John Sharp – författare

The play-focused, step-by-step guide to creating great game designs

This book offers a play-focused, process-oriented approach for designing games people will love to play. Drawing on a combined 35 years of design and teaching experience, Colleen Macklin and John Sharp link the concepts and elements of play to the practical tasks of game design. Using full-color examples, they reveal how real game designers think and work, and illuminate the amazing expressive potential of great game design.

Focusing on practical details, this book guides you from idea to prototype to playtest and fully realized design. You’ll walk through conceiving and creating a game’s inner workings, including its core actions, themes, and especially its play experience. Step by step, you’ll assemble every component of your “videogame,” creating practically every kind of play: from cooperative to competitive, from chance-based to role-playing, and everything in between.

Macklin and Sharp believe that games are for everyone, and game design is an exciting art form with a nearly unlimited array of styles, forms, and messages. Cutting across traditional platform and genre boundaries, they help you find inspiration wherever it exists.

Games, Design and Play is for all game design students, and for beginning-to-intermediate-level game professionals, especially independent game designers. Bridging the gaps between imagination and production, it will help you craft outstanding designs for incredible play experiences!

Coverage includes:

Your hands-on guide to Visual C# fundamentals with Visual Studio 2022

Expand your expertise—and teach yourself the fundamentals of programming the latest version of Visual C# with Visual Studio 2022. This book provides software developers all the guidance, exercises, and code needed to start building responsive, scalable, cloud-connected applications that can run almost anywhere.

Discover how to:

Reclaiming fun as a meaningful concept for understanding games and play.

“Fun” is somewhat ambiguous. If something is fun, is it pleasant? Entertaining? Silly? A way to trick students into learning? Fun also has baggage—it seems inconsequential, embarrassing, child''s play. In Fun, Taste, & Games, John Sharp and David Thomas reclaim fun as a productive and meaningful tool for understanding and appreciating play and games. They position fun at the heart of the aesthetics of games. As beauty was to art, they argue, fun is to play and games—the aesthetic goal that we measure our experiences and interpretations against.

Sharp and Thomas use this fun-centered aesthetic framework to explore a range of games and game issues—from workplace bingo to Meow Wolf, from basketball to Myst, from the consumer marketplace to Marcel Duchamp. They begin by outlining three elements for understanding the drive, creation, and experience of fun: set-outsideness, ludic forms, and ambiguity. Moving from theory to practice and back again, they explore the complicated relationships among the titular fun, taste, and games. They consider, among other things, the dismissal of fun by game journalists and designers; the seminal but underinfluential game Myst, and how tastes change over time; the shattering of the gamer community in Gamergate; and an aesthetics of play that goes beyond games.

How to confront, embrace, and learn from the unavoidable failures of creative practice; with case studies that range from winemaking to animation.

Failure is an inevitable part of any creative practice. As game designers, John Sharp and Colleen Macklin have grappled with crises of creativity, false starts, and bad outcomes. Their tool for coping with the many varieties of failure: iteration, the cyclical process of conceptualizing, prototyping, testing, and evaluating. Sharp and Macklin have found that failure—often hidden, covered up, a source of embarrassment—is the secret ingredient of iterative creative process. In Iterate, they explain how to fail better.

After laying out the four components of creative practice—intention, outcome, process, and evaluation—Sharp and Macklin describe iterative methods from a wide variety of fields. They show, for example, how Radiolab cohosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich experiment with radio as a storytelling medium; how professional skateboarder Amelia Bródka develops skateboarding tricks through trial and error; and how artistic polymath Miranda July explores human frailty through a variety of media and techniques. Whimsical illustrations tell parallel stories of iteration, as hard-working cartoon figures bake cupcakes, experiment with levitating office chairs, and think outside the box in toothbrush design (“let''s add propellers!”). All, in their various ways, use iteration to transform failure into creative outcomes. With Iterate, Sharp and Macklin offer useful lessons for anyone interested in the creative process.

