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Books > Social sciences > General
As the videogame industry has grown up, the need for better stories
and characters has dramatically increased, yet traditional
screenwriting techniques alone cannot equip writers for the unique
challenges of writing stories where the actions and decisions of a
diverse range of players are at the centre of every narrative
experience. Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames was the
first book to demystify the emerging field of game writing by
identifying and explaining the skills required for creating
videogame narrative. Through the insights and experiences of
professional game writers, this revised edition captures a snapshot
of the narrative skills employed in today's game industry and
presents them as practical articles accompanied by exercises for
developing the skills discussed. The book carefully explains the
foundations of the craft of game writing, detailing all aspects of
the process from the basics of narrative to guiding the player and
the challenges of nonlinear storytelling. Throughout the book there
is a strong emphasis on the skills developers and publishers expect
game writers to know. This second edition brings the material up to
date and adds four new chapters covering MMOs, script formats,
narrative design for urban games, and new ways to think about
videogame narrative as an art form. Suitable for both beginners and
experienced writers, Game Writing is the essential guide to all the
techniques of game writing. There's no better starting point for
someone wishing to get into this exciting field, whether they are
new game writers wishing to hone their skills, or screenwriters
hoping to transfer their skills to the games industry.
'A striking memoir...A must-read for anyone healing from complex
trauma' Jeanette McCurdy, bestselling author of I'm Glad My Mom
Died Every cell in my body is filled with the code of generations
of trauma, of death, of birth, of migration, of history that I
cannot understand. . . . I want to have words for what my bones
know. By the age of thirty, Stephanie Foo was successful on paper:
she had her dream job as an award-winning radio producer at This
American Life and a loving boyfriend. But behind her office door,
she was having panic attacks and sobbing at her desk every morning.
After years of questioning what was wrong with herself, she was
diagnosed with complex PTSD - a condition that occurs when trauma
happens continuously, over the course of years. Both of Foo's
parents abandoned her when she was a teenager, after years of
physical and verbal abuse and neglect. She thought she'd moved on,
but her new diagnosis illuminated the way her past continued to
threaten her health, relationships, and career. She found limited
resources to help her, so Foo set out to heal herself, and to map
her experiences onto the scarce literature about C-PTSD. In this
deeply personal and thoroughly researched account, Foo interviews
scientists and psychologists and tries a variety of innovative
therapies. She returns to her hometown in California to investigate
the effects of immigrant trauma on the community, and she uncovers
family secrets in the country of her birth, Malaysia, to learn how
trauma can be inherited through generations. Ultimately, she
discovers that you don't move on from trauma - but you can learn to
move with it. Powerful, enlightening and hopeful, What My Bones
Know is a brave narrative that reckons with the hold of the past
over the present, the mind over the body - and examines one woman's
ability to reclaim agency from her trauma.
The Evolution of Consciousness brings together interdisciplinary
insights from philosophy, neuroscience, psychology and cognitive
science to explain consciousness in terms of the biological
function that grounds it in the physical world. Drawing on the
novel analogy of a house of cards, Paula Droege pieces together
various conceptual questions and shows how they rest on each other
to form a coherent, structured argument. She asserts that the mind
is composed of unconscious sensory and cognitive representations,
which become conscious when they are selected and coordinated into
a representation of the present moment. This temporal
representation theory deftly bridges the gap between mind and body
by highlighting that physical systems are conscious when they can
respond flexibly to actions in the present. With examples from
evolution, animal cognition, introspection and the free will
debate, this is a compelling and animated account of the possible
explanations of consciousness, offering answers to the conceptual
question of how consciousness can be considered a cognitive
process.
A collection of essays about Armenian identity and belonging in the
diaspora. In the century since the Armenian Genocide, Armenian
survivors and their descendants have written of a vast range of
experiences using storytelling and activism, two important aspects
of Armenian culture. Wrestling with questions of home and self,
diasporan Armenian writers bear the burden of repeatedly telling
their history, as it remains widely erased and obfuscated. Telling
this history requires a tangled balance of contextualizing the past
and reporting on the present, of respecting a culture even while
feeling lost within it. We Are All Armenian brings together
established and emerging Armenian authors to reflect on the
complications of Armenian ethnic identity today. These personal
essays elevate diasporic voices that have been historically
silenced inside and outside of their communities, including queer,
multiracial, and multiethnic writers. The eighteen contributors to
this contemporary anthology explore issues of displacement,
assimilation, inheritance, and broader definitions of home. Through
engaging creative nonfiction, many of them question what it is to
be Armenian enough inside an often unacknowledged community.
