Liam loves playing games. His favourite game is 'Woof Woof' which he loves to play with Daddy. When Liam collects all the bones and Daddy loses, he says 'Good game Liam'. When Daddy wins, he gets to shout 'Woof Woof – I win!'. Liam does not like it when he doesn't win. In Liam Wins the Game, Sometimes, lovable Liam learns that it is ok to feel disappointed if you don't win, but that it's not ok to moan or cry or throw things: sometimes you win and sometimes you don't. He learns how to become a good sport, and that makes him a real champ! Vibrant, colourful and lively, this book's positive messages and advice are ideal for young children wanting to understand social situations or how friendships work.

What can videogames tell us about the politics of contemporary technoculture, and how are designers and players responding to its impositions? To what extent do the technical features of videogames index our assumptions about what exists and what is denied that status? And how can we use games to identify and shift those assumptions without ever putting down the controller? Ludopolitics responds to these questions with a critique of one of the defining features of modern technology: the fantasy of control. Videogames promise players the opportunity to map and master worlds, offering closed systems that are perfect in principle if not in practice. In their numerical, rule-bound, and goal-oriented form, they express assumptions about both the technological world and the world as such. More importantly, they can help us identify these assumptions and challenge them. Games like Spec Ops: The Line, Braid, Undertale, and Bastion, as well as play practices like speedrunning, theorycrafting, and myth-making provide an aesthetic means of mounting a political critique of the pursuit and valorization of technological control.

The children on a newly formed soccer team love their coach, Miss Malarky, who doesn't know much about the game except how to make it fun, but the school principal and parents have other ideas.

This is Liam. Every day Liam eats lots of good food. Each time Liam eats, his tummy gets fuller and fuller... and fuller... until Liam's tummy starts to stretch' Successful toilet training is a time of celebration for both parents and child. It marks the end of dirty diapers and a forward step in the development of a child. Fraught with both stress and triumph, the period of toilet training can take from days to months. For a typical child, learning to gain control over the body's internal stimuli can be at best challenging. For many children, however, these internal cues can be overwhelming and confusing, leading to both a frustrating and traumatic toileting experience. Liam Goes Poo in the Toilet illustrates the relationship between eating and excreting. It provides visual instructions on how to 'relax and push'. After much fanfare, Liam finally masters going `poo' in the toilet, and both he and Mum bask in the glory of a job well done.

Liam learns the importance of accepting responsibility for his actions and apologizing when he makes a mistake that hurts or annoys someone.

Liam has always felt a bit like he's stuck between two worlds. This isprimarily because he's a twelve-year-old kid who looks like he's about thirty. Sometimes it's not so bad, like when his new principal mistakes him for a teacher on the first day of school or when he convinces a car dealer to let him take a Porsche out on a test drive. But mostly it's just frustrating, being a kid trapped in an adult world. And so he decides to flip things around. Liam cons his way onto the first spaceship to take civilians into space, a special flight for a group of kids and an adult chaperone, and he is going as the adult chaperone. It's not long before Liam, along with his friends, is stuck between two worlds again—only this time he's 239,000 miles from home. Frank Cottrell Boyce, author of Millions and Framed, brings us a funny and touching story of the many ways in which grown-upness is truly wasted on grown-ups.

A gaming academic offers a “fascinating” exploration of why we play video games—despite the unhappiness we feel when we fail at them (Boston Globe) We may think of video games as being “fun,” but in The Art of Failure, Jesper Juul claims that this is almost entirely mistaken. When we play video games, our facial expressions are rarely those of happiness or bliss. Instead, we frown, grimace, and shout in frustration as we lose, or die, or fail to advance to the next level. Humans may have a fundamental desire to succeed and feel competent, but game players choose to engage in an activity in which they are nearly certain to fail and feel incompetent. So why do we play video games even though they make us unhappy? Juul examines this paradox. In video games, as in tragic works of art, literature, theater, and cinema, it seems that we want to experience unpleasantness even if we also dislike it. Reader or audience reaction to tragedy is often explained as catharsis, as a purging of negative emotions. But, Juul points out, this doesn't seem to be the case for video game players. Games do not purge us of unpleasant emotions; they produce them in the first place. What, then, does failure in video game playing do? Juul argues that failure in a game is unique in that when you fail in a game, you (not a character) are in some way inadequate. Yet games also motivate us to play more, in order to escape that inadequacy, and the feeling of escaping failure (often by improving skills) is a central enjoyment of games. Games, writes Juul, are the art of failure: the singular art form that sets us up for failure and allows us to experience it and experiment with it. The Art of Failure is essential reading for anyone interested in video games, whether as entertainment, art, or education.