Games & Activities

Creating Q*bert and Other Classic Video Arcade Games takes you inside the video arcade game industry during the pivotal decades of the 1980s and 1990s. Warren Davis, the creator of the groundbreaking Q*bert, worked as a member of the creative teams who developed some of the most popular video games of all time, including Joust 2, Mortal Kombat, NBA Jam, and Revolution X.

In a witty and entertaining narrative, Davis shares insightful stories that offer a behind-the-scenes look at what it was like to work as a designer and programmer at the most influential and dominant video arcade game manufacturers of the era, including Gottlieb, Williams/Bally/Midway, and Premiere.

Likewise, the talented artists, designers, creators, and programmers Davis has collaborated with over the years reads like a who’s who of video gaming history: Eugene Jarvis, Tim Skelly, Ed Boon, Jeff Lee, Dave Thiel, John Newcomer, George Petro, Jack Haeger, and Dennis Nordman, among many others.

The impact Davis has had on the video arcade game industry is deep and varied. At Williams, Davis created and maintained the revolutionary digitizing system that allowed actors and other photo-realistic imagery to be utilized in such games as Mortal Kombat, T2, and NBA Jam. When Davis worked on the fabled Us vs. Them, it was the first time a video game integrated a live action story with arcade-style graphics.

On the one-of-a-kind Exterminator, Davis developed a brand new video game hardware system, and created a unique joystick that sensed both omni-directional movement and rotation, a first at that time. For Revolution X, he created a display system that simulated a pseudo-3D environment on 2D hardware, as well as a tool for artists that facilitated the building of virtual worlds and the seamless integration of the artist’s work into game code.

Whether you’re looking for insights into the Golden Age of Arcades, would like to learn how Davis first discovered his design and programming skills as a teenager working with a 1960's computer called a Monrobot XI, or want to get the inside scoop on what it was like to film the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame band Aerosmith for Revolution X, Davis’ memoir provides a backstage tour of the arcade and video game industry during its most definitive and influential period.

• Recognizing Mah Jongg tiles in different types of sets
• Building the walls and dealing the tiles
• Organizing your tiles and planning your play
• Understanding table rules and etiquette
• Winning strategies for various types of hands

• A timeless sample Mah Jongg scoring card
• A paper set to cut out and use while learning
• Easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions
• Over 80 color illustrations
• Helpful practice exercises and quizzes that reinforce the lessons
• Access to a website that provides up to date information about the game
• A glossary of terms that every Mah Jongg player needs to know

Enter the realm of the world's greatest fictional detective and use your powers of deduction to solve these new puzzling mysteries. Sherlock Holmes: The Murder Files is a specially commissioned collection of narrative murder cases from Dr John Watson's case notes that feature all of the twists and turns of a Holmes' case - but now it is up to you to create your own mind palace and solve them.

There are 10 murder cases to be cracked, each of which requires the reader to unravel the clues using logic and powers of perception.

Can you unlock the secrets of each challenge?

Really, Mr. Collins,' cried Elizabeth with some warmth, 'you puzzle me exceedingly...'
- Pride and Prejudice.

Enter the world of Pride & Prejudice & Puzzles, a beautifully realised puzzle collection that transports you to Jane Austen's Regency England - a land of polite intrigue and conjugal contrivance.

Permit yourself the indulgence of an interval of recreation and amusement to make your acquaintance with the riddles and conundrums contained within; for you are sure to receive no inconsiderable pleasure from the puzzling over and resolving of them. Your quest for an amiable distraction will be over, leaving your curiosity entirely satisfied. Puzzles there are plenty, clues there are many, and the pages are handsomely decorated with fine engravings entirely suited to the subject matter.

