In Ernest Games Carl Lindahl recovers a folkloric world long hidden from readers of Chaucer. Lindahl is the first critic to demonstrate how the poem reflects the social and artistic patterns of medieval folk performance. Combining current approaches from the fields of literary criticism, social history, and folklore, Earnest Games begins with a study of Chaucer's setting and characters. Lindahl discovers that Chaucer gives each community -- the gentils, the churls, and the pilgrims -- a game strategy that faithfully reflects the social realities of the English Middle Ages.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Now a major motion picture directed by Steven Spielberg. “Enchanting . . . Willy Wonka meets The Matrix.”—USA Today • “As one adventure leads expertly to the next, time simply evaporates.”—Entertainment Weekly A world at stake. A quest for the ultimate prize. Are you ready? In the year 2045, reality is an ugly place. The only time Wade Watts really feels alive is when he’s jacked into the OASIS, a vast virtual world where most of humanity spends their days. When the eccentric creator of the OASIS dies, he leaves behind a series of fiendish puzzles, based on his obsession with the pop culture of decades past. Whoever is first to solve them will inherit his vast fortune—and control of the OASIS itself. Then Wade cracks the first clue. Suddenly he’s beset by rivals who’ll kill to take this prize. The race is on—and the only way to survive is to win. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Entertainment Weekly • San Francisco Chronicle • Village Voice • Chicago Sun-Times • iO9 • The AV Club “Delightful . . . the grown-up’s Harry Potter.”—HuffPost “An addictive read . . . part intergalactic scavenger hunt, part romance, and all heart.”—CNN “A most excellent ride . . . Cline stuffs his novel with a cornucopia of pop culture, as if to wink to the reader.”—Boston Globe “Ridiculously fun and large-hearted . . . Cline is that rare writer who can translate his own dorky enthusiasms into prose that’s both hilarious and compassionate.”—NPR “[A] fantastic page-turner . . . starts out like a simple bit of fun and winds up feeling like a rich and plausible picture of future friendships in a world not too distant from our own.”—iO9
To create a great video game, you must start with a solid game design: A well-designed game is easier to build, more entertaining, and has a better chance of succeeding in the marketplace. Here to teach you the essential skills of player-centric game design is one of the industry’s leading authorities, who offers a first-hand look into the process, from initial concept to final tuning. Now in its second edition, this updated classic reference by Ernest Adams offers a complete and practical approach to game design, and includes material on concept development, gameplay design, core mechanics, user interfaces, storytelling, and balancing. In an easy-to-follow approach, Adams analyzes the specific design challenges of all the major game genres and shows you how to apply the principles of game design to each one. You’ll learn how to: Define the challenges and actions at the heart of the gameplay. Write a high-concept document, a treatment, and a full design script. Understand the essentials of user interface design and how to define a game’s look and feel. Design for a variety of input mechanisms, including the Wii controller and multi-touch iPhone. Construct a game’s core mechanics and flow of resources (money, points, ammunition, and more). Develop appealing stories, game characters, and worlds that players will want to visit, including persistent worlds. Work on design problems with engaging end-of-chapter exercises, design worksheets, and case studies. Make your game accessible to broader audiences such as children, adult women, people with disabilities, and casual players. “Ernest Adams provides encyclopedic coverage of process and design issues for every aspect of game design, expressed as practical lessons that can be immediately applied to a design in-progress. He offers the best framework I’ve seen for thinking about the relationships between core mechanics, gameplay, and player—one that I’ve found useful for both teaching and research.” — Michael Mateas, University of California at Santa Cruz, co-creator of Façade
How filling life with play-whether soccer or lawn mowing, counting sheep or tossing Angry Birds -- forges a new path for creativity and joy in our impatient age Life is boring: filled with meetings and traffic, errands and emails. Nothing we'd ever call fun. But what if we've gotten fun wrong? In Play Anything, visionary game designer and philosopher Ian Bogost shows how we can overcome our daily anxiety; transforming the boring, ordinary world around us into one of endless, playful possibilities. The key to this playful mindset lies in discovering the secret truth of fun and games. Play Anything, reveals that games appeal to us not because they are fun, but because they set limitations. Soccer wouldn't be soccer if it wasn't composed of two teams of eleven players using only their feet, heads, and torsos to get a ball into a goal; Tetris wouldn't be Tetris without falling pieces in characteristic shapes. Such rules seem needless, arbitrary, and difficult. Yet it is the limitations that make games enjoyable, just like it's the hard things in life that give it meaning. Play is what happens when we accept these limitations, narrow our focus, and, consequently, have fun. Which is also how to live a good life. Manipulating a soccer ball into a goal is no different than treating ordinary circumstances- like grocery shopping, lawn mowing, and making PowerPoints-as sources for meaning and joy. We can "play anything" by filling our days with attention and discipline, devotion and love for the world as it really is, beyond our desires and fears. Ranging from Internet culture to moral philosophy, ancient poetry to modern consumerism, Bogost shows us how today's chaotic world can only be tamed-and enjoyed-when we first impose boundaries on ourselves.