Our Elgar Concise Introductions are inspiring and considered
introductions to the key principles in business, expertly written
by some of the world’s leading scholars. The aims of the series
are two-fold: to pinpoint essential principles of business and
management, and to offer insights that stimulate critical thinking.
Examining the psychological and social drivers of unsustainable and
sustainable consumption, this Concise Introduction provides an
insightful overview of the causes of unsustainable consumer
behaviour and the instruments and interventions needed to create a
sustainable consumption pattern. Key Features: Outlines how policy
interventions can contribute to a transformation in the consumption
pattern Based on a comprehensive model of the causes and
consequences of (un)sustainable consumer choices Provides a precise
account of how the structure and distribution of consumption are
responsible for environmental problems Maps the roots of
unsustainable consumption in human nature as well as in economic,
institutional, social, and structural contexts Highlighting a
variety of ways to promote sustainable consumption, from
sustainability labelling to carbon taxes and infrastructure
investments, this Concise Introduction will be essential reading
for students and researchers in behavioural sciences, business and
management, economic psychology, environmental sociology, and
sustainable development.
Personal, social, health and economic education (PSHE) and
relationships, (sex) and health education (R(S)HE) are often
undervalued in school and are frequently seen as an add-ons. But
when taught well, PSHE and R(S)HE can enhance not only other
subjects but strengthen school safeguarding, develop pupil
well-being and improve pupils’ progress and resilience in
learning. Underpinned by a range of contemporary research and
illustrated through examples of classroom practice, the expert team
of teacher educators look at a range of curriculum areas and
contemporary issues to explore how PSHE and R(S)HE education can
enhance other curriculum areas. As well as showing how pupils’
life skills can be developed, they also explore how teachers’
understanding of how PSHE and R(S)HE can be implemented without
additional planning or expensive resources. The book takes an
inclusive understanding of both diverse families and relationships
throughout. Topics covered include: -social media, online presence
and critical literacy skills -mental health coping strategies
-plastic reducing -topical, sensitive, controversial issues (TSCIs)
Covering the whole primary spectrum from Early Years to Key Stage
2, case studies from each phase are included within each chapter to
help practitioners to relate the material to their own classroom.
Points to consider for your setting are included and guidance on
further reading provides reliable direction for additional
information.
This book examines how the profound religious, political, and
intellectual shifts that characterize the early modern period in
Europe are inextricably linked to cultural uses of alcohol in
Europe and the Atlantic world. Combining recent work on the history
of drink with innovative new research, the eight contributing
scholars explore themes such as identity, consumerism, gender,
politics, colonialism, religion, state-building, and more through
the revealing lens of the pervasive drinking cultures of early
modern peoples. Alcohol had a place at nearly every European table
and a role in much of early modern experience, from building
personal bonds via social and ritual drinking to fueling economies
at both micro and macro levels. At the same time, drinking was also
at the root of a host of personal tragedies, including domestic
violence in the home and human trafficking across the Atlantic.
Alcohol in the Early Modern World provides a fascinating
re-examination of pre-modern beliefs about and experiences with
intoxicating beverages.
If countless books and movies are to be believed, America's Wild
West was, at heart, a world of cowboys and Indians, sheriffs and
gunslingers, scruffy settlers and mountain men—a man's world.
Here, Chris Enss, in the latest of her popular books to take on
this stereotype, tells the stories of twelve courageous women who
faced down schoolrooms full of children on the open prairies and in
the mining towns of the Old West. Between 1847 and 1858, more than
600 women teachers traveled across the untamed frontier to provide
youngsters with an education, and the numbers grew rapidly in the
decades to come, as women took advantage of one of the few career
opportunities for respectable work for ladies of the era. Enduring
hardship, the dozen women whose stories are movingly told in the
pages of Frontier Teachers demonstrated the utmost dedication and
sacrifice necessary to bring formal education to the Wild West. As
immortalized in works of art and literature, for many students
their women teachers were heroic figures who introduced them to a
world of possibilities—and changed America forever.
Through an array of detailed case studies, this book explores the
vibrant digital expressions of diverse groups of Muslim cybernauts:
religious clerics and Sufis, feminists and fashionistas, artists
and activists, hajj pilgrims and social media influencers. These
stories span a vast cultural and geographic landscape—from
Indonesia, Iran, and the Arab Middle East to North America. These
granular case studies contextualize cyber Islam within broader
social trends: racism and Islamophobia, gender dynamics, celebrity
culture, identity politics, and the shifting terrain of
contemporary religious piety and practice. The book’s authors
examine an expansive range of digital multimedia technologies as
primary “texts.” These include websites, podcasts, blogs,
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube channels, online magazines
and discussion forums, and religious apps. The contributors also
draw on a range of methodological and theoretical models from
multiple academic disciplines, including communication and media
studies, anthropology, history, global studies, religious studies,
and Islamic studies.