In the late 1920s and 30s, the international chess scene was rocked by the success of Sultan Khan, a self-taught prodigy from colonial Punjab. In a brief international career, Khan stunned the chess elite by repeatedly defeating the world’s best players and winning the British Chess Championship three times. Despite his dazzling creativity and peerless endgame technique, Khan’s legacy has long been marginalized or inaccurately portrayed. Written by Khan’s son and granddaughter, Endgame of Empire offers a comprehensive biography of this trailblazing genius who became the first Asian and first person of color to rise to the top of international chess.

From its origins in South Asia, chess had developed into an emblem of European culture. With Khan’s arrival to reclaim the game, it became a catalyst for the many ways in which individuals, ideologies, and empires clashed in the interwar period. Endgame of Empire offers a vivid portrait of Khan as he navigated challenges on and off the chessboard. His rise was meteoric, but also fraught with prejudice and ultimately cut short by the political realities of his time. Set in the broader context of race, empire, and decolonization, the book celebrates Khan’s genius as a strategist while also uncovering the difficult circumstances under which he conquered international chess. It also provides the first extended accounts of Khan’s life in colonial India before his chess career and his life after professional chess in the Pakistan whose arrival he had long desired.

In an appendix, former U.S. Chess Champion Sam Shankland walks the reader through six of Khan’s finest victories. This instructive commentary provides both an account of Khan’s style and a lesson for beginning and experienced chess players alike in the strategic ideas at which Khan was ahead of his time.

At a moment of emergent nationalism in South Asia, Khan’s unassuming brilliance on the chessboard came to represent something greater: a graceful assertion of equality and a prelude to independence. Blending intimate family recollections, archival discoveries, and sharp historical analysis, Endgame of Empire reclaims a legacy long overshadowed by race, empire, and myth and offers a playbook in holding one’s own through adversity.

Senior Mind Gym will give anyone suffering from the memory glitches and fuzzy thinking that comes with age a fun brain-boosting workout. 

Do you keep forgetting where you put things – and, even, what those things are called? Has ‘thingy’ become one of your commonly used words? Do you find yourself feeling a bit befuddled? If so, it sounds like you’re suffering from what is commonly known as “Senior Moments”. But never fear, Senior Mind Gym is a comprehensive mental workout wrapped up in one handy book that will help reboot your scatterbrain.

This book contains:

• Fun Quizzes
• Conundrums
• Crosswords
• Word Games
• Sudoku
• Mazes
• Escape-the-page games

You can sharpen your little grey cells with a daily workout. Regularly challenging your brain will help to improve your mental agility, concentration levels, memory, and problem-solving skills – something we can all benefit from, at any age! 

This is the perfect gift book for a broad age range of seniors who can benefit from and enjoy a variety of fun mental challenges to improve brain function.

Video Game Ecologies and Culture examines the environments that video games affect and are impacted by. The edited collection engages with the notion of ecology as a critical concept that allows to study video game conceptions of human, posthuman, and natural environments and explore the entangled eco-cultural formations in video games and gaming. The contributions discuss the theme of video game ecologies with an interdisciplinary emphasis on the cultural, political, social, and ecological discourses pertaining to the medium and reflect on the relations and imaginaries developed through eco/critical video game practices. These interrelations are carved out in essays on relationality, kinship, and capitalist ruins, immersion in virtual marine ecosystems, video games and the commodification of ecocriticism, eco-colonial power formations, playing and recording nature, gender and post-anthropocentric game worlds, time-loop chronotopes, and ludoaffective dissonance and survival in video games.

Grab the controller! Save the World!
One of the gaming industry’s leading women describes how gaming can be a force for global good.

Play is in our DNA, but gaming has always had a bad rap. Since the first humans carved a game board into the dirt, we’ve been told that playing around isn’t a useful way to spend our time. But gaming is as natural as we are. We game to experiment with ideas and to learn. We play to create new worlds so we can change this one. Gaming pushes us to imagine what more we can become. In Push Play: Gaming for a Better World, Dr. Songyee Yoon, Chief Strategy Officer at NCSOFT, lays out how gaming can help us craft a better world together.

