Download or read book The Most Relaxing Video Games written by Ryan Janes and published by White Owl. This book was released on 2024-05-30 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Video games are so much more than just full throttle blasts of gunfights, violence and white-knuckle competition. They can also be beautiful, cosy and even emotionally uplifting journeys too. The ideal escapism after a day you’d sooner forget or the perfect sedative following a particularly stress-filled afternoon. The Most Relaxing Video Games will walk you through a selection of gaming experiences sure to help you unwind. From the familiar warmth of sitting down with a good classic board game (51 of them to be exact) through to the solving of hundreds of puzzles on a mysterious island using nothing but lines, there’s a world of delightfully comforting video games just waiting to sooth your gaming soul. Covering over 50 video games and spanning nearly thirty years, this comprehensive guide includes detailed explanations of every peaceful entry along with full-color screenshots, standout moments, fascinating facts and of course what it is that makes them such a relaxing alternative. Whether you’re a fan of racers, management sims, puzzles or platformers, there’s something here for everyone. So trade in your firearms for farming gear and punching fists for puzzles. Sit back, get comfy and discover the relaxing side that video games have to offer.
Download or read book Asking Questions about Video Games written by Marie Powell and published by Cherry Lake. This book was released on 2015-08-01 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world of gaming has changed a lot since the days of Pong and PacMan. Asking Questions about Video Games gives young readers a look at the technology behind today's games, the messages they send, and what they say about our values as a culture. Case studies prompt inquiry, further thinking, and close examination of specific issues. Additional text features and search tools, including a glossary and an index, help students locate information and learn new words.
Download or read book Self Reg written by Dr. Stuart Shanker and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-06-21 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There’s no such thing as a bad kid. That’s what a lifetime of experience has taught Dr. Stuart Shanker. No matter how difficult, out of control, distracted, or exhausted a child might seem, there’s a way forward: self-regulation. Overturning decades of conventional wisdom, this radical new technique allows children and the adults who care for them to regain their composure and peace of mind. Self-Reg is a groundbreaking book that presents an entirely new understanding of your child’s emotions and behavior and a practical guide for parents to help their kids engage calmly and successfully in learning and life. Grounded in decades of research and working with children and parents by Dr. Shanker, Self-Reg realigns the power of the parent-child relationship for positive change. Self-regulation is the nervous system’s way of responding to stress. We are seeing a generation of children and teens with excessively high levels of stress, and, as a result, an explosion of emotional, social, learning, behavior, and physical health problems. But few parents recognize the “hidden stressors” that their children are struggling with: physiological as well as social and emotional. An entrenched view of child rearing sees our children as lacking self-control or willpower, but the real basis for these problems lies in excessive stress. Self-regulation can dramatically improve a child’s mood, attention, and concentration. It can help children to feel empathy, and to cultivate the sorts of virtues that most parents know are vital for their child’s long-term wellbeing. Self-regulation brings about profound and lasting transformation that continues throughout life. Dr. Shanker translates decades of his findings from working with children into practical, prescriptive advice for parents, giving them concrete ways to develop their self-regulation skills and teach their children to do the same and engage successfully with life for optimal learning, social, and emotional growth.
Download or read book Extra Lives written by Tom Bissell and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-06-14 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Extra Lives, acclaimed writer and life-long video game enthusiast Tom Bissell takes the reader on an insightful and entertaining tour of the art and meaning of video games. In just a few decades, video games have grown increasingly complex and sophisticated, and the companies that produce them are now among the most profitable in the entertainment industry. Yet few outside this world have thought deeply about how these games work, why they are so appealing, and what they are capable of artistically. Blending memoir, criticism, and first-rate reportage, Extra Lives is a milestone work about what might be the dominant popular art form of our time.
Download or read book How to Do Things with Videogames written by Ian Bogost and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2011-08-05 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, computer games have moved from the margins of popular culture to its center. Reviews of new games and profiles of game designers now regularly appear in the New York Times and the New Yorker, and sales figures for games are reported alongside those of books, music, and movies. They are increasingly used for purposes other than entertainment, yet debates about videogames still fork along one of two paths: accusations of debasement through violence and isolation or defensive paeans to their potential as serious cultural works. In How to Do Things with Videogames, Ian Bogost contends that such generalizations obscure the limitless possibilities offered by the medium’s ability to create complex simulated realities. Bogost, a leading scholar of videogames and an award-winning game designer, explores the many ways computer games are used today: documenting important historical and cultural events; educating both children and adults; promoting commercial products; and serving as platforms for art, pornography, exercise, relaxation, pranks, and politics. Examining these applications in a series of short, inviting, and provocative essays, he argues that together they make the medium broader, richer, and more relevant to a wider audience. Bogost concludes that as videogames become ever more enmeshed with contemporary life, the idea of gamers as social identities will become obsolete, giving rise to gaming by the masses. But until games are understood to have valid applications across the cultural spectrum, their true potential will remain unrealized. How to Do Things with Videogames offers a fresh starting point to more fully consider games’ progress today and promise for the future.
