Video games open portals into fantastical worlds where imaginative play prevails. The virtual medium seemingly provides us with ample opportunities to behave and act out with relative safety and impunity. Or does it? Sound Play explores the aesthetic, ethical, and sociopolitical stakes of our engagements with gaming's audio phenomena-from sonic violence to synthesized operas, from democratic music-making to vocal sexual harassment. Author William Cheng shows how the simulated environments of games empower designers, composers, players, and scholars to test and tinker with music, noise, speech, and silence in ways that might not be prudent or possible in the real world. In negotiating utopian and alarmist stereotypes of video games, Sound Play synthesizes insights from across musicology, sociology, anthropology, communications, literary theory, and philosophy. With case studies that span Final Fantasy VI, Silent Hill, Fallout 3, The Lord of the Rings Online, and Team Fortress 2, this book insists that what we do in there-in the safe, sound spaces of games-can ultimately teach us a great deal about who we are and what we value (musically, culturally, humanly) out here.

Draw your favorite Outfits, vehicles, weapons, and more with Epic Games' first official how to draw book, including tips to make your sketches as epic as your in-game achievements and featuring the authentic Fortnite holographic seal. Learn how to draw 35 of the game's most popular icons - including Outfits, weapons, building materials and vehicles. In easy-to-follow stages, you'll go step-by-step from rough sketch to detailed finish. INCLUDES: * 16 iconic Outfits * 8 fearsome weapons * The craziest in-game vehicles * Drawing guide * Top art tips, including advanced shading and texture techniques Whether you're a complete novice or an experienced artist, this book will inspire you to pick up a pencil and get sketching! LET'S GO!

WELCOME TO LAWBRANDAuroboros: Coils of the Serpent is a 5E campaign setting by Chris Metzen and Warchief Gaming. The first release in this universe, Worldbook: Lawbrand, is based on the roleplaying campaign that Chris ran with his childhood friends in the eighties and nineties, before heading to Blizzard to work on worlds such as Warcraft, StarCraft, and more.As a 5E compatible source book, Worldbook: Lawbrand gives players and GMs all the tools they'll need to create their own adventures in this epic fantasy world.Containing over a hundred pages of lore, as well as being loaded to the brim with new options for character customization, Worldbook: Lawbrand also features a comprehensive Adventures section, designed to give GMs a way to launch imaginative adventures for their party.Key Features: - Background and lore for each Trade-City, faction, and key players that run them.- Four brand new sub-classes and five new races unique to the setting, as well as new magic items, spells, and magical tattoos known as sigils.- Guides and recommendations on how to run adventures in Lawbrand, including creating compelling stories, using the Mark of the Serpent in your party, and more.Will you tame the world - or shatter it?

In this classic of travel writing, first published sixty years ago, a Danish journalist records his experience of life in North Africa under colonial rule. Driving through the Sahara in a battered Chevrolet, having converted to Islam and with a knowledge of Arabic, he leaves the beaten track to discover communities and landscapes shrouded in mystery for centuries. Brushes with magicians, cave-dwellers and Sufi mystics, however, prove less astonishing than the cruelties inflicted on the local populations by Mussolini's generals.

A motley crew of singing villains. A ragtag team of adventurers. A conflict that could decide the fate of Azeroth itself. It's safe to say that Hearthstone's never looked so exciting! For the first time, Blizzard Entertainment's collectible card game told a complete, continuous story across three expansions. The Art of Hearthstone, Volume V: Year of the Dragon shows hundreds of fantastic illustrations created by dozens of artists for the game's cards, cinematics, and concept art, as well as diving deep into the creative process and pipeline that made the Year of Dragon one of Hearthstone's most ambitious.

Enter the world of Overwatch, the smash-hit from Blizzard Entertainment, in this five-story anthology chronicling some of the video game's most fascinating and celebrated characters, now available for the first time in print! Since its initial launch in 2016, Overwatch has captivated the imaginations of over 50 million players worldwide. Now fans can join some of the game's most iconic heroes-and villains-on a series of missions ranging from the lush Caribbean to southern India, and everywhere in between. Authored by some of the most compelling voices in science fiction today, including Michael Chu, Brandon Easton, Christie Golden, and Alyssa Wong, this short story anthology is rife with themes of love and loss, ambition and despair, alliances and conflict, all pointing toward a common hope, that the future is worth fighting for.