While gaming has global implications, it has largely been created by, marketed to and associated with men. The gaming industry’s perception as a “boys club” has kept many talented women from pursuing their passions in STEM. As a leader and expert in the video game industry, Dr. Yoon shares her own experience in this male dominated field and her quest for a more diverse and equitable tech community. From encouraging more female lead characters in games to creating more supportive environments for working mothers, Dr. Yoon works to break down barriers for those who have been shut out of opportunities in STEM. After all, the game only gets better with more players.

Through stories from her career in the gaming industry and her deep passion for tech, she outlines how innovations in gaming push industries forward and create a more equitable world for everyone.

• Learn how gaming inspires Artificial Intelligence to consider everyone’s perspective.
  
• Master tips and tricks from gaming that can be used to lead diverse and thriving business teams.
  
• Explore the digital worlds of Massively Multiplayer Online Games and understand why we need digital communities where all humans can participate.
  

So, get those thumbs flexing with Push Play to unlock your power to play.

Videogames have always depicted representations of American culture, but how exactly they feed back into this culture is less obvious. Advocating an action-based understanding of both videogames and culture, this book delineates how aspects of American culture are reproduced transnationally through popular open-world videogames. Playing American proposes an analytic focus on open-world videogames' "ambient operations" and traces practices of "playing American" through the stages of videogame development, gameplay, and reception. Three case studies – concentrating on the Grand Theft Auto, Watch Dogs, and Red Dead Redemption franchises, respectively – highlight different figurations of "playing American." Thematic foci range from public discourses on systemic racism and neoliberal capitalism to the justification of real-world surveillance practices and to the reconfiguration of the Western in the digital age. Playing American provides those interested in either videogames or American culture with a fresh angle and new concepts regarding its subject matters. It demonstrates that videogames are agents of cultural reproduction that do distinct cultural work for American culture in the twenty-first century.

Video games are a global phenomenon, international in their scope and democratic in their appeal. This is the first volume dedicated to the subject of apocalyptic video games. Its two dozen papers engage the subject comprehensively, from game design to player experience, and from the perspectives of content, theme, sound, ludic textures, and social function. The volume offers scholars, students, and general readers a thorough overview of this unique expression of the apocalyptic imagination in popular culture, and novel insights into an important facet of contemporary digital society.

Forty original contributions on games and gaming culture

What does Pokémon Go tell us about globalization? What does Tetris teach us about rules? Is feminism boosted or bashed by Kim Kardashian: Hollywood? How does BioShock Infinite help us navigate world-building?

From arcades to Atari, and phone apps to virtual reality headsets, video games have been at the epicenter of our ever-evolving technological reality. Unlike other media technologies, video games demand engagement like no other, which begs the question—what is the role that video games play in our lives, from our homes, to our phones, and on global culture writ large?

How to Play Video Games brings together forty original essays from today’s leading scholars on video game culture, writing about the games they know best and what they mean in broader social and cultural contexts. Read about avatars in Grand Theft Auto V, or music in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. See how Age of Empires taught a generation about postcolonialism, and how Borderlands exposes the seedy underbelly of capitalism. These essays suggest that understanding video games in a critical context provides a new way to engage in contemporary culture. They are a must read for fans and students of the medium.

How does a group of young underdogs with big dreams but little experience transform a culture and industry? In the case of the $75 billion video game business, it helps if the outfit is run by a brash iconoclast with the vision of an outlaw and the work ethic of a Puritan—and grew up madly in love with gangster movies, video games, and rap music. It also helps if the company makes the most revolutionary, controversial, and successful video game franchise ever—Grand Theft Auto.

In Jacked, acclaimed author and journalist David Kushner takes you on an unauthorized joyride through the high-risk, high-profit, and fast-moving world of the biggest players in the game industry—and the haters out to get them. He reveals the untold story behind the people who created the product that defined one generation and infuriated another.

