The New Games Book


Book Description




Best New Games


Book Description

Best New Games, Updated Edition, is the most comprehensive collection of New Games currently available for getting acquainted, developing sensitivity and trust, building teamwork, and opening and closing play sessions. The updated edition features an accompanying DVD, an improved format, a game finder, and information on how New Games can be used to meet education and physical activity standards.




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.




New Games


Book Description

Pamela M. Lee’s New Games revisits postmodernism in light of art history's more recent embrace of "the contemporary." What can the theories and practices associated with postmodernism tell us about the obsession with the contemporary in both the academy and the art world? In looking at work by Dara Birnbaum, Öyvind Fahlström and Richard Serra, among others, Lee returns to Jean-Francois Lyotard's canonical text The Postmodern Condition as a means to understand more recent art-critical interests in interactivity, collectivism and neo-liberalism. She reads Lyotard's well-known treatment of language games relative to the game theory associated with the Cold War and the rise of the information society. New Games asks readers to think critically about our recent past and the embattled state of our contemporary preoccupations. With a critical introduction by Johanna Burton, New Games is the fourth and penultimate volume in Routledge’s series of short books on the theories of modernism by leading art historians on twentieth-century art and art criticism.




Games for Everyone


Book Description

200 fascinating games to thrill, surprise, and amaze kids of all ages. Includes old favourites and new, imaginative games that will help students compete, cooperate, communicate, and have fun.




The New Games Book


Book Description

Group participation ideas for classroom, physical education, etc.




Seasoned


Book Description

Tom Zink was born in a blizzard in 1947, a child of winter. Seasoned: A Memoir of Grief and Grace is the story of Tom’s unwitting grief journey of five decades that begins when his older brother Steve is hit by a car and killed while on the paper route the two boys shared. It’s the story of a conservative German Lutheran family and the ways in which the parents and surviving children protect each other in loss with a silent acceptance that does not serve them in the long run. Tom buries his grief along with his brother so he can carry on with his life. His career after high school takes him around the world, across the country, and back again. It is only after Tom is married and a father of two teen-aged sons that, in a moment of profound grace, he realizes the depth and importance of his loss. His faith and new-found desire as an adult to process Steve’s death take Tom full circle back to his brother’s grave. But this is not merely a story of grief and recovery; it is also a tender and lighthearted look at humor and laughter, winning and losing, and doubt and faith.




The Well-Played Game


Book Description

The return of a classic book about games and play that illuminates the relationship between the well-played game and the well-lived life. In The Well-Played Game, games guru Bernard De Koven explores the interaction of play and games, offering players—as well as game designers, educators, and scholars—a guide to how games work. De Koven's classic treatise on how human beings play together, first published in 1978, investigates many issues newly resonant in the era of video and computer games, including social gameplay and player modification. The digital game industry, now moving beyond its emphasis on graphic techniques to focus on player interaction, has much to learn from The Well-Played Game. De Koven explains that when players congratulate each other on a “well-played” game, they are expressing a unique and profound synthesis that combines the concepts of play (with its associations of playfulness and fun) and game (with its associations of rule-following). This, he tells us, yields a larger concept: the experience and expression of excellence. De Koven—affectionately and appreciatively hailed by Eric Zimmerman as “our shaman of play”—explores the experience of a well-played game, how we share it, and how we can experience it again; issues of cheating, fairness, keeping score, changing old games (why not change the rules in pursuit of new ways to play?), and making up new games; playing for keeps; and winning. His book belongs on the bookshelves of players who want to find a game in which they can play well, who are looking for others with whom they can play well, and who have discovered the relationship between the well-played game and the well-lived life.




Reality Is Broken


Book Description

“McGonigal is a clear, methodical writer, and her ideas are well argued. Assertions are backed by countless psychological studies.” —The Boston Globe “Powerful and provocative . . . McGonigal makes a persuasive case that games have a lot to teach us about how to make our lives, and the world, better.” —San Jose Mercury News “Jane McGonigal's insights have the elegant, compact, deadly simplicity of plutonium, and the same explosive force.” —Cory Doctorow, author of Little Brother A visionary game designer reveals how we can harness the power of games to boost global happiness. With 174 million gamers in the United States alone, we now live in a world where every generation will be a gamer generation. But why, Jane McGonigal asks, should games be used for escapist entertainment alone? In this groundbreaking book, she shows how we can leverage the power of games to fix what is wrong with the real world-from social problems like depression and obesity to global issues like poverty and climate change-and introduces us to cutting-edge games that are already changing the business, education, and nonprofit worlds. Written for gamers and non-gamers alike, Reality Is Broken shows that the future will belong to those who can understand, design, and play games. Jane McGonigal is also the author of SuperBetter: A Revolutionary Approach to Getting Stronger, Happier, Braver and More Resilient.




Old Favorites, New Fun


Book Description

Activities become old favorites for one reason: Throughout the years, kids enjoy participating in them. But even old favorites can become stale after a while. Not so with Old Favorites, New Fun: Physical Education Activities for Children. This book, written by a physical educator with 30 years of experience, provides creative twists and refreshing modifications of classic activities, resulting in a wealth of choices to fit into and supplement your existing physical education curriculum. This book provides more than 350 thoroughly field-tested activities addressing core physical education content themes. These revitalized traditional activities help you meet major content demands of quality physical education in fresh, fun ways your students will love. What's more, you'll receive creative guidelines for dividing groups, starting play, and modifying "classic" sports to give you even more ways to keep students active--and encourage their enthusiasm for lifelong fitness. Old Favorites, New Fun includes the following features: - Activities to develop locomotor, manipulative, rhythmic, body and spatial awareness, and health-related fitness skills--thus ensuring your students get the extensive practice they need to succeed - Popular themes, such as parachute, team-building, and cross-curricular units, to extend and reinforce learning of core content - Clear equipment lists, objectives, setup instructions, and descriptions to help you transition between activities and classes by showing you what you need and how to place equipment and students quickly - Prominent safety notes to help you head off potential injuries The suggested modifications let you tailor activities to the needs of all your students so that everyone will benefit from the experience. Collectively, these activities will help your students meet all the national standards in physical education as you strive to meet physical education objectives in systematic and inviting ways. Old Favorites, New Fun is an easy-to-use resource to help you develop and reinforce your quality physical education program. Have new fun teaching these old favorites