A Game of Fox & Squirrels

Author: Jenn Reese
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company (BYR)
ISBN: 1250243025
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Book Description
A 2021 Oregon Book Award Winner An NPR Best Book of 2020 A Finalist for the 2021-22 Maine Student Book Award A 2021 Mythopoeic Awards Finalist Andre Norton Award finalist Jenn Reese explores the often thin line between magic and reality, light and darkness in her enchanting middle grade standalone. "Brings to life, viscerally, what it is like to live in fear of abuse—even after the abuse itself is over. But there is magic here too, and the promise of a better future that comes with learning to let people who care about you into your world." —Alan Gratz, New York Times-bestselling author of Refugee “A captivating and touching story... both whimsical and emotionally—sometimes frighteningly—compelling.” —Ingrid Law, Newbery Honor-winning author of Savvy "Magically creative and deeply honest, A Game of Fox & Squirrels merges games and grimness in a fantasy tale that tells the truth." —Elana K. Arnold, Printz Honor-winning author of Damsel and A Boy Called Bat After an incident shatters their family, eleven-year old Samantha and her older sister Caitlin are sent to live in rural Oregon with an aunt they've never met. Sam wants nothing more than to go back to the way things were... before she spoke up about their father's anger. When Aunt Vicky gives Sam a mysterious card game called "A Game of Fox & Squirrels," Sam falls in love with the animal characters, especially the charming trickster fox, Ashander. Then one day Ashander shows up in Sam’s room and offers her an adventure and a promise: find the Golden Acorn, and Sam can have anything she desires. But the fox is hiding rules that Sam isn't prepared for, and her new home feels more tempting than she'd ever expected. As Sam is swept up in the dangerous quest, the line between magic and reality grows thin. If she makes the wrong move, she'll lose far more than just a game. Perfect for fans of Barbara O'Connor, Lauren Wolk, and Ali Benjamin, A Game of Fox & Squirrels is a stunning, heartbreaking novel about a girl who finds the light in the darkness... and ultimately discovers the true meaning of home.

Game On! 2021

Author: Scholastic
Publisher: Game On!
ISBN: 9781338670875
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
Check out the ultimate annual video game guide from Scholastic AFK! Game On! 2021 is full of the latest information on the hottest games of 2021, how they were developed, and how to beat them. Get ready for another awesome year of gaming with this ultimate guide to all your favorite games, including a definitive list of the biggest games of the past year and hottest new ones coming in 2021! Game On! 2021 is the most comprehensive guide to all the best games, tech, and streamers, featuring a bunch of the year's greatest gaming moments. This complete guide is packed with secrets, stats, tips, and tricks for all your favorite games. All games featured in AFK's Game On! 2021 are rated T for Teen or younger -- perfect for young gamers.

Game Feel

Author: Steve Swink
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1482267330
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 377

Book Description
"Game Feel" exposes "feel" as a hidden language in game design that no one has fully articulated yet. The language could be compared to the building blocks of music (time signatures, chord progressions, verse) - no matter the instruments, style or time period - these building blocks come into play. Feel and sensation are similar building blocks whe

Gaming the Metrics

Author: Mario Biagioli
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262356570
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 307

Book Description
How the increasing reliance on metrics to evaluate scholarly publications has produced new forms of academic fraud and misconduct. The traditional academic imperative to “publish or perish” is increasingly coupled with the newer necessity of “impact or perish”—the requirement that a publication have “impact,” as measured by a variety of metrics, including citations, views, and downloads. Gaming the Metrics examines how the increasing reliance on metrics to evaluate scholarly publications has produced radically new forms of academic fraud and misconduct. The contributors show that the metrics-based “audit culture” has changed the ecology of research, fostering the gaming and manipulation of quantitative indicators, which lead to the invention of such novel forms of misconduct as citation rings and variously rigged peer reviews. The chapters, written by both scholars and those in the trenches of academic publication, provide a map of academic fraud and misconduct today. They consider such topics as the shortcomings of metrics, the gaming of impact factors, the emergence of so-called predatory journals, the “salami slicing” of scientific findings, the rigging of global university rankings, and the creation of new watchdogs and forensic practices.

No Game for Boys to Play

Author: Kathleen Bachynski
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469653710
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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.

Locally Played

Author: Benjamin Stokes
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262356937
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 287

Book Description
How games can make a real-world difference in communities when city leaders tap into the power of play for local impact. In 2016, city officials were surprised when Pokémon GO brought millions of players out into the public space, blending digital participation with the physical. Yet for local control and empowerment, a new framework is needed to guide the power of mixed reality and pervasive play. In Locally Played, Benjamin Stokes describes the rise of games that can connect strangers across zip codes, support the “buy local” economy, and build cohesion in the fight for equity. With a mix of high- and low-tech games, Stokes shows, cities can tap into the power of play for the good of the group, including healthier neighborhoods and stronger communities. Stokes shows how impact is greatest when games “fit” to the local community—not just in terms of culture, but at the level of group identity and network structure. By pairing design principles with a range of empirical methods, Stokes investigates the impact of several games, including Macon Money, where an alternative currency encouraged people to cross lines of socioeconomic segregation in Macon, Georgia; Reality Ends Here, where teams in Los Angeles competed to tell multimedia stories around local mythology; and Pokémon GO, appropriated by several cities to serve local needs through local libraries and open street festivals. Locally Played provides game designers with a model to strengthen existing networks tied to place and gives city leaders tools to look past technology trends in order to make a difference in the real world.

