Tap to Play!


Book Description

In this interactive video-game-inspired picture book perfect for fans of Press Here and Tap the Magic Tree, Blip needs to reach the bar to win his game—but he needs the reader’s help. If he wins, he gets a surprise! Tap, tickle, and shake Blip. Tilt, turn, and bounce Blip. Help Blip win the game in this spirited interactive book, perfect for reading—and playing—again and again!




The Tapping Solution


Book Description

In the New York Times best-selling book The Tapping Solution, Nick Ortner, founder of the Tapping World Summit and best-selling filmmaker of The Tapping Solution, is at the forefront of a new healing movement. In this book, he gives readers everything they need to successfully start using the powerful practice of tapping—or Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT).Tapping is one of the fastest and easiest ways to address both the emotional and physical problems that tend to hamper our lives. Using the energy meridians of the body, practitioners tap on specific points while focusing on particular negative emotions or physical sensations. The tapping helps calm the nervous system to restore the balance of energy in the body, and in turn rewire the brain to respond in healthy ways. This kind of conditioning can help rid practitioners of everything from chronic pain to phobias to addictions. Because of tapping’s proven success in healing such a variety of problems, Ortner recommends to try it on any challenging issue. In The Tapping Solution, Ortner describes not only the history and science of tapping but also the practical applications. In a friendly voice, he lays out easy-to-use practices, diagrams, and worksheets that will teach readers, step-by-step, how to tap on a variety of issues. With chapters covering everything from the alleviation of pain to the encouragement of weight loss to fostering better relationships, Ortner opens readers’ eyes to just how powerful this practice can be. Throughout the book, readers will see real-life stories of healing ranging from easing the pain of fibromyalgia to overcoming a fear of flying.The simple strategies Ortner outlines will help readers release their fears and clear the limiting beliefs that hold them back from creating the life they want.




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.




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.




What's That Noise? TAP! TAP!


Book Description

Invites young readers to identify the parts that make sounds in toys with which various animals are about to play from the noises they make and clues in the illustrations, and to lift the flap in each spread to see the answer.




Play Your Bigger Game


Book Description

Change the way you think about work, productivity, and creativity - and go from surviving to thriving! Play Your Bigger Game provides a philosophy and methodology that you can learn in just nine minutes, and it will serve you for the rest of your life. Self-empowerment expert Rick Tamlyn believes that life is all made up. So why not make it a game of your own design—one that excites, challenges, and allows you to fully express your talents and creativity? When you play your bigger game, you create a life that is dynamic, engaging, and wildly inspiring. This book is your antidote to inertia—you will never feel stuck again. Each and every day, it will motivate you to keep stretching, achieving, and thriving above and beyond any boundaries or limitations that might have held you back in the past. Play Your Bigger Game offers pathways, tools, and inspiring stories to feed the hunger in your soul, light the fires of your imagination, and build a fulfilling life and a lasting legacy. If you long to: • have a more positive impact within your family, your work, your community, or organization • make a change, but you aren’t sure what sort of change • create meaningful work • take responsibility and direct your destiny • make a difference or leave a legacy . . . then you should join thousands of others around the world and play your bigger game!




You Can’t Say You Can’t Play


Book Description

Who of us cannot remember the pain and humiliation of being rejected by our classmates? However thick-skinned or immune to such assaults we may become as adults, the memory of those early exclusions is as palpable to each of us today as it is common to human experience. We remember the uncertainty of separating from our home and entering school as strangers and, more than the relief of making friends, we recall the cruel moments of our own isolation as well as those children we knew were destined to remain strangers. In this book Vivian Paley employs a unique strategy to probe the moral dimensions of the classroom. She departs from her previous work by extending her analysis to children through the fifth grade, all the while weaving remarkable fairy tale into her narrative description. Paley introduces a new rule—“You can’t say you can’t play”—to her kindergarten classroom and solicits the opinions of older children regarding the fairness of such a rule. We hear from those who are rejected as well as those who do the rejecting. One child, objecting to the rule, says, “It will be fairer, but how are we going to have any fun?” Another child defends the principle of classroom bosses as a more benign way of excluding the unwanted. In a brilliant twist, Paley mixes fantasy and reality, and introduces a new voice into the debate: Magpie, a magical bird, who brings lonely people to a place where a full share of the sun is rightfully theirs. Myth and morality begin to proclaim the same message and the schoolhouse will be the crucible in which the new order is tried. A struggle ensues and even the Magpie stories cannot avoid the scrutiny of this merciless pack of social philosophers who will not be easily caught in a morality tale. You Can’t Say You Can’t Play speaks to some of our most deeply held beliefs. Is exclusivity part of human nature? Can we legislate fairness and still nurture creativity and individuality? Can children be freed from the habit of rejection? These are some of the questions. The answers are to be found in the words of Paley’s schoolchildren and in the wisdom of their teacher who respectfully listens to them.




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.




Scooby-Doo! Mystery


Book Description

Stardust Monuments spotlights the enduring efforts to memorialize and canonize the history and meaning of Hollywood and American film culture. In this engaging analysis, Alison Trope explores the tensions between art and commerce as they intersect in a range of nonprofit and for-profit institutions and products. An insightful tour of Hollywood's past, present, and future, Stardust Monuments examines the establishment of film libraries and museums beginning in the mid 1930s, the many failed attempts to open a Hollywood museum ranging from the 1960s to today, and the more successful recent corporate efforts to use Hollywood's past in theme restaurants and parks, classic movie channels, and DVD boxed sets. This fascinating narrative details the ongoing struggle to champion and codify Hollywood's legacy, a struggle engaged in by Hollywood stars and corporate executives, as well as memorabilia collectors and users of IMDb.




Can I Play Too? (An Elephant and Piggie Book)


Book Description

Gerald the elephant and Piggie learn to play catch with their new friend Snake, even though Snake doesn't have any arms! By the author of the Theodor Seuss Geisel Medal-winning book, Are You Ready to Play Outside?