Drawing on more than a decade of his own reporting, game playing, and interviewing, Kushner goes deep inside the making of Grand Theft Auto (GTA), long veiled in secrecy, rumor, and myth. He also examines the cultural and political backlash that sent sales soaring, even as it threatened the game's continued existence.

This is a pop culture story for the ages. It begins in the back alleys of Dundee, Scotland, where the geeky geniuses at DMA Design invented GTA. Fledgling marketer and rebellious gamer Sam Houser saw GTA's enormous potential and pushed DMA to make it bolder, wilder, and funnier, and let players freely explore the game's gritty cities, wreaking havoc whenever they pleased. With its groundbreaking innovations and cinematic flair, GTA quickly became the centerpiece of Houser's new company, Rockstar Games, and the hottest title on the planet. But one of America's most notorious culture warriors, Jack Thompson, had his own mission—to ensure that GTA was banned from store shelves for corrupting youth and to bring Rockstar to their knees—even as the gamers of the world rallied against him.

With its incredible artistry, arch satire, and massive press coverage, GTA earned critical and commercial acclaim around the world, breaking the Guinness record for most successful entertainment product launch of all time. But deep within its urban wasteland lurked a nasty little secret—the now-famous sex mini-game, "Hot Coffee." It would mean big trouble for Rockstar Games and bring Houser and his rival, Thompson, to the brink.

Whichever side you're on, Jacked gives you a new understanding of this breakout industry, and the game that defined it.

Praise for Working the Phones:

“A sharp reminder of the difficulties faced by call-center workers.” —The Financial Times

“Jamie Woodcock shows us what call-centers can tell us about bleakness and resistance in the modern workplace.” —VICE

“Jamie Woodcock’s brilliant insider account of life in a British call-center reveals the dirty realities of digital capitalism . . . a book that is sure to become a classic.” —Peter Fleming, author of The Mythology of Work

“Woodcock knows not only his theory but his subject inside out. There’s casualization, cruelty, and regimentation, but also subversion, and his focus on employee resistance offers a flicker of hope.” —Times Higher Education

In Marx at the Arcade, acclaimed researcher Jamie Woodcock delves into the hidden abode of the gaming industry. In an account that will appeal to hardcore gamers, digital skeptics, and the joystick-curious, Woodcock unravels the vast networks of artists, software developers, and factory and logistics workers whose seen and unseen labor flows into the products we consume on a gargantuan scale. Along the way, he analyzes the increasingly important role the gaming industry plays in contemporary capitalism and the broader transformations of work and the economy that it embodies.

Jamie Woodcock is a sociologist of work, focusing on digital labor, the gig economy, and resistance. He is currently a fellow at the London School of Economics and is the author of the award-winning Working the Phones (2016). He is on the editorial board of Historical Materialism and an editor of Notes from Below, an online journal of workers’ inquiry.

Ringbearers collects together essays by established and leading figures within Game Studies, each focused on different aspects of the Massively Multiplayer Online game The Lord of the Rings Online.

The authors played the game extensively, yet they each come to it with different questions. Some essays focus on what players do with and in the game, whether that means asking about the opportunities provided for role-play or asking how the knowledge that fans bring to the game informs their experience of it. Others focus on the design of the game: for example the handling of narrative and its temporal dimensions, the articulation of core themes into ludic form, or the representational and aural strategies used. Moral rhetorics solicit discussion from various perspectives, as does the treatment of horror and the 'other'. Particular game mechanics are analysed in detail such as the game's crafting economy, or, more generally, the development of improbable conventions that players have learned to accept as the grammar of games.

As well as Design, Media and Game Studies students and scholars, Ringbearers will also prove of interest to those studying adaptation and to scholar-fans of JRR Tolkein's massively influential and popular fictional work.

In this new anthology, the editors of the widely acclaimed The Political Interests of Gender (1988) make a compelling case for reconstructing feminist theory in critical-realist terms, fostering more robust, multi-dimensional approaches to analyses of the political interests of gender.