The first-of-its-kind, Games and Gaming in Medieval Literature explores the depth and breadth of games in medieval literature and culture. Chapters span from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, and cover England, France, Denmark, Poland, and Spain, re-examining medieval games in diverse social settings such as the church, court, and household.
This book provides new theoretical insights to our understanding of play as a cultural activity. All chapters address play and playful activities from a cultural-historical theoretical approach by re-addressing central claims and concepts in the theory and providing new models and understandings of the phenomenon of play within the framework of cultural historical theory. Empirical studies cover a wide range of institutional settings: preschool, school, home, leisure time, and in various social relations (with peers, professionals and parents) in different parts of the world (Europe, Australia, South America and North America). Common to all chapters is a goal of throwing new light on the phenomenon of playing within a theoretical framework of cultural-historical theory. Play as a cultural, collective, social, personal, pedagogical and contextual activity is addressed with reference to central concepts in relation to development and learning. Concepts and phenomena related to ZPD, the imaginary situation, rules, language play, collective imagining, spheres of realities of play, virtual realities, social identity and pedagogical environments are presented and discussed in order to bring the cultural-historical theoretical approach into play with contemporary historical issues. Essential as a must read to any scholar and student engaged with understanding play in relation to human development, cultural historical theory and early childhood education.
An exploration of the way videogames mount arguments and make expressive statements about the world that analyzes their unique persuasive power in terms of their computational properties. Videogames are an expressive medium, and a persuasive medium; they represent how real and imagined systems work, and they invite players to interact with those systems and form judgments about them. In this innovative analysis, Ian Bogost examines the way videogames mount arguments and influence players. Drawing on the 2,500-year history of rhetoric, the study of persuasive expression, Bogost analyzes rhetoric's unique function in software in general and videogames in particular. The field of media studies already analyzes visual rhetoric, the art of using imagery and visual representation persuasively. Bogost argues that videogames, thanks to their basic representational mode of procedurality (rule-based representations and interactions), open a new domain for persuasion; they realize a new form of rhetoric. Bogost calls this new form "procedural rhetoric," a type of rhetoric tied to the core affordances of computers: running processes and executing rule-based symbolic manipulation. He argues further that videogames have a unique persuasive power that goes beyond other forms of computational persuasion. Not only can videogames support existing social and cultural positions, but they can also disrupt and change these positions themselves, leading to potentially significant long-term social change. Bogost looks at three areas in which videogame persuasion has already taken form and shows considerable potential: politics, advertising, and learning.
This "funny, dark, and true" (Caitlin Moran) memoir is Bridget Jones's Diary for the Fleabag generation: What happens when you have an unplanned baby on your own in your mid-thirties before you've worked out how to look after yourself, let alone a child? This is the story of one woman's adventures in single motherhood. It's about what happens when Mr. Right isn't around so you have a baby with Mr. Wrong, a touring musician who tells you halfway through your pregnancy that he's met someone else, just after you've given up your LA life and moved back to England to attempt some kind of modern family life with him. So now you're six months along, sleeping on a friend's sofa in London, and waking up in the morning to a room full of taxidermied animals who seem to be staring at you. The Hungover Games about what it's like raising a baby on your own when you're more at home on the dance floor than in the kitchen. It's about how to invent the concept of the two-person family when you grew up in a traditional nuclear unit of four, and your kid's friends all have happily married parents too, and you are definitely not, in any way, ticking off the days until all those lovely couples get divorced. Unflinchingly honest, emotionally raw, and surprisingly sweet, The Hungover Games is the true story of what happens if you've been looking for love your whole life and finally find it where you least expect it.