Hands-On Unity 2020 Game Development

Author: Nicolas Alejandro Borromeo
Publisher: Packt Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1838647600
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 581

Book Description
Build immersive game experiences using the new Unity 2020 features with this practical guide Key FeaturesUnleash the capabilities of C# scripting for creating immersive UI, graphics, Game AI agents and much moreExplore Unity's latest tools, including Universal Render Pipeline, Shader Graph, and VFX graph, to enhance graphics and animationGet started with building augmented reality experience using Unity’s AR FoundationBook Description Over the years, the Unity game engine has extended its scope from just being about creating video games to building AR/VR experiences, complex simulations, real-time realistic rendering, films, and serious games for training and education. Its features for implementing gameplay, graphics, and customization using C# programming make Unity a comprehensive platform for developing professional-level, rich experiences. With this book, you'll be able to build impressive Unity projects in a step-by-step manner and apply your knowledge of Unity concepts to create a real-world game. Complete with hands-on tutorials and projects, this easy-to-follow guide will show you how to develop your first complete game using a variety of Unity tools. As you make progress, you'll learn how to make the most of the Unity Editor and create scripts using the C# programming language. This Unity game development book will then take you through integrating graphics, sound, and animations and manipulating physics to create impressive mechanics for your games. You'll also learn how to code a simple AI agent to challenge the user and use profiling tools to ensure that the code runs in a performant way. Finally, you'll get to grips with Unity's AR Foundation for creating AR experiences for 3D apps and games. By the end of this book, you'll have developed a complete game and will have built a solid foundation using Unity's tooling ecosystem to develop game projects of any scale. What you will learnWrite scripts for customizing various aspects of a game, such as physics, gameplay, and UIProgram rich shaders and effects using Unity's new Shader Graph and Universal Render PipelineImplement postprocessing to increase graphics quality with full-screen effectsCreate rich particle systems for your Unity games from scratch using VFX Graph and ShurikenAdd animations to your game using the Animator, Cinemachine, and TimelineImplement game artificial intelligence (AI) to control character behaviorDetect and fix optimization issues using profilers and batchingWho this book is for This book is for game developers looking to migrate to the Unity game engine. If you are a developer with some exposure to Unity, this book will help you explore its latest features. Prior experience with C# programming is required to get the most out of the book.

The Reality Game

Author: Samuel Woolley
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1541768248
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description
Fake news posts and Twitter trolls were just the beginning. What will happen when misinformation moves from our social media feeds into our everyday lives? Online disinformation stormed our political process in 2016 and has only worsened since. Yet as Samuel Woolley shows in this urgent book, it may pale in comparison to what's to come: humanlike automated voice systems, machine learning, "deepfake" AI-edited videos and images, interactive memes, virtual reality, and more. These technologies have the power not just to manipulate our politics, but to make us doubt our eyes and ears and even feelings. Deeply researched and compellingly written, The Reality Game describes the profound impact these technologies will have on our lives. Each new invention built without regard for its consequences edges us further into this digital dystopia. Yet Woolley does not despair. Instead, he argues pointedly for a new culture of innovation, one built around accountability and especially transparency. With social media dragging us into a never-ending culture war, we must learn to stop fighting and instead prevent future manipulation. This book shows how we can use our new tools not to control people but to empower them.

One Up

Author: Joost van Dreunen
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231552211
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 317

Book Description
What explains the massive worldwide success of video games such as Fortnite, Minecraft, and Pokémon Go? Game companies and their popularity are poorly understood and often ignored from the standpoint of traditional business strategy. Yet this industry generates billions in revenue by thinking creatively about digital distribution, free-to-play content, and phenomena like e-sports and live streaming. What lessons can we draw from its major successes and failures about the future of entertainment? One Up offers a pioneering empirical analysis of innovation and strategy in the video game industry to explain how it has evolved from a fringe activity to become a mainstream form of entertainment. Joost van Dreunen, a widely recognized industry expert with over twenty years of experience, analyzes how game makers, publishers, and platform holders have tackled strategic challenges to make the video game industry what it is today. Using more than three decades of rigorously compiled industry data, he demonstrates that video game companies flourish when they bring the same level of creativity to business strategy that they bring to game design. Filled with case studies of companies such as Activision Blizzard, Apple, Electronic Arts, Epic Games, Microsoft, Nexon, Sony, Take-Two Interactive, Tencent, and Valve, this book forces us to rethink common misconceptions around the emergence of digital and mobile gaming. One Up is required reading for investors, creatives, managers, and anyone looking to learn about the major drivers of change and growth in contemporary entertainment.

Losing the Long Game

Author: Philip H. Gordon
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1250217040
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 211

Book Description
Foreign Affairs Best of Books of 2021 "Book of the Week" on Fareed Zakaria GPS Financial Times Best Books of 2020 The definitive account of how regime change in the Middle East has proven so tempting to American policymakers for decades—and why it always seems to go wrong. "It's a first-rate work, intelligently analyzing a complex issue, and learning the right lessons from history." —Fareed Zakaria Since the end of World War II, the United States has set out to oust governments in the Middle East on an average of once per decade—in places as diverse as Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan (twice), Egypt, Libya, and Syria. The reasons for these interventions have also been extremely diverse, and the methods by which the United States pursued regime change have likewise been highly varied, ranging from diplomatic pressure alone to outright military invasion and occupation. What is common to all the operations, however, is that they failed to achieve their ultimate goals, produced a range of unintended and even catastrophic consequences, carried heavy financial and human costs, and in many cases left the countries in question worse off than they were before. Philip H. Gordon's Losing the Long Game is a thorough and riveting look at the U.S. experience with regime change over the past seventy years, and an insider’s view on U.S. policymaking in the region at the highest levels. It is the story of repeated U.S. interventions in the region that always started out with high hopes and often the best of intentions, but never turned out well. No future discussion of U.S. policy in the Middle East will be complete without taking into account the lessons of the past, especially at a time of intense domestic polarization and reckoning with America's standing in world.