Leading gender studies’ scholars utilise different research traditions to investigate topics including human rights, women’s movements, gendered labour markets, international monetary policy, equality policy, and queer politics. This unique anthology includes theoretical and empirical work, illustrating how to build bridges between materialist and discursive theoretical frameworks for understanding the politics of gender. It will be a trend-setting text for advanced gender studies political science, and sociology courses, as well as for professionals in these fields.

Step through the looking glass into a magical world of puzzles based on Lewis Carroll’s classic tale.

Sharpen your wit and wisdom with 80 conundrums set in Lewis Carroll's weirdly brilliant and brilliantly weird world. Carroll, an obsessive, inventive expert logician, would create elaborate "Pillow Problems" every evening. Some of these are in this collection, grouped by difficulty, so you can match your skills of deduction, reasoning, arithmetic, and creative thinking against the master's. All the familiar characters from his masterpiece appear, including the Mad Hatter with a puzzle about biscuits, the Cheshire Cat with a math quandary, and the Red Queen with a riddle to untangle—all beautifully illustrated with Sir John Tenniel’s original art.

Containing more than 100 enigmas, riddles and conundrums, all taking inspiration from their extraordinary stories and vivid worlds, explore new galaxies and new technologies while solving challenges all written in the distinctive and brilliant styles of these five stars of science fiction.

Enter the genre-defining worlds created by five masters of speculative fiction in The Science Fiction Puzzle Book. Featuring the prolific works of Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein and Ursula K. Le Guin, become part of their futuristic, dystopian and world-building adventures with this series of enigmatic puzzles.

'A knotty puzzle may hold up a scientist for a century'
– Isaac Asimov, The Robots of Dawn.

Psycho Puzzles re-creates the suspense and drama of Hitchcock's greatest films in more than 80 puzzles.

Each conundrum uses characters and situations from his movies to set the scene and you will be asked to calculate the answers to a number of gruesome questions, such as: Can Melanie Daniels survive inside a phone booth as the birds make their savage attack? How much hard liquor can Roger Thornhill consume while being chased by a crop duster? Can Norman sink Marion's car and return to the Bates Motel before the police catch him?

Highly illustrated throughout with period artworks, and with trivia questions about Hitchcock and his life and works as well, this is the perfect book for any movie-loving puzzle fan.

More than 80 puzzles and trivia questions inspired by the worlds and works of Alfred Hitchcock. All of his feature films are referenced, with particular attention paid to his most famous works, such as Psycho, North by Northwest, The Birds, Vertigo and Rear Window. Stylish artworks and illustrations are included to re-create the vivid atmosphere of his movies.

The world’s greatest detective returns once more . . . to test your powers of deduction! Can you solve all the cases in this remarkable collection?

Written in the style of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's great stories, and told in the voice of Dr. Watson, this book offers an enlightening and diverting selection of puzzles—more than 200 of them. They range from elementary riddles to fiendish brainbusters, from simple riddles to full-out mysteries. Fans must follow threads of logic through convoluted labyrinths, unravel wordknots, figure out identities, solve a murder by looking at an illustration, and much more. Can you live up to Holmes’s exacting standards? Solvers will find tips and tricks for “deducing” the Sherlock way, along with all answers and explanations.

Expand your mind with this exciting collection of mental challenges—more than 100—from the seemingly simple to the almost impossible.

Mystify your mind with more than 100 brainteasers. This provocative collection of puzzles will test your solving skills with an assortment of lateral thinking problems, confounding conundrums, extreme enigmas, almost-impossible IQ questions, and perplexing physics quandaries. Try to solve the mystery of a death in a locked room, how a woman figured out a crafty cabbie had lied to her, why a wife was crying over her expensive birthday present, and more!

This title from the De Gruyter Book Archive has been digitized in order to make it available for academic research. It was originally published under National Socialism and has to be viewed in this historical context. Learn more here.

