San Antonio College Library

"Whether it's a favorite television show, an artist at the top of the music charts, a best-selling book, or a hometown sports team, we love entertainment. It's a big business and in this accessible introduction, Andi Stein and Beth Bingham Evans give readers a glimpse inside the industry, to better understand how each segment operates and the challenges and trends it faces. Each chapter addresses a different segment of the entertainment industry."...

Overview: We purchase video games to play them, not to save them. What happens to video games when they are out of date, broken, nonfunctional, or obsolete? Should a game be considered an "ex-game" if it exists only as emulation, as an artifact in museum displays, in an archival box, or at the bottom of a landfill? In Game After, Raiford Guins focuses on video games not as hermetically sealed within time capsules of the past but on their material...

"Characteristics of Games offers a new way to understand games: by focusing on certain traits--including number of players, rules, degrees of luck and skill needed, and reward/effort ratio--and using these characteristics as basic points of comparison and analysis. These issues are often discussed by game players and designers but seldom written about in any formal way. This book fills that gap. By emphasizing these player-centric basic concepts,...

Synopsis: Tom Bissell is a prizewinning writer who published three widely acclaimed books before the age of thirty-four. He is also an obsessive gamer who has spent untold hours in front of his various video game consoles, playing titles such as Far Cry 2, Left 4 Dead, BioShock, and Oblivion for, literally, days. If you are reading this flap copy, the same thing can probably be said of you, or of someone you know. Until recently, Bissell was somewhat...

"Suitable for an introductory game development course or a reference for game developers and designers, this book offers coverage of all the key concepts and ideas that encompass game development, while providing real-life examples and practical insight."--Books24x7 website.

Play has been part of early childhood programs since the initial kindergarten developed by Friedreich Froebel more than one hundred and fifty years ago. While research shows that most teachers value children's play, they often do not know how to guide that play to make it more educational. Too often, in reflecting the value of child-initiated activities, teachers set the stage for children's play, observe it, but hesitate to intervene in that play....

"This is the first book to look at the relationship between author and reader in terms of a 'game'. It directs attention to the various means by which an author will 'play' with his reader, and gives examples of the different degrees to which authors of all countries and of all ages have sought to puzzle, to intrigue, or to vex."--Back cover.

Electronic games have established a huge international market, significantly outselling non-digital games; people spend more money on The Sims than on "Monopoly" or even on "Magic: the Gathering." Yet it is widely believed that the market for electronic literature -- predicted by some to be the future of the written word -- languishes. Even bestselling author Stephen King achieved disappointing results with his online publication of "Riding the Bullet"...