Download or read book Gaming Sexism written by Amanda C. Cote and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interviews with female gamers about structural sexism across the gaming landscape When the Nintendo Wii was released in 2006, it ushered forward a new era of casual gaming in which video games appealed to not just the stereotypical hardcore male gamer, but also to a much broader, more diverse audience. However, the GamerGate controversy six years later, and other similar public incidents since, laid bare the internalized misogyny and gender stereotypes in the gaming community. Today, even as women make up nearly half of all gamers, sexist assumptions about the what and how of women’s gaming are more actively enforced. In Gaming Sexism, Amanda C. Cote explores the video game industry and its players to explain this contradiction, how it affects female gamers, and what it means in terms of power and gender equality. Across in-depth interviews with women-identified gamers, Cote delves into the conflict between diversification and resistance to understand their impact on gaming, both casual and “core” alike. From video game magazines to male reactions to female opponents, she explores the shifting expectations about who gamers are, perceived changes in gaming spaces, and the experiences of female gamers amidst this gendered turmoil. While Cote reveals extensive, persistent problems in gaming spaces, she also emphasizes the power of this motivated, marginalized audience, and draws on their experiences to explore how structural inequalities in gaming spaces can be overcome. Gaming Sexism is a well-timed investigation of equality, power, and control over the future of technology.
Download or read book Power Up written by Matthew Lane and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-19 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Did you know that every time you pick up the controller to your PlayStation or Xbox, you are entering a game world steeped in mathematics? Power-Up reveals the hidden mathematics in many of today's most popular video games and explains why mathematical learning doesn't just happen in the classroom or from books--you're doing it without even realizing it when you play games on your cell phone. In this lively and entertaining book, Matthew Lane discusses how gamers are engaging with the traveling salesman problem when they play Assassin's Creed, why it is mathematically impossible for Mario to jump through the Mushroom Kingdom in Super Mario Bros., and how The Sims teaches us the mathematical costs of maintaining relationships. He looks at mathematical pursuit problems in classic games like Missile Command and Ms. Pac-Man, and how each time you play Tetris, you're grappling with one of the most famous unsolved problems in all of mathematics and computer science. Along the way, Lane discusses why Family Feud and Pictionary make for ho-hum video games, how realism in video games (or the lack of it) influences learning, what video games can teach us about the mathematics of voting, the mathematics of designing video games, and much more. Power-Up shows how the world of video games is an unexpectedly rich medium for learning about the beautiful mathematical ideas that touch all aspects of our lives--including our virtual ones."--Dust jacket.
Download or read book You ve Been Played written by Adrian Hon and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2022-09-20 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How games are being harnessed as instruments of exploitation—and what we can do about it Warehouse workers pack boxes while a virtual dragon races across their screen. If they beat their colleagues, they get an award. If not, they can be fired. Uber presents exhausted drivers with challenges to keep them driving. China scores its citizens so they behave well, and games with in-app purchases use achievements to empty your wallet. Points, badges, and leaderboards are creeping into every aspect of modern life. In You’ve Been Played, game designer Adrian Hon delivers a blistering takedown of how corporations, schools, and governments use games and gamification as tools for profit and coercion. These are games that we often have no choice but to play, where losing has heavy penalties. You’ve Been Played is a scathing indictment of a tech-driven world that wants to convince us that misery is fun, and a call to arms for anyone who hopes to preserve their dignity and autonomy.
Download or read book The History of Video Games written by Charlie Fish and published by White Owl. This book was released on 2021-05-30 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a potted history of video games, telling all the rollercoaster stories of this fascinating young industry that’s now twice as big globally than the film and music industries combined. Each chapter explores the history of video games through a different lens, giving a uniquely well-rounded overview. Packed with pictures and stats, this book is for video gamers nostalgic for the good old days of gaming, and young gamers curious about how it all began. If you’ve ever enjoyed a video game, or you just want to see what all the fuss is about, this book is for you. There are stories about the experimental games of the 1950s and 1960s; the advent of home gaming in the 1970s; the explosion – and implosion – of arcade gaming in the 1980s; the console wars of the 1990s; the growth of online and mobile games in the 2000s; and we get right up to date with the 2010s, including such cultural phenomena as twitch.tv, the Gamergate scandal, and Fortnite. But rather than telling the whole story from beginning to end, each chapter covers the history of video games from a different angle: platforms and technology, people and personalities, companies and capitalism, gender and representation, culture, community, and finally the games themselves.
Download or read book Storyplaying written by Sebastian Domsch and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2013-08-28 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Incontestably, Future Narratives are most conspicuous in video games: they combine narrative with the major element of all games: agency. The persons who perceive these narratives are not simply readers or spectators but active agents with a range of choices at their disposal that will influence the very narrative they are experiencing: they are players. The narratives thus created are realizations of the multiple possibilities contained in the present of any given gameplay situation. Surveying the latest trends in the field, the volume discusses the complex relationship of narrative and gameplay.
