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96 books match the query 'Games & Activities' and 5 start with a

cover of A Library Miscellany

A Library Miscellany

Claire Cock-Starkey

Bodleian Library Publishing, 2018

What can be found in the Vatican’s Secret Archive? How many books did Charles Darwin’s library aboard the Beagle hold? Which library is home to a colony of bats?
            Bursting with potted histories, quirky facts, and enlightening lists, this book explores every aspect of the library, celebrating these remarkable institutions as well as the individuals behind their inspiring collections. From the ancient library at Alexandria to the Library of Congress in Washington DC, and from university libraries to those of humble villages, A Library Miscellany explores institutions both old and new. Opening the door to unusual collections such as herbaria, art libraries, magic libraries, and even the “library of smells,” this book also charts the difficulties of cataloging books deemed to be subversive, heretical, libelous, or obscene.
            Packed with unusual facts and statistics, this is the perfect gift for library enthusiasts, bibliophiles, collectors, and readers everywhere.
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cover of A Museum Miscellany

A Museum Miscellany

Claire Cock-Starkey

Bodleian Library Publishing, 2019

Which are the oldest museums in the world? What is a cabinet of curiosity? What is on the FBI’s list of stolen art?

A Museum Miscellany celebrates the intriguing world of galleries and museums, from national institutions such as the Louvre, the British Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art to niche collections such as the Lawnmower Museum and the Museum of Barbed Wire. Here you will find a cornucopia of museum-related facts, statistics, and lists, covering everything from museum ghosts, dangerous museum objects, and conservation beetles to treasure troves, museum heists and the Museum of London’s fatberg.

Bursting with quirky facts, intriguing statistics, and legendary curators, this book is the perfect gift for museum aficionados and collectors alike. 
 
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cover of American Sweepstakes: How One Small State Bucked the Church, the Feds, and the Mob to Usher in the Lottery Age

American Sweepstakes

How One Small State Bucked the Church, the Feds, and the Mob to Usher in the Lottery Age

Kevin Flynn

University Press of New England, 2015

By 1963 public lotteries—a time-honored if tarnished method of raising revenue for everything from the Roman roads to Washington’s Continental Army—had been outlawed in the United States for seventy years. The only legal gambling in America was found in Nevada, where mob involvement had at first been an open secret, and then revealed as no secret at all. In New Hampshire—a conservative, rural state with no sales tax and persistent problems with funding education—state legislator Larry Pickett had filed a bill to establish a lottery in every legislative session since 1953. To the surprise of many, it won passage a decade later and was signed into law by John King, the state’s first Democratic governor in forty years. American Sweepstakes describes how King assembled an unlikely group of supporters—including a celebrated FBI agent and the staunchly conservative publisher of the state’s leading newspaper—to establish the first state lottery in the nation, paving the way for what is today a $78 billion enterprise. Despite the remonstrations of the Catholic Church, the threat of arrest by the federal government, the strident denunciations of nearly every newspaper editorialist in the country, and the very real fear that the lottery would be co-opted by the mob, eleven thoroughbred racehorses leapt from the gate on September 12, 1964, in the first New Hampshire Sweepstakes, ushering in the lottery age in America.
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cover of Animal Crossing: New Horizons: Can a Game Take Care of Us?

Animal Crossing

New Horizons: Can a Game Take Care of Us?

Noah Wardrip-Fruin

University of Chicago Press, 2025

A moving, personal exploration of what we looked for, and found, in the gaming sensation Animal Crossing during and after the pandemi

Animal Crossing: New Horizons was released on March 20, 2020—just as a pandemic kept many from family, work, restaurants, and the rest of their regularly scheduled lives. At its height, the game averaged one million copies sold per day, as players sought comfort, escape, and a virtual means of connection. In this book, game scholar Noah Wardrip-Fruin, isolated with his family by both lockdown and disability, explores the power of this game and the mixed emotions of a player and a parent trying to make it from one day to the next—while his kids’ obsession with Animal Crossing creates conflicts between them and pushback against family rules.
 
Wardrip-Fruin helps both Animal Crossing fans and newcomers understand the unexpected beneath the game’s surface: like the story of the first Animal Crossing, codesigned by an absent father seeking connection; like the hallmarks of video game manipulation, from “streak” bonuses to game-determined playtimes; like the appeal of endless shopping, in a kind of “safe” capitalism; and, of course, like the character quirks of a raccoon dog, Tom Nook, who provides a world of both safety and strange paternalism.
 
For many, this blockbuster game offered a comforting world compared to a reality of danger. In this first entry in the Replay series, Wardrip-Fruin offers an absorbing investigation of a game’s role in contemporary social life and a book that belongs on the shelf of anyone who loves or is puzzled by this Nintendo sensation.

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cover of Antiracist Futures for Games and Play

Antiracist Futures for Games and Play

TreaAndrea M. Russworm and Soraya Murray, editors

Duke University Press, 2027

The essays in Antiracist Futures for Games and Play show how games are distributive sites of power that can become creative spaces for imagining and modeling alternative futures instead of replicating the dystopian conditions of the here and now. Bringing together game designers, scholars, and industry professionals, the volume examines race, power, and decolonial approaches to games; speculative design interventions; Black resistance and innovation in game history and culture; and how game labs and small studios can be generative sites for futurity. When created and experienced as antiracist interventions, games and play may become tools for challenging oppressive systems and opening liberatory pathways. Together, the pieces in this collection serve as a resounding call to action for the industry by demonstrating how intentional worldbuilding, design principles, and speculative critical practices have the potential to model antiracist futures from which other concrete forms of equity can flow.
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