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.

Games software has its roots in a "cottage" industry, ignoring formal methodologies, instead leaving the programmers to find homespun solutions to the technical problems faced. The picture has now changed: the scale of the problems faced by programmers means that more methodical techniques must be applied to game development to prevent projects spiralling out of control, both in terms of technical complexity and cost. The book addresses how program teams can develop ever more complex entertainment software within the constraints of deadlines, budgets and changing technologies. It establishes a set of best practices tempered with real-world pragmatism, understanding that there is no "one size fits all" solution. No member of the game development team should be working in isolation and the book will be useful to producers, designers and artists as well as the programmers themselves. In addition, the book addresses the needs of the growing number of Game Development courses offered in academia, giving students a much-needed insight into the real world of object-oriented game design.

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?

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.

The must-have collectible compendium, continuing the extensive lore compilation of the Destiny universe. Destiny Grimoire Anthology, Volume IV: The Royal Will, unravels the making and methods of two of Destiny's most powerful monarchs-Mara Sov, the Queen of the Awoken and Oryx, the Taken King. Through a curated selection of lore surrounding their legends, these pages explore beyond their storied rise to power and ill-fated confrontation among the rings of Saturn to reveal a deeper understanding of the mysterious Awoken and examine the very essence of Light and Dark.

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.

Create, Explore, and ... Color with The Official Minecraft Coloring Book! Based on Minecraft, the best-selling video game of all time, this action-packed coloring book lets kids color their way through nearly 50 epic pages of original art inspired by the expansive, wondrous, and never-ending world of Minecraft.

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.

The Destiny Grimoire Anthology is a must-have collectible lore compendium assembled for Destiny's devoted and enlightened scholars and lore lovers, as well as fans of fantasy and science fiction storytelling. The Destiny Grimoire Anthology weaves tales from multiple sources together for the first time, casting new light on Destiny's most legendary heroes, infamous villains, and their greatest moments of triumph and tragedy.

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.

Bungie presents the Destiny Grimoire Anthology, a must-have collectible lore compendium designed and assembled for Destiny's devoted and enlightened scholars and lore lovers, as well as fans of fantasy and science fiction storytelling. Until now, the myths, mysteries, and machinations of the Destiny universe were found hidden throughout the worlds-enticing threads that hinted at a greater tapestry. The Destiny Grimoire Anthology weaves tales from multiple sources together for the first time, casting new light on Destiny's most legendary heroes, infamous villains, and their greatest moments of triumph and tragedy. This volume illuminates a facet of the world of Destiny, and challenges players' thoughts and assumptions on what it means to be a Guardian, offering new and differing perspectives on the cosmic war that rages between the Traveler and its ancient enemies.