Gamification is being used everywhere; despite its apparent plethora of benefits, the unbalanced use of its main mechanics can end up in catastrophic results for a company or institution. Currently, there is a lack of knowledge of what it is, leading to its unregulated and ad hoc use without any prior planning. This unbalanced use prejudices the achievement of the initial goals and impairs the user's evolution, bringing potential negative reflections. Currently, there are few specifications and modeling languages that allow the creation of a system of rules to serve as the basis for a gamification engine. Consequently, programmers implement gamification in a variety of ways, undermining any attempt at reuse and negatively affecting interoperability. Next-Generation Applications and Implementations of Gamification Systems synthesizes all the trends, best practices, methodologies, languages, and tools that are used to implement gamification. It also discusses how to put gamification in action by linking academic and informatics researchers with professionals who use gamification in their daily work to disseminate and exchange the knowledge, information, and technology provided by the international communities in the area of gamification throughout the 21st century. Covering topics such as applied and cloud gamification, chatbots, deep learning, and certifications and frameworks, this book is ideal for programmers, computer scientists, software engineers, practitioners of technological companies, managers, academicians, researchers, and students.

Throughout the 1990s, artists experimented with game engine technologies to disrupt our habitual relationships to video games. They hacked, glitched, and dismantled popular first-person shooters such as Doom (1993) and Quake (1996) to engage players in new kinds of embodied activity. In Unstable Aesthetics: Game Engines and the Strangeness of Art Modding, Eddie Lohmeyer investigates historical episodes of art modding practices-the alteration of a game system's existing code or hardware to generate abstract spaces-situated around a recent archaeology of the game engine: software for rendering two and three-dimensional gameworlds. The contemporary artists highlighted throughout this book-Cory Arcangel, JODI, Julian Oliver, Krista Hoefle, and Brent Watanabe, among others -- were attracted to the architectures of engines because they allowed them to explore vital relationships among abstraction, technology, and the body. Artists employed a range of modding techniques-hacking the ROM chips on Nintendo cartridges to produce experimental video, deconstructing source code to generate psychedelic glitch patterns, and collaging together surreal gameworlds-to intentionally dissect the engine's operations and unveil illusions of movement within algorithmic spaces. Through key moments in game engine history, Lohmeyer formulates a rich phenomenology of video games by focusing on the liminal spaces of interaction among system and body, or rather the strangeness of art modding.

Official lavish in-depth coffee table art book for the first-person horror adventure game Scorn, inspired by H.R. Giger and Zdzislaw Beksinski, to be released on Xbox series X/S, Microsoft Windows, Steam, and Windows Store. In this coffee table hardback, uncover the concept and vision behind Scorn, alongside insight from the artists and software designers at Ebb. The game is set in a nightmarish universe of odd forms and somber tapestry inspired by the work of H.R. Giger, and designed around the idea of "being thrown into the world". This lavish book explores the characters, creatures, weapons, and locations, with maps, user interfaces, concept art, and original designs. The unsettling biomechanical environment is a character in itself, and every location reveals its own theme, puzzles, and characters that are integral in creating a cohesive lived-in world. "It blends the anatomical and organic with the mechanical and architectural to create fleshy, irregular landscapes inhabited by shambling monstrosities" - PC Gamer magazine

The world of esports in education is booming, and the field needs empirical studies to help ground much of what is going on in the field. Over the last couple years, there appears to be a large amount of anecdotal evidence surrounding esports and its role in education, but researchers, teachers, coaches, and organizations need peer-reviewed, research-based evidence so they can evolve the field at large. As the amount of esports teams and organizations continues to rise, so will the need for the field to provide empirical research about esports and education and the effect it has on students and those who partake in it. Esports Research and Its Integration in Education is an essential reference source for those interested in educational research related to esports topics as they are approached through multiple ages of schooling and infused throughout a variety of content areas and research methodologies. The book covers empirical studies that help practitioners to understand how esports is developing within and around learning institutions and what the impact may be on students and their contemporary educational experiences. Covering topics such as college and career readiness, literacy practices, and urban education, this text is essential for stakeholders involved in the rise of esports, administrators, teachers, coaches, researchers, students, and academicians.

Starting with the announcement trailer in 2014, Overwatch's award-winning cinematics captured the hearts of millions across the world, introducing them to a hopeful science fiction world where heroes are needed. Crafting these animated shorts required the Blizzard cinematics team to explore new ways of animated filmmaking with a bold new art style, more frequent releases, and intimate collaboration with the game team. The Cinematic Art of Overwatch chronicles this journey, featuring never-before-seen art and anecdotes that illustrate how Overwatch's richly imagined characters and world were brought to life through cinematic storytelling.