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- Play Story Press is excited to release two books this week!
Play Story Press is excited to release two books this week!
Play Story Press
November 13, 2024
Roll for Learning: 51 Micro Tabletop Role-Playing Games to Use in the Classroom, edited by Camilla Zamboni, Matthew Farber, and William Merchant.
Roll for Learning is a curated collection of original micro tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs). Micro TTRPGs have grown in popularity in recent years, particularly in the game jam space, and offer great potential for classroom use, as these games are intended to be easy to learn and quick to play. Further, TTRPGs are also an emerging field in scholarly texts, so there is a rich literature to draw from when introducing them to instructors.
This volume brings together scholars and instructors working on TTRPGs and game designers with an interest in education. It includes 51 game chapters, each composed of an original micro TTRPG followed by tips for implementation, ideas for assessment, best practice recommendations, and a relevant bibliography—all aligned to learning outcomes for elementary through higher education classrooms.
By focusing on the micro TTRPG model, which is quick to read and easy to implement, this volume creates a space that is at once informed by research, aligned with new trends in the TTRPG world, and welcoming to new interested users. We hope that you will enjoy reading and using Roll for Learning—an educational book you can play!
Virtual Body Language, by Jeffrey Ventrella.
Why does the tail wag the brain? What is virtual autism? Why can’t our avatars walk hand-in-hand? Will a nonverbal Babel fish save the world? Jeffrey Ventrella, a seasoned virtual worlds programmer and visual language expert, reviews the history of avatars, smileys, and other expressive forms, and considers a future of spectacular creativity. This book combines thoughtful scholarship with amusing anecdotes from the trenches of Silicon Valley. Virtual Body Language presents a thorough analysis of the neurological, linguistic, aesthetic, and technical aspects of how nonverbal communication can be distributed over the internet. Based on nearly a decade of avatar development, Ventrella has the practical foundation on which to justify even the most outrageous claims, regarding what “avatar” might mean in the future.