Ever wonder why teens can spend entire weekends playing video games but struggle with just one hour of homework? Why we’re addicted to certain websites and steal glances at our smartphones under the dinner table? Or why some people are able to find joy in difficult or repetitive jobs while others burn out? It’s not the experiences themselves but the way they’re structured that matters. All our lives we’ve been told that games are distractions—playful pastimes, but unrelated to success. In Game Frame, Aaron Dignan shows us that the opposite is true: games produce peak learning conditions and accelerated achievement. Here, the crucial connection between the games we love to play and the everyday tasks, goals, and dreams we have trouble realizing is illuminated. Aaron Dignan is the thirty-something founder of a successful digital strategy firm that studies the transformative power of technology in culture. He and his peers were raised on a steady diet of games and gadgets, ultimately priming them to challenge the status quo of the modern workplace. What they learned from games goes deeper than hand-eye coordination; instead, this generation intrinsically understands the value of adding the elements of games into everyday life. Game Frame is the first prescriptive explanation of what games mean to us, the human psychology behind their magnetic pull, and how we can use the lessons they teach as a framework to achieve our potential in business and beyond. Games are a powerful way to influence and change behavior in any setting. Here, Dignan outlines why games and play are such important trends in culture today, and how our technology, from our iPhones to our hybrid cars, primes us to be instinctive players. Game Frame tackles the challenging task of defining games and the mechanics that make games work from several perspectives, then explores these ideas through the lens of neuroscience. Finally, Dignan provides practical tips for using basic game mechanics in a variety of settings, such as motivating employees at work or encouraging children at home, giving readers the tools to develop their own games to solve problems in their everyday lives. Illuminated throughout with a series of real-world examples and hypothetical scenarios, Game Frame promises a crash course in game design and behavioral psychology that will leave the reader—and, by extension, the world itself—more productive. Revolutionary, visionary, practical, and time-tested, Game Frame will change the way you approach life.

With iPhone and Unity, game developers are empowered to create compelling games but they must be careful to specifically address the unique challenges of the iPhone hardware cpu and gpu requirements. This book teaches artists how to circumvent the potential pitfalls.

FRAME GAMES, as seen every week for the last 10 years in USA WEEKEND magazine, are very popular and enjoyable word puzzles that represent a famous phrase, song, person, place, or movie in a unique, framed puzzle. By looking at the way the letters are formed and where they are placed in relation to the other letters, readers are challenged to piece together a solution. These artfully constructed brainteasers are a favorite among teachers, travelers, and puzzle-lovers alike. With 500 puzzles, this book is sure to keep you thoroughly entertained.

Classic and cutting-edge writings on games, spanning nearly 50 years of game analysis and criticism, by game designers, game journalists, game fans, folklorists, sociologists, and media theorists. The Game Design Reader is a one-of-a-kind collection on game design and criticism, from classic scholarly essays to cutting-edge case studies. A companion work to Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman's textbook Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, The Game Design Reader is a classroom sourcebook, a reference for working game developers, and a great read for game fans and players. Thirty-two essays by game designers, game critics, game fans, philosophers, anthropologists, media theorists, and others consider fundamental questions: What are games and how are they designed? How do games interact with culture at large? What critical approaches can game designers take to create game stories, game spaces, game communities, and new forms of play? Salen and Zimmerman have collected seminal writings that span 50 years to offer a stunning array of perspectives. Game journalists express the rhythms of game play, sociologists tackle topics such as role-playing in vast virtual worlds, players rant and rave, and game designers describe the sweat and tears of bringing a game to market. Each text acts as a springboard for discussion, a potential class assignment, and a source of inspiration. The book is organized around fourteen topics, from The Player Experience to The Game Design Process, from Games and Narrative to Cultural Representation. Each topic, introduced with a short essay by Salen and Zimmerman, covers ideas and research fundamental to the study of games, and points to relevant texts within the Reader. Visual essays between book sections act as counterpoint to the writings. Like Rules of Play, The Game Design Reader is an intelligent and playful book. An invaluable resource for professionals and a unique introduction for those new to the field, The Game Design Reader is essential reading for anyone who takes games seriously.

The biggest challenge facing many game programmers is completing their game. Most game projects fizzle out, overwhelmed by the complexity of their own code. Game Programming Patterns tackles that exact problem. Based on years of experience in shipped AAA titles, this book collects proven patterns to untangle and optimize your game, organized as independent recipes so you can pick just the patterns you need. You will learn how to write a robust game loop, how to organize your entities using components, and take advantage of the CPUs cache to improve your performance. You'll dive deep into how scripting engines encode behavior, how quadtrees and other spatial partitions optimize your engine, and how other classic design patterns can be used in games.

This accessible guide to the U.S. Supreme Court explains the Court's history and authority, its structure and processes, its most important and enduring legal decisions, and its place in the U.S. political system. A 2018 Pew Research Center poll found that while 78 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents believed that the Supreme Court should base its decisions on the "modern" meaning of the Constitution, 67 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents asserted that Justices should rely on the Constitution's "original meaning." The Court often is the final arbiter of polarizing battles that originate in other branches of government. At the same time, however, its structural insulation from Congress, the Presidency, and electoral politics make the Supreme Court-at least in theory-well positioned to rise above the rough-and-tumble of politics. This book examines the power of the Supreme Court in America's system of democratic governance in several ways. These include: reviewing debates over whether justices should interpret the Constitution in line with its "original meaning" or in accordance with present-day understandings; exploring the processes and factors that shape how cases are chosen and decided; considering contentious battles over the selection of justices; and examining the impact of the Court on American culture and society.

The central assumption that guides this book is that research and practice about learning at the workplace has recently lost its critical edge. This book explores what has happened to workplace learning and organizational learning and studies what has replaced it. In addition, the book discusses to what extend there are reasons to revitalize it. Today, themes such as ‘innovation’, ‘co-creation’ and ‘knowledge sharing’ seem to have become preferred and referred to as theoretical fields as well as fields of practice. In several chapters of this book it is argued that the critical power of learning could be regained by starting a new discussion of how these new fields of practice can be substantiated by topics such as learning arrangements, learning mechanisms, and learning strategies. Hence, the aim of this book is to both advance and recapture our knowledge of learning in today’s increasingly complex world of work and organizing. The contributions in this work do so by revisiting classic research on workplace and organizational learning and discussing how insights from this body of literature evokes new meaning. It sets the stage for new agendas and rethinks current practices that are entangled in activities such as innovation, co-creation, knowledge sharing or other currently widespread fields of practice.