes, high-profile interviews, and thought-provoking games that you can play alone or with your co-workers. The Business Playground is not your average business book. Former Eurythmics band member Dave Stewart turns on his rock and roll charm with personal, inspirational stories from his own career as well as interviews with such innovative and influential thinkers as Mick Jagger, Microsoft’s Paul Allen, and Twitter’s Evan Williams. The legendary Sir Richard Branson makes a guest appearance as the author of the book’s foreword where he sets the tone for this quirky, fun, emminently useful guide to creative business thinking. Whether you’re running a one-man show or heading up a multinational corporation, you’ll discover new techniques for finding and harnessing your creative abilities and putting them to work for your business in this entertaining book. The Business Playground includes real-world examples of innovation in action, as well as substantial and practical techniques that you can use immediately to aid in creative thinking and problem solving. Play the games at the end of each chapter and you’ll learn how to: Ask the right questions so you can find the right answers Rediscover, train, and utilize your innate creative abilities Conduct “the perfect brainstorm”—yes, such a thing really does exist Create a work culture that’s conducive to creativity Help people collaborate with others within and outside of the organization Kill ideas that aren’t working before they waste too much time and too many resources In his foreword Sir Richard Branson says, “Dave and Mark’s enthusiasm for creativity and how it can be applied in business leaps off every page. The Business Playground will bring out the creative child inside all of us and I can’t imagine many readers being left uninspired to try it out for themselves. Their mix of insights about creativity, revealing examples, anecdotes, interviews with creative thinkers, and games make for an entertaining and informative read. If you get half as much out of this book as I did, you’re in for quite a treat.” Join in the fun with the Business Playground Facebook community at: www.facebook.com/businessplayground


Primacy

Primacy

Author: Barry D. Wade

Publisher: Author House

Published: 2010-08-25

Total Pages: 462

ISBN-13: 145206394X

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A commiserating and provocative tale, Primacy is an all-important lesson of love, tragedy and inspiration as told from an urban perspective. Propagated in the latter portion of the turbulent 60's, on the outskirts of the gritty streets of Philadelphia, it is the story of a young male born in a 'dysfunctional' household and living in a less than opulent neighborhood. With an adolescent's cognizant awareness of the times and personal events, the prognosticator's life starts out on an anger-laced, emotionally charged tumultuous journey that eventually transcends both the time and the streets of the "City of Brotherly Love". Later in the story as the prognosticator becomes of age you are escorted further into his moral decadence as he takes the reader descriptively fitting into the twenty-first century, meeting with consequences and humility. Eloquently written with appropriate vernacular and speech of the situational characters, this story brings into stark visualization a vivid visitation for the reader. Primacy is an empathetic journey for the many whom have felt that they have been through trying situations and that no other soul could possibly empathize.


Play development in children with disabilties

Play development in children with disabilties

Author: Serenella Besio

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2016-01-01

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 3110522144

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This book is the result of the first two-year work of Working Group 1 of the network “LUDI – Play for children with disabilities”. LUDI is an Action (2014-2018) financed by COST; it is a multidisciplinary network of more than 30 countries and almost 100 researchers and practitioners belonging to the humanistic and technological fields to study the topic of play for children with disabilities within the framework of the International Classification of Functioning Disability and Health (WHO, 2001).The principal objective of this book is to bring the LUDI contribution to the important topic of play in children with disabilities, because today an international consensus on the definition of play and disabilities is still lacking. The process of ensuring equity in the exercise of the right to play for children with disabilites requests three actions: to approach this topic through a “common language”, at least all over Europe; to put play at the centre of the multidisciplinary research and intervention regarding the children with disabilities; to grant this topic the status of a scientific and social theme of full visibility and recognized authority. Children with disabilities face several limitations in play, due to several reasons: impairments; playgrounds, toys and other play tools that are not accessible and usable; environments and contexts that are not accessible nor inclusive; lack of educational awareness and intentionality; lack of specific psycho-pedagogical and rehabilitative competence; lack of effective intervention methodologies. Moreover, disabled children’s lives are dominated by medical and rehabilitative practices in which play is always an activity aiming to reach an objective or to provoke an improvement; play for the sake of play is considered a waste of time. The concept of play for the sake of play strongly refers to the distinction between play activities and play-like activities. Play activities are initiated and carried out by the player (alone, with peers, with adults, etc.) for the only purpose of play itself (fun and joy, interest and challenge, love of race and competition, ilinx and dizziness, etc.). They have of course consequences on growth and development, but these consequences are not intentionally pursued. Play-like activities are initiated and conducted by an adult (with one or more children), in educational, clinical, social contexts; they are playful and pleasant, but their main objective is other than play: e.g., cognitive learning, social learning, functional rehabilitation, child's observation and assessment, psychological support, psychotherapy, etc. This book, then, contributes to a clear distinction between play and play-like activities that, hopefully, will bring to new developments in play studies.


The Top Dimension

The Top Dimension

Author: Phyllis Sinclair

Publisher: AuthorHouse

Published: 2015-11-03

Total Pages: 156

ISBN-13: 1504956737

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Short story description: A paranormal story about astral travel or out-of-body travel. Spirit guides and guardian angels. Spiritual dimensions above and beyond Earth and reincarnation.