The story of white masculinity in geek culture through a history of hobby gaming

Geek culture has never been more mainstream than it is now, with the ever-increasing popularity of events like Comic Con, transmedia franchising of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, market dominance of video and computer games, and the resurgence of board games such as Settlers of Catan and role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. Yet even while the comic book and hobby shops where the above are consumed today are seeing an influx of BIPOC gamers, they remain overwhelmingly white, male, and heterosexual.

The Privilege of Play contends that in order to understand geek identity’s exclusionary tendencies, we need to know the history of the overwhelmingly white communities of tabletop gaming hobbyists that preceded it. It begins by looking at how the privileged networks of model railroad hobbyists in the early twentieth century laid a cultural foundation for the scenes that would grow up around war games, role-playing games, and board games in the decades ahead. These early networks of hobbyists were able to thrive because of how their leisure interests and professional ambitions overlapped. Yet despite the personal and professional strides made by individuals in these networks, the networks themselves remained cloistered and homogeneous—the secret playgrounds of white men.

Aaron Trammell catalogs how gaming clubs composed of lonely white men living in segregated suburbia in the sixties, seventies and eighties developed strong networks through hobbyist publications and eventually broke into the mainstream. He shows us how early hobbyists considered themselves outsiders, and how the denial of white male privilege they established continues to define the socio-technical space of geek culture today. By considering the historical role of hobbyists in the development of computer technology, game design, and popular media, The Privilege of Play charts a path toward understanding the deeply rooted structural obstacles that have stymied a more inclusive community. The Privilege of Play concludes by considering how digital technology has created the conditions for a new and more diverse generation of geeks to take center stage.

Gambling in Papua New Guinea, despite being completely absent prior to the Colonial era, has come to supersede storytelling as the region’s main nighttime activity. Money Games is an ethnographic monograph which reveals the contemporary importance of gambling in urban Papua New Guinea. Rich ethnographic detail is coupled with cross-cultural comparison which span the globe. This anthropological study of everyday economics in Melanesia thereby intersects with theories of money, value, play, informal economy, social change and leadership.

Card Games is a detailed guide to 52 of the most popular card games, perfect for players of all ages.

A simple deck of cards can provide hours of entertainment for adults and children, so it’s no surprise that card games are as popular as ever. From simple, fast-paced games for children to more complex, strategic games for adults, this family-friendly companion features 52 classic games for one player upwards.

This handy guide provides detailed rules and instructions for each game, accompanied by clear, colored diagrams to help you master these fun, engaging games. The current edition has been updated to include two popular poker games: Five-card Stud and Texas Hold’em.

This title from the De Gruyter Book Archive has been digitized in order to make it available for academic research. It was originally published under National Socialism and has to be viewed in this historical context. Learn more here.

This title from the De Gruyter Book Archive has been digitized in order to make it available for academic research. It was originally published under National Socialism and has to be viewed in this historical context. Learn more here.

Eine Auswahl seiner besten Partien mit Beiträgen führender Meister

Do you know what it takes to play the game? At the poker table, just like in the ocean, baitfish get gobbled up by sharks. To help you ascend to the top of the poker food chain, Pick Up Your Poker Game answers all the game's most important questions with over 50 tips and strategies to give you the upper hand. So whether you're a seasoned pro or a bare-bones beginner, this handy, information-packed guide will take your poker game to the next level by helping you discover:

• Winning strategies when you don't have a winning hand
• Bluffing techniques and when to use them
• What players to choose or avoid as your opponent
• How to help determine your opponent's hand
• How to capitalize on your opponent's weaknesses and your strengths

With illustrations by Sweden�s Beatrix Potter, this is more beautiful than your run-of-the mill baby record book.

This beautiful baby record book is illustrated throughout with Elsa Beskow's classic artwork. With plenty of room for photographs and keepsakes, parents and grandparents can record all the important developments and happy memories in their child's early life, to share in the years to come.

Each page is fully illustrated with Beskow's charming depictions of children, taken from her picture books which have been loved for over a century.