The globalizing influence of professional sports Professional sports today have truly become a global force, a common language that anyone, regardless of their nationality, can understand. Yet sports also remain distinctly local, with regional teams and the fiercely loyal local fans that follow them. This book examines the twenty-first-century phenomenon of global sports, in which professional teams and their players have become agents of globalization while at the same time fostering deep-seated and antagonistic local allegiances and spawning new forms of cultural conflict and prejudice. Andrei Markovits and Lars Rensmann take readers into the exciting global sports scene, showing how soccer, football, baseball, basketball, and hockey have given rise to a collective identity among millions of predominantly male fans in the United States, Europe, and around the rest of the world. They trace how these global—and globalizing—sports emerged from local pastimes in America, Britain, and Canada over the course of the twentieth century, and how regionalism continues to exert its divisive influence in new and potentially explosive ways. Markovits and Rensmann explore the complex interplay between the global and the local in sports today, demonstrating how sports have opened new avenues for dialogue and shared interest internationally even as they reinforce old antagonisms and create new ones. Gaming the World reveals the pervasive influence of sports on our daily lives, making all of us citizens of an increasingly cosmopolitan world while affirming our local, regional, and national identities.

Thirty-nine essays explore the vast diversity of video game history and culture across all the world's continents. Video games have become a global industry, and their history spans dozens of national industries where foreign imports compete with domestic productions, legitimate industry contends with piracy, and national identity faces the global marketplace. This volume describes video game history and culture across every continent, with essays covering areas as disparate and far-flung as Argentina and Thailand, Hungary and Indonesia, Iran and Ireland. Most of the essays are written by natives of the countries they discuss, many of them game designers and founders of game companies, offering distinctively firsthand perspectives. Some of these national histories appear for the first time in English, and some for the first time in any language. Readers will learn, for example, about the rapid growth of mobile games in Africa; how a meat-packing company held the rights to import the Atari VCS 2600 into Mexico; and how the Indonesian MMORPG Nusantara Online reflects that country's cultural history and folklore. Every country or region's unique conditions provide the context that shapes its national industry; for example, the long history of computer science in the United Kingdom and Scandinavia, the problems of piracy in China, the PC Bangs of South Korea, or the Dutch industry's emphasis on serious games. As these essays demonstrate, local innovation and diversification thrive alongside productions and corporations with global aspirations. Africa • Arab World • Argentina • Australia • Austria • Brazil • Canada • China • Colombia • Czech Republic • Finland • France • Germany • Hong Kong • Hungary • India • Indonesia • Iran • Ireland • Italy • Japan • Mexico • The Netherlands • New Zealand • Peru • Poland • Portugal • Russia • Scandinavia • Singapore • South Korea • Spain • Switzerland • Thailand • Turkey • United Kingdom • United States of America • Uruguay • Venezuela

This is a profound look at learning, language, and literacy. It is also about brains and bodies. And it is about talk, texts, media, and society. These topics, though usually studied in different narrow academic silos, are all part of one highly interactive process—human development. Gee argues that children will need to be resilient, imaginative, hopeful, and deliberate learners to survive the deeply complex and unpredictable world in which they live. In a world beset by conflicting ideologies that give rise to hatred, violence, and war, Gee urges us to look to a broader set of ideas from seemingly unrelated disciplines for a viable vision of education. This book proposes a framework of principles that can be used to reconceptualize education, specifically literacy education, to better prepare students to be collaborators toward peace and sustainability. Book Features: Offers a new set of ideas about literacy, learning, and human development in a risk-laden, digitally driven modern world. Uses recent breakthroughs in research on brains, bodies, society, identity, and teaching and learning in and out of school. Stresses the importance of human growth and development to a more peaceful and equitable world.

Audisee® eBooks with Audio combine professional narration and sentence highlighting for an engaging read aloud experience! Just how dedicated can gamers be? Video games inspire people to write fan fiction, draw characters, and even dress up in costume to act out video game scenes. Read this book and dive into gaming culture. Whether you like to read comics, write stories, perform in plays, make music, create movies, or dress up in wacky outfits, video gaming culture has got something for everyone!

Internet Gaming Disorder: Theory, Assessment, Treatment, and Prevention is an informative and practical introduction to the topics of Internet gaming disorder and problematic gaming. This book provides mental health clinicians with hands-on assessment, prevention, and treatment techniques for clients with problematic gaming behaviors and Internet gaming disorder. It provides an overview of the existing research on epidemiology, risk and protective factors, and discusses the distinct cognitive features that distinguish gaming from gambling and other related activities and disorders. Clinicians will find interest in discussion of the latest developments in cognitive-behavioral approaches to gaming disorder as well as the best structure for clinical interviews. Included in clinical sections are details of the key indicators of harm and impairment associated with problem gaming and how these might present in clinical cases. Internet Gaming Disorder is strongly evidence-based, draws extensively upon the latest international research literature, and provides insights into the likely future developments in this emerging field both in terms of technological development and new research approaches. Discusses the conceptual basis of Internet gaming disorder as a behavioral addiction Provides screening approaches for measuring excessive gaming Details a structured clinical interview approach for assessing gaming disorder Provides evidence-based clinical strategies for prevention and treatment Covers cognitive behavioral therapy and harm reduction strategies

This book provides a practical approach for applying posthumanist insights to qualitative research inquiry. Adams and Thompson invite readers to embrace their inner – and outer – cyborg as they consider how today’s professional practices and everyday ways of being are increasingly intertwined with digital technologies. Drawing on posthuman scholarship, the authors offer eight heuristics for “interviewing objects” in an effort to reveal the unique – and sometimes contradictory – contributions the digital is making to work, learning and living. The heuristics are drawn from Actor Network Theory, phenomenology, postphenomenology, critical media studies and related sociomaterial approaches. This text offers a theoretically informed yet practical approach for asking critical questions of digital and non-digital things in professional and personal spaces, and ultimately, for considering the ethical and political implications of a technology mediated world. A thought-provoking and innovative study, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of technology studies, digital learning, and sociology.