Board Games as Media

Author: Paul Booth
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
ISBN: 1501357174
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Book Description
Leading expert Paul Booth explores the growth in popularity of board games today, and unpacks what it means to read a board game. What does a game communicate? How do games play us? And how do we decide which games to play and which are just wastes of cardboard? With little scholarly research in this still-emerging field, Board Games as Media underscores the importance of board games in the ever-evolving world of media.

Avidly Reads Board Games

Author: Eric Thurm
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479815829
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 167

Book Description
Avidly Reads is a series of short books about how culture makes us feel. Founded in 2012 by Sarah Blackwood and Sarah Mesle, Avidly—an online magazine supported by the Los Angeles Review of Books—specializes in short-form critical essays devoted to thinking and feeling. Avidly Reads is an exciting new series featuring books that are part memoir, part cultural criticism, each bringing to life the author’s emotional relationship to a cultural artifact or experience. Avidly Reads invites us to explore the surprising pleasures and obstacles of everyday life. Writer and critic Eric Thurm digs deep into his own experience as a board game enthusiast to explore the emotional and social rules that games create and reveal, telling a series of stories about a pastime that is also about relationships. From the outdated gender roles in Life and Mystery Date to the cutthroat, capitalist priorities of Monopoly and its socialist counterpart, Class Struggle, Thurm thinks through his ongoing rivalries with his siblings and ponders the ways games both upset and enforce hierarchies and relationships—from the familial to the geopolitical. Like sitting down at the table for family game night, Board Games is an engaging book of twists and turns, trivia, and nostalgia.

Game Play

Author: Paul Booth
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1628927429
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Book Description
The 21st century has seen a board game renaissance. At a time when streaming television finds millions of viewers, video games garner billions of dollars, and social media grows ever more intense, little has been written about the rising popularity of board games. And yet board games are one of our fastest growing hobbies, with sales increasing every year. Today's board games are more than just your average rainy-day mainstay. Once associated solely with geek subcultures, complex and strategic board games are increasingly dominating the playful media environment. The popularity of these complex board games mirrors the rise of more complex cult media products. In Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games, Paul Booth examines complex board games based on book, TV, and film franchises, including Doctor Who, The Walking Dead, Lord of the Rings, Star Trek, The Hunger Games and the worlds of H.P. Lovecraft. How does a game represent a cult world? How can narratives cross media platforms? By investigating the relationship between these media products and their board game versions, Booth illustrates the connections between cult media, gameplay, and narrative in a digital media environment.

The Everything Tabletop Games Book

Author: Bebo
Publisher: Everything
ISBN: 1507210620
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
Tabletop and board games aren’t just for rainy days or awkward family events anymore. As the game industry grows, people of all ages are jumping to play “the original social network.” In our ever-increasing technological world, playing old-school games is a welcome retreat from the overexposure to Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and the rest of social media. Over the past few years, board games have become the hot new hobby. Instead of friends sitting around the same table and staring at their phones, they are now either working with or against each other. Millions upon millions of new fans have begun to join their friends in real life for a fun game of Pandemic, 7 Wonders, or Ticket to Ride. The Everything Tabletop Games Book shows how to play some of the best tabletop games in the world, from classic strategy games like Settlers of Catan to great new games like Gloomhaven. Throughout the book, you’ll learn the different genres of tabletop and board games; how to play each game; rules and strategies to help you win; and even where to play online—including new expansions to keep your favorite games fresh and exciting. So gather up some friends, pick a game from this book, and start playing! You’ll be having a blast in no time.