Download or read book Master the SAT 2015 written by Peterson's and published by Peterson's. This book was released on 2014-08-26 with total page 1101 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peterson's Master the SAT provides a wealth of test-taking strategies and helps students prepare for the SAT with extensive reviews and 9 full-length practice tests to help sharpen math, writing, and critical reading skills. In addition, "Parents' Guide to College Admission Testing," provides advice for parents on subjects such as what tests your high school student should take, how to motivate your child, and what role to play in the college admissions process. 9 full-length practice tests (including access to 3 online), with detailed answer explanations for each exam question "Parents' Guide to College Admission Testing," provides advice on how parents can motivate their children, what tests high school students should take, and what role parents should play in the college admissions process Access to hundreds of in-depth college and university descriptions online, offering information on degrees, student life, admission requirements, and application information Extensive reviews of all subjects appearing on the SAT, including essay writing, higher-level math, and reading comprehension. User-friendly design, with bulleted roadmaps and chapter summaries formulated so that high school students can work through the exercises at their own pace Vocabulary review with exercises and practice test questions in the free download of Peterson's Ultimate Word Success eBook .
Download or read book Master the SAT 2015 Practice Test 2 written by Peterson's and published by Peterson's. This book was released on 2014-09-09 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peterson's Master the SAT 2015: Practice Test 2 features a full-length SAT exam with detailed answer explanations. The practice test is designed to prepare test-takers for the critical reading, writing, and math questions-as well as the written essays-they will find on the actual exam. This eBook is a breakout section containing selected content from Peterson's Master the SAT 2015 which provides students with detailed strategies to help maximize their test scores AND offers hundreds of practice questions to help them prepare for test day. For further SAT test preparation, the complete eBook and other breakout sections are also available.
Download or read book Video Games and Storytelling written by Souvik Mukherjee and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-09-15 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Tempest written by Judd Ethan Ruggill and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2015-08-27 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Atari’s 1981 arcade hit Tempest was a “tube shooter” built around glowing, vector-based geometric shapes. Among its many important contributions to both game and cultural history, Tempest was one of the first commercial titles to allow players to choose the game’s initial play difficulty (a system Atari dubbed “SkillStep”), a feature that has since became standard for games of all types. Tempest was also one of the most aesthetically impactful games of the twentieth century, lending its crisp, vector aesthetic to many subsequent movies, television shows, and video games. In this book, Ruggill and McAllister enumerate and analyze Tempest’s landmark qualities, exploring the game’s aesthetics, development context, and connections to and impact on video game history and culture. By describing the game in technical, historical, and ludic detail, they unpack the game’s latent and manifest audio-visual iconography and the ideological meanings this iconography evokes.
Download or read book Video Games written by Anne Elder and published by Little Hero. This book was released on 2021-08-19 with total page 18 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Power up your little gamer with this introduction to video game play.
Download or read book How Games Move Us written by Katherine Isbister and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-10-27 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An engaging examination of how video game design can create strong, positive emotional experiences for players—with examples from popular, indie, and art games. This is a renaissance moment for video games—in the variety of genres they represent, and the range of emotional territory they cover. But how do games create emotion? In How Games Move Us, Katherine Isbister takes the reader on a timely and novel exploration of the design techniques that evoke strong emotions for players. She counters arguments that games are creating a generation of isolated, emotionally numb, antisocial loners. Games, Isbister shows us, can actually play a powerful role in creating empathy and other strong, positive emotional experiences; they reveal these qualities over time, through the act of playing. She offers a nuanced, systematic examination of exactly how games can influence emotion and social connection, with examples—drawn from popular, indie, and art games—that unpack the gamer’s experience. Isbister describes choice and flow, two qualities that distinguish games from other media, and explains how game developers build upon these qualities using avatars, non-player characters, and character customization, in both solo and social play. She shows how designers use physical movement to enhance players’ emotional experience, and examines long-distance networked play. She illustrates the use of these design methods with examples that range from Sony’s Little Big Planet to the much-praised indie game Journey to art games like Brenda Romero’s Train. Isbister’s analysis shows us a new way to think about games, helping us appreciate them as an innovative and powerful medium for doing what film, literature, and other creative media do: helping us to understand ourselves and what it means to be human.
Download or read book Being the Person Your Dog Thinks You Are written by Jim Davies and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-02-02 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A crisp and sparkling blend of cognitive science and human behavior that offers meaningful and attainable pathways towards becoming our best selves. Why do we feel like in order to be productive, happy, or good, we must sacrifice everything else? Is it possible to feel all three at once? Without even knowing it, we’re doing things everyday to sabotage ourselves and our societies, habits that prevent us from optimizing long term happiness. Where most books imagine solutions that, when enacted, fail to fundamentally improve our lives, Jim Davies grounds his research in cognitive science to show you not only what works, but how much it works. Being the Person Your Dog Thinks You Are shows us how we can use science to become our best selves, using resources we already have within our own brains. Davies's book challenges and inspires us to approach the big picture while also staying mindful of the everyday details in real life. Davies proves why multitasking is bad for you, when a little unmindfulness can be good for you, how to best justify which charities to donate to, and how to hack your brain. The most surprising truth Davies offers us spreads across these pages like wildfire: you too can lead an optimally good life, not through uprooting your life from the ground up, but from adapting your mentality to your given present. A better life doesn’t need to look like a massive change—like our beloved dogs who already view us as our best selves, it’s already much closer than you think.