In 1884, twenty-three-year-old Corabelle Fellows left her family in
Washington, DC, and journeyed out West to teach Native children in
Nebraska and Dakota Territory. She hoped her missionary work would
improve the lives of the Dakota and Lakota Sioux people by helping
them assimilate into white culture, following the predominant
government policy at the time. But after years of living among the
Native people, it was Cora's perceptions of life, love, and faith
that were transformed. It began with her friendship with Elizabeth
Winyan, a remarkable Dakota woman who was a model of strength,
compassion, and adaptability among her people. Winyan became a
maternal figure for Cora in the strange land so far from the
"civilized" city. She even saved Cora from being married against
her will. Then Cora met Sam Campbell, a man from Scottish and Sioux
stock. They fell in love and were married, though the match made
national headlines after Cora's family disowned her. The couple
struggled to find a place in the American frontier, straddling two
worlds. For years their marriage was grist for the yellow press,
and they became a sensational national story that led them to a
brief stint as a sideshow attraction for traveling exhibitions and
dime museums to support themselves. They would never live happily
ever after, and the couple was plagued by racist rhetoric and
sexist slander even after their divorce. Life Painted Red details
Cora's experiences from her Washington, DC, exodus to her years
living among the Sioux, and her scandalous, short-lived marriage to
Sam Campbell.
Intergenerational conflict is a perennial feature of society and
capitalism. One side has the youth, the other side has the lion's
share of the wealth, and the good things wealth can bring. In the
last few years that friction has reached to dangerous heights. Call
it war. And, like all war, it has the risk of doing severe damage.
In this fiery polemic the author of the best-selling The War on the
Old has switched sides, and now examines the conflict as it must
appear to the young. For the first time since the Second World War,
younger generations can expect less fulfilled lives than their
elders. They may not be their `betters', but in the second decade
of the twenty-first century they surely are better heeled.
Traditionally society's way of controlling the young has been to
send them off to war, or conscript them. They would either die, or
learn `duty'. Now we send as many as 50% to university, from which
they emerge encumbered with debt. As Orwell observed, there is
nothing like debt for extinguishing the political fire in your
belly. The War on the Young is lively, provocative and ranges
wittily, and at times angrily, over many casus belli from the
standpoint of the nation's young people. Things are not getting
better. This is a timely and highly readable look at a ticking
generational time-bomb.
The texts gathered in this volume embrace women artists-only
exhibitions, festivals, collective art projects, groups and
associations, organised in the long 1970s in Europe (1968-1984).
These all-women art initiatives are closely related to developments
within the political and politicized women's movement in Europe and
America but what emerges is the varied and plural manner of their
engagements with feminism(s) alongside their creation of
`heterotopias' in relation to specific sites/ politics/
collaborative art practices. This book presents examples from
Italy, Spain, UK, Portugal, Austria, Poland, Denmark, Germany (East
and West), The Netherlands, France and Sweden. While each chapter
is largely devoted to one country, the authors point to how the
local and specific political situation in which these initiatives
emerged is linked to global tendencies as well as inter-European
exchanges. Each chapter of this book thus assesses the impact of
travelling views of feminism, by considering connections made
between women artists (often when travelling abroad) or their
knowledge of art practices from abroad. Distinct and highly varied
attitudes towards political activism (from strong engagement to a
clearly pronounced distance and even hostility) are shown in each
essay and, what is more, they are shown as based on radically
different premises about feminism, politics and art.
For Profit and For Good opens up for critical examination a sector
of higher education that surprisingly is rarely scrutinized in
depth: the corporate institutions that have made up the fastest
growing sector of US higher education in this century. It explores
in detail the development of one such institution, Walden
University, from its emergence out of the social turmoil and
progressive education movement of the 1960s, through the succeeding
decades, characterized by changes on every front. It looks frankly
at the impact of these forces on the university's original mission
and describes the university's response to them. It investigates
the idea of whether the resources and incentives of being
for-profit have changed higher education in a way that benefits not
only investors but also learners, their workplaces, and the larger
community. Business models of management, technological
developments, and changes in an ever-evolving society are issues
every university faces and seeing how this institution grappled
with them will be instructive. Fundamentally, this book addresses
the essential ethical question of whether the for-profit sector in
higher education adds value, and, if so, what that added value
might be. This book will be of interest to researchers and students
of the history of education, alternatives in higher education, the
economics of education, education administration, reform and new
developments in higher education, online learning, and policy
studies in education. It is also relevant for policy makers and
other managers in edubusiness.
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