The book provides a contemporary foundation in designing social impact games. It is structured in 3 parts: understanding, application, and implementation. The book serves as a guide to designing social impact games, particularly focused on the needs of, media professionals, indie game designers and college students. It serves as a guide for people looking to create social impact play, informed by heuristics in game design. Key Features Provides contemporary guide on the use of games to create social impact for beginner to intermediate practitioners o Provides design and implementation strategies for social impact games Provides wide ranging case studies in social impact games Provides professional advice from multiple social impact industry practitioners via sidebar interviews, quotes, and postmortems Provides a quick start guide on creating a variety of social impact engagements across a wide variety of subjects and aims

In recent years, computer games have moved from the margins of popular culture to its center. Reviews of new games and profiles of game designers now regularly appear in the New York Times and the New Yorker, and sales figures for games are reported alongside those of books, music, and movies. They are increasingly used for purposes other than entertainment, yet debates about videogames still fork along one of two paths: accusations of debasement through violence and isolation or defensive paeans to their potential as serious cultural works. In How to Do Things with Videogames, Ian Bogost contends that such generalizations obscure the limitless possibilities offered by the medium’s ability to create complex simulated realities. Bogost, a leading scholar of videogames and an award-winning game designer, explores the many ways computer games are used today: documenting important historical and cultural events; educating both children and adults; promoting commercial products; and serving as platforms for art, pornography, exercise, relaxation, pranks, and politics. Examining these applications in a series of short, inviting, and provocative essays, he argues that together they make the medium broader, richer, and more relevant to a wider audience. Bogost concludes that as videogames become ever more enmeshed with contemporary life, the idea of gamers as social identities will become obsolete, giving rise to gaming by the masses. But until games are understood to have valid applications across the cultural spectrum, their true potential will remain unrealized. How to Do Things with Videogames offers a fresh starting point to more fully consider games’ progress today and promise for the future.

'Will Storr is one of our best journalists of ideas ... The Status Game might be his best yet' James Marriott, Books of the Year, The Times What drives our political and moral beliefs? What makes us like some things and dislike others? What shapes how we behave, and misbehave, in groups? What makes you, you? For centuries, philosophers and scholars have described human behaviour in terms of sex, power and money. In The Status Game, bestselling author Will Storr radically turns this thinking on its head by arguing that it is our irrepressible craving for status that ultimately defines who we are. From the era of the hunter-gatherer to today, when we exist as workers in the globalised economy and citizens of online worlds, the need for status has always been wired into us. A wealth of research shows that how much of it we possess dramatically affects not only our happiness and wellbeing but also our physical health - and without sufficient status, we become more ill, and live shorter lives. It's an unconscious obsession that drives the best and worst of us: our innovation, arts and civilisation as well as our murders, wars and genocides. But why is status such an all-consuming prize? What happens if it's taken away from us? And how can our unquenchable thirst for it explain cults, moral panics, conspiracy theories, the rise of social media and the 'culture wars' of today? On a breathtaking journey through time and culture, The Status Game offers a sweeping rethink of human psychology that will change how you see others - and how you see yourself.

Did you know that games can be a terrifically effective way to build team spirit, communication, and trust among people who work together day in and day out? Now you can spark morale in any work group by choosing from 70 stimulating games and activities specifically designed for the manager who's looking to raise sagging morale in a department, liven up boring staff meetings, enable team members to collaborate smoothly and effectively, and much more!

WOULD YOU KILL ONE PERSON TO SAVE FIVE OTHERS? If you could upload all of your memories into a machine, would that machine be you? Is it possible we're all already artificial intelligences, living inside a simulation? These sound like questions from a philosophy class, but in fact they're from modern, popular video games. Philosophical discussion often uses thought experiments to consider ideas that we can't test in real life, and media like books, films, and games can make these thought experiments far more accessible to a non-academic audience. Thanks to their interactive nature, video games can be especially effective ways to explore these ideas. Each chapter of this book introduces a philosophical topic through discussion of relevant video games, with interviews with game creators and expert philosophers. In ten chapters, this book demonstrates how video games can help us to consider the following questions: 1. Why do video games make for good thought experiments? (From the ethical dilemmas of the Mass Effect series to 'philosophy games'.) 2. What can we actually know? (From why Phoenix Wright is right for the wrong reasons to whether No Man's Sky is a lie.) 3. Is virtual reality a kind of reality? (On whether VR headsets like the Oculus Rift, PlayStation VR, and HTC Vive deal in mass-market hallucination.) 4. What constitutes a mind? (From the souls of Beyond: Two Souls to the synths of Fallout 4.) 5. What can you lose before you're no longer yourself? (Identity crises in the likes of The Swapper and BioShock Infinite.) 6. Does it mean anything to say we have choice? (Determinism and free will in Bioshock, Portal 2 and Deus Ex.) 7. What does it mean to be a good or dutiful person? (Virtue ethics in the Ultima series and duty ethics in Planescape: Torment.) 8. Is there anything better in life than to be happy? (Utilitarianism in Bioshock 2 and Harvest Moon.) 10. How should we be governed, for whom and by who? (Government and rights in Eve Online, Crusader Kings, Democracy 3 and Fable 3.) 11. Is it ever right to take another life? And how do we cope with our own death? (The Harm Thesis and the good death in To The Moon and Lost Odyssey.)

"An unholy mixture of helpful guidebook and jabbing provocation, [THINGS WE THINK ABOUT GAMES] will earn its right to rattle around your brain. It is essential reading for designer, critic, and straight-up rank 'n' file gamer alike." ¿Robin D. Laws, creator of HeroQuest and Feng ShuiWill Hindmarch and Jeff Tidball think a lot about games. At their commentary website, Gameplaywright.net, they think out loud about what it means to play games, make games, sell games, and love games. They are gamers.Here, with fellow game designers and notable game players, they think out loud on paper in the first Gameplaywright book.THINGS WE THINK ABOUT GAMES collects dozens on dozens of bite-sized thoughts about games. From the absurd to the magnificent, the demonstrable to the dogmatic, this collection spans both the breadth of games¿board, card, roleplaying and more¿and the depth of gaming, offering insights about collecting, playing, critiquing, designing, and publishing.

“McGonigal is a clear, methodical writer, and her ideas are well argued. Assertions are backed by countless psychological studies.” —The Boston Globe “Powerful and provocative . . . McGonigal makes a persuasive case that games have a lot to teach us about how to make our lives, and the world, better.” —San Jose Mercury News “Jane McGonigal's insights have the elegant, compact, deadly simplicity of plutonium, and the same explosive force.” —Cory Doctorow, author of Little Brother A visionary game designer reveals how we can harness the power of games to boost global happiness. With 174 million gamers in the United States alone, we now live in a world where every generation will be a gamer generation. But why, Jane McGonigal asks, should games be used for escapist entertainment alone? In this groundbreaking book, she shows how we can leverage the power of games to fix what is wrong with the real world-from social problems like depression and obesity to global issues like poverty and climate change-and introduces us to cutting-edge games that are already changing the business, education, and nonprofit worlds. Written for gamers and non-gamers alike, Reality Is Broken shows that the future will belong to those who can understand, design, and play games. Jane McGonigal is also the author of SuperBetter: A Revolutionary Approach to Getting Stronger, Happier, Braver and More Resilient.