Case Studies:Allison Tauziet, winemaker; Matthew Maloney, animator; Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, Radiolab cohosts; Wylie Dufresne, chef; Nathalie Pozzi, architect, and Eric Zimmerman, game designer; Andy Milne, jazz musician; Amelia Bródka, skateboarder; Baratunde Thurston, comedian; Cas Holman, toy designer; Miranda July, writer and filmmaker

Study Skills in Education

This series addresses key study skills in the context of education courses, helping students indentify their strenghts and weaknesses, increase their confidence and realise their academic potential. The books are suitable for students on:

- any course of Initial Teacher Training leading to the award of QTS (primary or secondary)

- degree course in Education or Education Studies with or without QTS

- degree courses in Early Years or Early Childhood Studies;

- foundation degrees in Education or any education-related subject discipline

Study Skills in Education

This series addresses key study skills in the context of education courses, helping students indentify their strenghts and weaknesses, increase their confidence and realise their academic potential. The books are suitable for students on:

- any course of Initial Teacher Training leading to the award of QTS (primary or secondary)

- degree course in Education or Education Studies with or without QTS

- degree courses in Early Years or Early Childhood Studies;

- foundation degrees in Education or any education-related subject discipline

Making a Difference: Careers in Health Informatics addresses everyday questions from people interested in working in health informatics. Typically, this includes people who work in health care, computer and technology fields, information science, finance / insurance and related areas. The book aims to tell students about various jobs that exist in the health informatics field, what credentials they need to qualify for those jobs, and a brief description about what people in those roles tend to do every day. As faculty members teaching in a Master of Science in Health Informatics program, the authors say that they are fortunate to have eager, bright, and talented graduate students who are invested in related health informatics areas. This could be their experiences in medicine, nursing, clinical care, software engineering, finance, business, library science, data science, or caregiving. Common questions we hear from our students that may be similar to questions among readers include: ‘what jobs are out there?’, ‘what can I do with this degree?’ or ‘what does a health informatics specialist do?’ This book aims to answer some of these questions with a look into a day in the life of people working in this field.

The book examines career options, roles, and skill sets important in health informatics across 6 related industries. We want readers to realize that their skills and interests can apply in many areas of the field, not exclusively hospitals. This book highlights 6 unique work segments (hospital systems, long term care, health IT / consumer health organizations, government, consulting, and payer / insurance companies) into which readers may look to expand their career opportunities. The hope is that this book will provide insight into career opportunities students and professionals may be qualified for, and interested in, but simply not aware of.

Hiring managers and human resource professionals across the stakeholder groups across the stakeholder groups may also find the book helpful in learning about other roles that may benefit their organizations.

Making a Difference: Careers in Health Informatics addresses everyday questions from people interested in working in health informatics. Typically, this includes people who work in health care, computer and technology fields, information science, finance / insurance and related areas. The book aims to tell students about various jobs that exist in the health informatics field, what credentials they need to qualify for those jobs, and a brief description about what people in those roles tend to do every day. As faculty members teaching in a Master of Science in Health Informatics program, the authors say that they are fortunate to have eager, bright, and talented graduate students who are invested in related health informatics areas. This could be their experiences in medicine, nursing, clinical care, software engineering, finance, business, library science, data science, or caregiving. Common questions we hear from our students that may be similar to questions among readers include: ‘what jobs are out there?’, ‘what can I do with this degree?’ or ‘what does a health informatics specialist do?’ This book aims to answer some of these questions with a look into a day in the life of people working in this field.

The book examines career options, roles, and skill sets important in health informatics across 6 related industries. We want readers to realize that their skills and interests can apply in many areas of the field, not exclusively hospitals. This book highlights 6 unique work segments (hospital systems, long term care, health IT / consumer health organizations, government, consulting, and payer / insurance companies) into which readers may look to expand their career opportunities. The hope is that this book will provide insight into career opportunities students and professionals may be qualified for, and interested in, but simply not aware of.

Hiring managers and human resource professionals across the stakeholder groups across the stakeholder groups may also find the book helpful in learning about other roles that may benefit their organizations.