It’s game time! Press start on Into the Game, the awesome-packed, New York Times bestselling graphic novel adventure by YouTube’s favorite family of gamers, FGTeeV! The FGTeeV family gamers have played hundreds of games together. Which is why Moomy decides to make a new game called My Pet Fish. Just one problem: the game is SUPER boring. And one other problem: Moomy and Duddy accidentally got sucked into it—and now they’re trapped! It’s up to the kids, Lexi, Mike, Chase, and Shawn, to jump into the gaming console and rescue their parents. But first, they have to battle their way through their favorite games until they find the one their parents are stuck in. Can the kids take on a vicious pack of vampire prairie dogs, flying doody diapers, some spooky ghouls, and one incredibly dull fish before Moomy and Duddy are bored to death? Game like never before in this exhilarating graphic novel adventure from YouTube sensation FGTeeV, with more than 11 million subscribers and over 11 billion views!

Humor, wit, and laughter surround each person. From everyday quips to the carefully contrived comedy of literature, newspapers, and television we experience humor in many forms, yet the impetus for our laughter is far from innocuous. Misfortune, stupidity, and moral or cultural defects, however faintly revealed in others and ourselves, seem to make us laugh. Although discomforting, such negative terms as superiority, aggression, hostility, ridicule, or degradation can be applied to instances of humor. According to scholars, Thomas Hobbes's "superiority theory"?that humor arises from mischances, infirmities, and indecencies, where there is no wit at all?applies to most humor. With the exception of good-natured play, Charles R. Gruner claims that humor is rarely as innocent as it first appears.Gruner's proposed superiority theory of humor is all-encompassing. In The Game of Humor, he expands the scope of Hobbes's theory to include and explore the contest aspect of "good-natured" play. As such, the author believes all instances of humor can be examined as games, in terms of competition and keeping score?winners and losers. Gruner draws on a broad spectrum of thought-provoking examples. Holocaust jokes, sexual humor, the racialist dialogue of such comic characters as Stepin Fetchit and Archie Bunker, simple puns, and many of the author's own encounters with everyday humor. Gruner challenges the reader to offer a single example of humor that cannot be "de-humorized" by its agonistic nature.The Game of Humor makes intriguing and enjoyable reading for people interested in humor and the aspects of human motivation. This book will also be valuable to professionals in communication and information studies, sociologists, literary critics and linguists, and psychologists concerned with the conflicts and tensions of everyday life.

This New York Times bestseller offers “slam-dunk lessons in teamwork and character” from the NBA hall of famer and former US senator (People). Bill Bradley, whose varied career highlights include a gold-medal win in the Olympics, two world championship victories with the New York Knicks, and three terms as a US senator from New Jersey, writes here about the game that helped form his philosophies for success in basketball and in life. Each chapter is devoted to a value that is fundamental to Bradley’s vision of a purposeful life: passion, discipline, selflessness, respect, perspective, courage, leadership, responsibility, resilience, and imagination. In each, he illustrates these principles with personal anecdotes and observations, creating a concise philosophical treatise that readers can apply to their own lives. With an introduction by Bradley’s friend and teammate Phil Jackson, this “love letter to basketball . . . is every bit as prescient, thoughtful, and just plain valuable a work as you’d expect from a man who never approaches any task without a full commitment” (The Boston Globe). “Bradley hits nothing but net with Values of the Game. Call it The Book of Virtues meets hardwood.” —USA Today “This may be the single most important present a parent can give a sports-loving child.” —The Dallas Morning News

Classic and cutting-edge writings on games, spanning nearly 50 years of game analysis and criticism, by game designers, game journalists, game fans, folklorists, sociologists, and media theorists. The Game Design Reader is a one-of-a-kind collection on game design and criticism, from classic scholarly essays to cutting-edge case studies. A companion work to Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman's textbook Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, The Game Design Reader is a classroom sourcebook, a reference for working game developers, and a great read for game fans and players. Thirty-two essays by game designers, game critics, game fans, philosophers, anthropologists, media theorists, and others consider fundamental questions: What are games and how are they designed? How do games interact with culture at large? What critical approaches can game designers take to create game stories, game spaces, game communities, and new forms of play? Salen and Zimmerman have collected seminal writings that span 50 years to offer a stunning array of perspectives. Game journalists express the rhythms of game play, sociologists tackle topics such as role-playing in vast virtual worlds, players rant and rave, and game designers describe the sweat and tears of bringing a game to market. Each text acts as a springboard for discussion, a potential class assignment, and a source of inspiration. The book is organized around fourteen topics, from The Player Experience to The Game Design Process, from Games and Narrative to Cultural Representation. Each topic, introduced with a short essay by Salen and Zimmerman, covers ideas and research fundamental to the study of games, and points to relevant texts within the Reader. Visual essays between book sections act as counterpoint to the writings. Like Rules of Play, The Game Design Reader is an intelligent and playful book. An invaluable resource for professionals and a unique introduction for those new to the field, The Game Design Reader is essential reading for anyone who takes games seriously.

This volume puts forth an original theoretical framework, the ludonarrative model, for studying video games which foregrounds the empirical study of the player experience. The book provides a comprehensive introduction to and description of the model, which draws on theoretical frameworks from multimodal discourse analysis, game studies, and social semiotics, and its development out of participant observation and qualitative interviews from the empirical study of a group of players. The volume then applies this approach to shed light on how players’ experiences in a game influence how they understand and make use of game components in order to progress its narrative. The book concludes with a frame by frame analysis of a popular game to demonstrate the model’s principles in action and its subsequent broader applicability to analyzing video game interaction and design. Offering a new way forward for video game research, this volume is key reading for students and scholars in multimodality, discourse analysis, game studies, interactive storytelling, and new media.

Each year, thousands of athletes work hard to excel at their sport, while sacrificing their time in hopes of one day playing professionally. Some make it but many do not. Most often we hear the stories of athletes that have succeeded. However there are many more untold stories of great athletes who did not. Brandon Sweeney shares his story of the setbacks he had to overcome when his dream of going to the NFL was shattered by a career ending injury. It was a long process of readjustment for Brandon but he ultimately discovers his true identity, and God-given purpose. Brandon wrote this book to motivate, inspire and challenge athletes to recognize the importance of preparing for life on and off the field, but ultimately to help others discover their full potential and their God-given purpose beyond the game.