Difficult Games

Difficult Games
Author: Franco Ricci
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
Total Pages: 144
Release: 2006-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0889206341

Examining Calvino's literary experiments as a young artist in search of his narrative voice, Ricci explores the psychological and existential motivations intrinsically linked to the writer's need for textual and systemic patterning. I racconti contains some of Calvino's least-read works, yet these early stories address issues, present scenarios and generate a growing variation of themes that form the heart of Calvino's narrative discourse. Ricci points out that melancholy permeates Calvino's works—even at his most playful. He suggests that if Calvino's highest merit was his sense of wonder and his urge to transform and defeat obscurantism with all the joy he could muster, one must remember that his work expressed, often painfully, the limits of human rationalism. I racconti can thus be read as a catalogue of the anxieties of both the young author and postwar Italian society.

Disney's Big Bad Book of Puzzlers

Disney's Big Bad Book of Puzzlers
Author: Karen C. Anderson
Publisher: Hyperion
Total Pages: 176
Release: 1996
Genre: Disney characters.
ISBN: 9780786840328

More than 100 picture and word puzzles, mazes, logic and memory games, and number and letter problems featuring 17 of Disney's most popular villains come together in a hefty volume filled with illustrations of the bad guys and gals. Villains from such timeless classics as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and recent hits like Pocahontas will provide children with countless hours of mind-bending entertainment.176 pp.

Games

Games
Author: C. Thi Nguyen
Publisher:
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2020
Genre: Games & Activities
ISBN: 0190052082

Games are a unique art form. They do not just tell stories, nor are they simply conceptual art. They are the art form that works in the medium of agency. Game designers tell us who to be in games and what to care about; they designate the player's in-game abilities and motivations. In other words, designers create alternate agencies, and players submerge themselves in those agencies. Games let us explore alternate forms of agency. The fact that we play games demonstrates something remarkable about the nature of our own agency: we are capable of incredible fluidity with our own motivations and rationality. This volume presents a new theory of games which insists on games' unique value in human life. C. Thi Nguyen argues that games are an integral part of how we become mature, free people. Bridging aesthetics and practical reasoning, he gives an account of the special motivational structure involved in playing games. We can pursue goals, not for their own value, but for the sake of the struggle. Playing games involves a motivational inversion from normal life, and the fact that we can engage in this motivational inversion lets us use games to experience forms of agency we might never have developed on our own. Games, then, are a special medium for communication. They are the technology that allows us to write down and transmit forms of agency. Thus, the body of games forms a "library of agency" which we can use to help develop our freedom and autonomy. Nguyen also presents a new theory of the aesthetics of games. Games sculpt our practical activities, allowing us to experience the beauty of our own actions and reasoning. They are unlike traditional artworks in that they are designed to sculpt activities - and to promote their players' aesthetic appreciation of their own activity.

Seven Games: A Human History

Seven Games: A Human History
Author: Oliver Roeder
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2022-01-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 1324003782

A group biography of seven enduring and beloved games, and the story of why—and how—we play them. Checkers, backgammon, chess, and Go. Poker, Scrabble, and bridge. These seven games, ancient and modern, fascinate millions of people worldwide. In Seven Games, Oliver Roeder charts their origins and historical importance, the delightful arcana of their rules, and the ways their design makes them pleasurable. Roeder introduces thrilling competitors, such as evangelical minister Marion Tinsley, who across forty years lost only three games of checkers; Shusai, the Master, the last Go champion of imperial Japan, defending tradition against “modern rationalism”; and an IBM engineer who created a backgammon program so capable at self-learning that NASA used it on the space shuttle. He delves into the history and lore of each game: backgammon boards in ancient Egypt, the Indian origins of chess, how certain shells from a particular beach in Japan make the finest white Go stones. Beyond the cultural and personal stories, Roeder explores why games, seemingly trivial pastimes, speak so deeply to the human soul. He introduces an early philosopher of games, the aptly named Bernard Suits, and visits an Oxford cosmologist who has perfected a computer that can effectively play bridge, a game as complicated as human language itself. Throughout, Roeder tells the compelling story of how humans, pursuing scientific glory and competitive advantage, have invented AI programs better than any human player, and what that means for the games—and for us. Funny, fascinating, and profound, Seven Games is a story of obsession, psychology, history, and how play makes us human.

Serious Games

Serious Games
Author: Stefan Göbel
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2015-05-27
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3319191268

This book constitutes the proceedings of the First Joint International Conference on Serious Games, JCSG 2015, held in Huddersfield, UK, in June 2015. This conference bundles the activities of the International Conference on Serious Games Development and Applications, SGDA, and the Conference on Serious Games, GameDays. The total of 12 full papers and 5 short papers was carefully reviewed and selected from 31 submissions. The book also contains one full invited talk. The papers were organized in topical sections named: games for health; games for learning; games for other purposes; game design and development; and poster and demo papers.

Computer Games

Computer Games
Author: Tristan Cazenave
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2016-05-11
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3319394029

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Fourth Computer Games Workshop, CGW 2015, and the Fourth Workshop on General Intelligence in Game-Playing Agents, GIGA 2015, held in conjunction with the 24th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI 2015, Buenos Aires, Argentina, in July 2015.The 12 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 27 submissions. The papers address all aspects of artificial intelligence and computer game playing. They discuss topics such as Monte-Carlo methods; heuristic search; board games; card games; video games; perfect and imperfect information games; puzzles and single player games; multi-player games; combinatorial game theory; applications; computational creativity; computational game theory; evaluation and analysis; game design; knowledge representation; machine learning; multi-agent systems; opponent modeling; planning; reasoning; search.

Games are Not

Games are Not
Author: David Myers
Publisher:
Total Pages: 214
Release: 2017
Genre: GAMES & ACTIVITIES
ISBN: 9781526121653

In Game are not, David Myers demonstrates that current controversies and conflicts surrounding the meanings and effects of videogames are not going away; they are essential properties of the game's unique and paradoxical aesthetic form: a form critical to human creativity, knowledge, and sustenance of the species.

Experimental Games

Experimental Games
Author: Patrick Jagoda
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 403
Release: 2020-12-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 022663003X

In our unprecedentedly networked world, games have come to occupy an important space in many of our everyday lives. Digital games alone engage an estimated 2.5 billion people worldwide as of 2020, and other forms of gaming, such as board games, role playing, escape rooms, and puzzles, command an ever-expanding audience. At the same time, “gamification”—the application of game mechanics to traditionally nongame spheres, such as personal health and fitness, shopping, habit tracking, and more—has imposed unprecedented levels of competition, repetition, and quantification on daily life. Drawing from his own experience as a game designer, Patrick Jagoda argues that games need not be synonymous with gamification. He studies experimental games that intervene in the neoliberal project from the inside out, examining a broad variety of mainstream and independent games, including StarCraft, Candy Crush Saga, Stardew Valley, Dys4ia, Braid, and Undertale. Beyond a diagnosis of gamification, Jagoda imagines ways that games can be experimental—not only in the sense of problem solving, but also the more nuanced notion of problem making that embraces the complexities of our digital present. The result is a game-changing book on the sociopolitical potential of this form of mass entertainment.

Games, Puzzles, and Computation

Games, Puzzles, and Computation
Author: Robert A. Hearn
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2009-06-30
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 1439865051

The authors show that there are underlying mathematical reasons for why games and puzzles are challenging (and perhaps why they are so much fun). They also show that games and puzzles can serve as powerful models of computation-quite different from the usual models of automata and circuits-offering a new way of thinking about computation. The appen