Game Play


Book Description

The long-awaited revision of the only book on game play available for mental health professionals Not only is play a pleasurable, naturally occurring behavior found in humans, it is also a driving force in our development. As opposed to the unstructured play often utilized in psychotherapy, game playing invokes more goal-directed behavior, carries the benefits of interpersonal interaction, and can perform a significant role in the adaptation to one's environment. This landmark, updated edition of Game Play explores the advantages of using games in clinical- and school-based therapeutic interventions with children and adolescents. This unique book shows how playing games can promote socialization, encourage the development of identity and self-esteem, and help individuals master anxiety-while setting the stage for deeper therapeutic intervention in subsequent sessions. Game Play Therapeutic Use of Childhood Games Second Edition Features: * New chapters on games in family therapy and games for specific disorders * Techniques and strategies for using game play to enhance communication, guidance, and relationships with clients * The different types of therapeutic games, elaborating on their various clinical applications




Game Play


Book Description

The essential guide to game play therapy for mental health practitioners The revised and updated third edition of Game Play Therapy offers psychologists and psychiatrists a guide to game play therapy’s theoretical foundations and contains the practical applications that are appropriate for children and adolescents. Game playing has proven to invoke more goal-directed behavior, has the benefit of interpersonal interaction, and can perform a significant role in the adaptation to one's environment. With contributions from noted experts in the field, the third edition contains information on the time-tested, classic games and the most recent innovations and advances in game play approaches. Game Play Therapy’s revised third edition (like the previous editions) continues to fill a gap in the literature by offering mental health practitioners the information needed to understand why and how to use this intervention effectively. The contributors offer advice for choosing the most useful games from the more than 700 now available and describe the fundamentals of administering the games. This important updated book: Contains material on the recent advances in the field including information on electronic games and disorder-specific games Includes illustrative case studies that explore the process of game therapy Reviews the basics of the underlying principles and applications of game therapy Offers a wide-range of games with empirical evidence of the effectiveness of game therapy Written for psychologists, psychiatrists, and other mental health clinicians, the revised third edition of Game Play Therapy offers a guide that shows how to apply game therapy techniques to promote socialization, encourage the development of identity and self-esteem, and help individuals master anxiety.




No Game for Boys to Play


Book Description

From the untimely deaths of young athletes to chronic disease among retired players, roiling debates over tackle football have profound implications for more than one million American boys—some as young as five years old—who play the sport every year. In this book, Kathleen Bachynski offers the first history of youth tackle football and debates over its safety. In the postwar United States, high school football was celebrated as a "moral" sport for young boys, one that promised and celebrated the creation of the honorable male citizen. Even so, Bachynski shows that throughout the twentieth century, coaches, sports equipment manufacturers, and even doctors were more concerned with "saving the game" than young boys' safety—even though injuries ranged from concussions and broken bones to paralysis and death. By exploring sport, masculinity, and citizenship, Bachynski uncovers the cultural priorities other than child health that made a collision sport the most popular high school game for American boys. These deep-rooted beliefs continue to shape the safety debate and the possible future of youth tackle football.




Rules of Play


Book Description

An impassioned look at games and game design that offers the most ambitious framework for understanding them to date. As pop culture, games are as important as film or television—but game design has yet to develop a theoretical framework or critical vocabulary. In Rules of Play Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman present a much-needed primer for this emerging field. They offer a unified model for looking at all kinds of games, from board games and sports to computer and video games. As active participants in game culture, the authors have written Rules of Play as a catalyst for innovation, filled with new concepts, strategies, and methodologies for creating and understanding games. Building an aesthetics of interactive systems, Salen and Zimmerman define core concepts like "play," "design," and "interactivity." They look at games through a series of eighteen "game design schemas," or conceptual frameworks, including games as systems of emergence and information, as contexts for social play, as a storytelling medium, and as sites of cultural resistance. Written for game scholars, game developers, and interactive designers, Rules of Play is a textbook, reference book, and theoretical guide. It is the first comprehensive attempt to establish a solid theoretical framework for the emerging discipline of game design.




Cat Kid Comic Club


Book Description

Welcome to the Cat Kid Comic Club, where Li'l Petey (LP), Flippy, and Molly introduce twenty-one rambunctious, funny, and talented baby frogs to the art of comic making. As the story unwinds with mishaps and hilarity, readers get to see the progress,




The Dark Side of Game Play


Book Description

Games allow players to experiment and play with subject positions, values and moral choice. In game worlds players can take on the role of antagonists; they allow us to play with behaviour that would be offensive, illegal or immoral if it happened outside of the game sphere. While contemporary games have always handled certain problematic topics, such as war, disasters, human decay, post-apocalyptic futures, cruelty and betrayal, lately even the most playful of genres are introducing situations in which players are presented with difficult ethical and moral dilemmas. This volume is an investigation of "dark play" in video games, or game play with controversial themes as well as controversial play behaviour. It covers such questions as: Why do some games stir up political controversies? How do games invite, or even push players towards dark play through their design? Where are the boundaries for what can be presented in a games? Are these boundaries different from other media such as film and books, and if so why? What is the allure of dark play and why do players engage in these practices?




