In this groundbreaking book, Keith Law, baseball writer for The Athletic and author of the acclaimed Smart Baseball, offers an era-spanning dissection of some of the best and worst decisions in modern baseball, explaining what motivated them, what can be learned from them, and how their legacy has shaped the game. For years, Daniel Kahneman’s iconic work of behavioral science Thinking Fast and Slow has been required reading in front offices across Major League Baseball. In this smart, incisive, and eye-opening book, Keith Law applies Kahneman’s ideas about decision making to the game itself. Baseball is a sport of decisions. Some are so small and routine they become the building blocks of the game itself—what pitch to throw or when to swing away. Others are so huge they dictate the future of franchises—when to make a strategic trade for a chance to win now, or when to offer a millions and a multi-year contract for a twenty-eight-year-old star. These decisions have long shaped the behavior of players, managers, and entire franchises. But as those choices have become more complex and data-driven, knowing what’s behind them has become key to understanding the sport. This fascinating, revelatory work explores as never before the essential question: What were they thinking? Combining behavioral science and interviews with executives, managers, and players, Keith Law analyzes baseball’s biggest decision making successes and failures, looking at how gambles and calculated risks of all sizes and scales have shaped the sport, and how the game’s ongoing data revolution is rewriting decades of accepted decision making. In the process, he explores questions that have long been debated, from whether throwing harder really increases a player’s risk of serious injury to whether teams actually “overvalue” trade prospects. Bringing his analytical and combative style to some of baseball’s longest running debates, Law deepens our knowledge of the sport in this entertaining work that is both fun and deeply informative.

Videogames are the fastest growing form of popular culture ever. These in-depth interviews with today's leading designers reveal the creative process behind games design and cover a wide range of games, including handheld and online. Full of colour artwork and practical advice, the book includes process sketches from the production period, studio photos, a detailed glossary and a comprehensive ludography.

Program 3D Games in C++: The #1 Language at Top Game Studios Worldwide C++ remains the key language at many leading game development studios. Since it’s used throughout their enormous code bases, studios use it to maintain and improve their games, and look for it constantly when hiring new developers. Game Programming in C++ is a practical, hands-on approach to programming 3D video games in C++. Modeled on Sanjay Madhav’s game programming courses at USC, it’s fun, easy, practical, hands-on, and complete. Step by step, you’ll learn to use C++ in all facets of real-world game programming, including 2D and 3D graphics, physics, AI, audio, user interfaces, and much more. You’ll hone real-world skills through practical exercises, and deepen your expertise through start-to-finish projects that grow in complexity as you build your skills. Throughout, Madhav pays special attention to demystifying the math that all professional game developers need to know. Set up your C++ development tools quickly, and get started Implement basic 2D graphics, game updates, vectors, and game physics Build more intelligent games with widely used AI algorithms Implement 3D graphics with OpenGL, shaders, matrices, and transformations Integrate and mix audio, including 3D positional audio Detect collisions of objects in a 3D environment Efficiently respond to player input Build user interfaces, including Head-Up Displays (HUDs) Improve graphics quality with anisotropic filtering and deferred shading Load and save levels and binary game data Whether you’re a working developer or a student with prior knowledge of C++ and data structures, Game Programming in C++ will prepare you to solve real problems with C++ in roles throughout the game development lifecycle. You’ll master the language that top studios are hiring for—and that’s a proven route to success.

Despite the constant changes in contemporary popular media, the horror genre retains its attraction for audiences of all backgrounds. This edited collection explores modern representations of gender in horror and how this factors into the genre's appeal.

The first-of-its-kind, Games and Gaming in Medieval Literature explores the depth and breadth of games in medieval literature and culture. Chapters span from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, and cover England, France, Denmark, Poland, and Spain, re-examining medieval games in diverse social settings such as the church, court, and household.

From its earliest days as little more than a series of monophonic outbursts to its current-day scores that can rival major symphonic film scores, video game music has gone through its own particular set of stylistic and functional metamorphoses while both borrowing and recontextualizing the earlier models from which it borrows. With topics ranging from early classics like Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros. to more recent hits like Plants vs. Zombies, the eleven essays in Music in Video Games draw on the scholarly fields of musicology and music theory, film theory, and game studies, to investigate the history, function, style, and conventions of video game music.

The Paradox of Transgression in Games looks at transgressive games as an aesthetic experience, tackling how players respond to game content that shocks, disturbs, and distresses, and how contemporary video games can evoke intense emotional reactions. The book delves into the commercial success of many controversial videogames: although such games may appear shocking for the observing bystander, playing them is experienced as deeply rewarding for the player. Drawing on qualitative player studies and approaches from media aesthetics theory, the book challenges the perception of games as innocent entertainment, and examines the range of emotional, moral, and intellectual experiences of players. As they explore what players consider transgressive, the authors ask whether there is something about the gameplay situation that works to mitigate the sense of transgression, stressing gameplay as an aesthetic experience. Anchoring the aesthetic game experience both in play studies as well as in aesthetic theory, this book will be an essential resource for scholars and students of game studies, aesthetics, media studies, philosophy of art, and emotions.

This edited volume provides a comprehensive overview of contemporary research into the application of digital games in second and foreign language teaching and learning. As the use of digital games in foreign language education continues to expand, there is a need for publications that provide a window into recent innovations in this increasingly influential area of language education. This volume is wide ranging in scope incorporating both theory and practice and includes contributions from authorities in the field. Areas covered include research reviews and a range of case studies conducted in a variety of international contexts. This volume represents an essential guide to developments in this field and will have wide appeal to students, language educators, game and instructional designers.