It's All a Game

Author: Tristan Donovan
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1250082730
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Book Description
“[A] timely book . . . a wonderfully entertaining trip around the board, through 4,000 years of game history.” —The Wall Street Journal Board games have been with us even longer than the written word. But what is it about this pastime that continues to captivate us well into the age of smartphones and instant gratification? In It’s All a Game, Tristan Donovan, British journalist and author of Replay: The History of Video Games, opens the box on the incredible and often surprising history and psychology of board games. He traces the evolution of the game across cultures, time periods, and continents, from the paranoid Chicago toy genius behind classics like Operation and Mouse Trap, to the role of Monopoly in helping prisoners of war escape the Nazis, and even the scientific use of board games today to teach artificial intelligence how to reason and how to win. With these compelling stories and characters, Donovan ultimately reveals why board games—from chess to Monopoly to Risk and more—have captured hearts and minds all over the world for generations. “Splendid . . . A quick and breezy read, it doesn’t just tell the fascinating stories of the (often struggling) individuals who created our favorite games. It also manages to convey the entire sweep of board game history, from the earliest forms of checkers to modern-day surprise hits like Settlers of Catan.” —Mashable “Artfully weaves together culture, business, and ways games impact society.” —Booklist “A fascinating and insightful discussion not only of games past, but the socioeconomic and historical factors that contributed to their popularity.” —Chicago Review of Books

Board Games as Media

Author: Paul Booth
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501357182
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Roleplaying Games in the Digital Age

Author: Stephanie Hedge
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 147664201X
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Book Description
The Digital Age has created massive technological and disciplinary shifts in tabletop role-playing, increasing the appreciation of games like Dungeons & Dragons. Millions tune in to watch and listen to RPG players on podcasts and streaming platforms, while virtual tabletops connect online players. Such shifts elicit new scholarly perspectives. This collection includes essays on the transmedia ecology that has connected analog with digital and audio spaces. Essays explore the boundaries of virtual tabletops and how users engage with a variety of technology to further role-playing. Authors map the growing diversity of the TRPG fandom and detail how players interact with RPG-related podcasts. Interviewed are content creators like Griffin McElroy of The Adventure Zone podcast, Roll20 co-creator Nolan T. Jones, board game designers Nikki Valens and Isaac Childres and fan artists Tracey Alvarez and Alex Schiltz. These essays and interviews expand the academic perspective to reflect the future of role-playing.

Board Games in the CLIL Classroom

Author: Thomai Alexiou
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110990911
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Book Description
The present book explores how modern board gaming and language teaching can be beneficially combined to achieve optimal impact. Modern board games have a lot to offer language learners and teachers, and they should play a much more significant role in what has been labelled "Content and Language Integrated Learning" or CLIL. Modern board games require cooperation, problem-solving, active discovery, interpretation and analysis. Most importantly, modern board games allow students to explore a hypothetical environment without the risk of language errors. The key ingredient of the present book is "game-based learning and teaching theory", or GBLTT, a theoretical framework which measures learning outcomes based on gaming and learning procedures. GBLTT is focused on balancing information and gameplay as well as putting a focus on the ability of each learner to retain language competence and to put their subject to realistic situations.

Rerolling Boardgames

Author: Douglas Brown
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476639272
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Book Description
Despite the advent and explosion of videogames, boardgames--from fast-paced party games to intensely strategic titles--have in recent years become more numerous and more diverse in terms of genre, ethos and content. The growth of gaming events and conventions such as Essen Spiel, Gen Con and the UK Games EXPO, as well as crowdfunding through sites like Kickstarter, has diversified the evolution of game development, which is increasingly driven by fans, and boardgames provide an important glue to geek culture. In academia, boardgames are used in a practical sense to teach elements of design and game mechanics. Game studies is also recognizing the importance of expanding its focus beyond the digital. As yet, however, no collected work has explored the many different approaches emerging around the critical challenges that boardgaming represents. In this collection, game theorists analyze boardgame play and player behavior, and explore the complex interactions between the sociality, conflict, competition and cooperation that boardgames foster. Game designers discuss the opportunities boardgame system designs offer for narrative and social play. Cultural theorists discuss boardgames' complex history as both beautiful physical artifacts and special places within cultural experiences of play.

Videogame Sciences and Arts

Author: Nelson Zagalo
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030379833
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Book Description
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Videogame Sciences and Arts, VJ 2019, held in Aveiro, Portugal, in November 2019. The 20 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 50 submissions. They were organized in topical sections named: Games and Theories; Table Boards; eSports; Uses and Methodologies; Game Criticism.