Life Is A Game, Play It!


Book Description

"The world is teaching man innumerable lessons all the time. Each one should try to discover for himself the secret of his life and the Universal Consciousness that is inherent in him. The first requisite for each one is to make himself his own guru," said Bhagawan in a discourse at Sri Sathya Sai University (then, Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning) on July 3rd, 1986. This book is the story of the efforts made by the author in obedience to that instruction and of some of the ways she has been assisted in her inner search by Baba's simple, but very effective teaching methods. This book does not attempt to tell anyone else how to live his life. It does not include any experiences, except those of which the author has first-hand knowledge. No attempt is made to describe or explain Sathya Sai Baba, but the author illustrates by incidents in her personal story what knowing Him has meant to her. This book is the first volume in the quartet, the other volumes being, "Life Is A Challenge, Meet It!", "Life Is A Dream, Realize It!", "Life is Love, Enjoy It!".




Play Between Worlds


Book Description

A study of Everquest that provides a snapshot of multiplayer gaming culture, questions the truism that computer games are isolating and alienating, and offers insights into broader issues of work and play, gender identity, technology, and commercial culture. In Play Between Worlds, T. L. Taylor examines multiplayer gaming life as it is lived on the borders, in the gaps—as players slip in and out of complex social networks that cross online and offline space. Taylor questions the common assumption that playing computer games is an isolating and alienating activity indulged in by solitary teenage boys. Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), in which thousands of players participate in a virtual game world in real time, are in fact actively designed for sociability. Games like the popular Everquest, she argues, are fundamentally social spaces. Taylor's detailed look at Everquest offers a snapshot of multiplayer culture. Drawing on her own experience as an Everquest player (as a female Gnome Necromancer)—including her attendance at an Everquest Fan Faire, with its blurring of online—and offline life—and extensive research, Taylor not only shows us something about games but raises broader cultural issues. She considers "power gamers," who play in ways that seem closer to work, and examines our underlying notions of what constitutes play—and why play sometimes feels like work and may even be painful, repetitive, and boring. She looks at the women who play Everquest and finds they don't fit the narrow stereotype of women gamers, which may cast into doubt our standardized and preconceived ideas of femininity. And she explores the questions of who owns game space—what happens when emergent player culture confronts the major corporation behind the game.




Fair Play


Book Description

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK Tired, stressed, and in need of more help from your partner? Imagine running your household (and life!) in a new way... It started with the Sh*t I Do List. Tired of being the “shefault” parent responsible for all aspects of her busy household, Eve Rodsky counted up all the unpaid, invisible work she was doing for her family—and then sent that list to her husband, asking for things to change. His response was...underwhelming. Rodsky realized that simply identifying the issue of unequal labor on the home front wasn't enough: She needed a solution to this universal problem. Her sanity, identity, career, and marriage depended on it. The result is Fair Play: a time- and anxiety-saving system that offers couples a completely new way to divvy up domestic responsibilities. Rodsky interviewed more than five hundred men and women from all walks of life to figure out what the invisible work in a family actually entails and how to get it all done efficiently. With 4 easy-to-follow rules, 100 household tasks, and a series of conversation starters for you and your partner, Fair Play helps you prioritize what's important to your family and who should take the lead on every chore, from laundry to homework to dinner. “Winning” this game means rebalancing your home life, reigniting your relationship with your significant other, and reclaiming your Unicorn Space—the time to develop the skills and passions that keep you interested and interesting. Stop drowning in to-dos and lose some of that invisible workload that's pulling you down. Are you ready to try Fair Play? Let's deal you in.




Power Play


Book Description

“An insider’s view of the good things that can emerge from being glued to a screen. . . . A solid piece of pop-culture/business journalism.” —Kirkus Reviews The phenomenal growth of gaming has inspired plenty of hand-wringing since its inception—from the press, politicians, parents, and everyone else concerned with its effect on our brains, bodies, and hearts. But what if games could be good, not only for individuals but for the world? In Power Play, Asi Burak and Laura Parker explore how video games are now pioneering innovative social change around the world. As the former executive director and now chairman of Games for Change, Asi Burak has spent the last ten years supporting and promoting the use of video games for social good, in collaboration with leading organizations like the White House, NASA, World Bank, and The United Nations. The games for change movement has introduced millions of players to meaningful experiences around everything from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the US Constitution. Power Play looks to the future of games as a global movement. Asi Burak and Laura Parker profile the luminaries behind some of the movement’s most iconic games, including former Supreme Court judge Sandra Day O’Connor and Pulitzer Prize–winning authors Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. They also explore the promise of virtual reality to address social and political issues with unprecedented immersion, and see what the next generation of game makers have in store for the future.