Brian Upton: The Aesthetic of Play

The Aesthetic of Play


Description

The impulse toward play is very ancient, not only pre-cultural but pre-human; zoologists have identified play behaviors in turtles and in chimpanzees. Games have existed since antiquity; 5,000-year-old board games have been recovered from Egyptian tombs. And yet we still lack a critical language for thinking about play. Game designers are better at answering small questions ("Why is this battle boring?") than big ones ("What does this game mean?"). In this book, the game designer Brian Upton analyzes the experience of play -- how playful activities unfold from moment to moment and how the rules we adopt constrain that unfolding. Drawing on games that range from Monopoly to Dungeons & Dragons to Guitar Hero, Upton develops a framework for understanding play, introducing a set of critical tools that can help us analyze games and game designs and identify ways in which they succeed or fail. Upton also examines the broader epistemological implications of such a framework, exploring the role of play in the construction of meaning and what the existence of play says about the relationship between our thoughts and external reality. He considers the making of meaning in play and in every aspect of human culture, and he draws on findings in pragmatic epistemology, neuroscience, and semiotics to describe how meaning emerges from playful engagement. Upton argues that play can also explain particular aspects of narrative; a play-based interpretive stance, he proposes, can help us understand the structure of books, of music, of theater, of art, and even of the process of critical engagement itself.

Smocking, the venerable English peasant craft dating from the late eighteenth century, was a needle technique originally used to adorn the traditional rural work chemise. Today's needleworkers will welcome this collection of 22 beautiful smocking patterns by noted designer Allyne Holland, as well as an informative discussion of smocking traditions, materials, fabric preparation, stitching techniques, and all the finishing touches. This is the stunning conclusion to Alma Katsu's gripping supernatural trilogy that began with The Taker. 'We had a tangled history, Adair and I. He had been my lover and my teacher, master to my slave. We had literally been prisoners to one another. Somewhere along the way he fell in love with me, but I was too afraid to love him in return. Afraid of his unexplainable powers, and his furious temper. Afraid of what I knew he was capable of and what even he himself didn't know he could do. I The Aesthetic of Play pdf ran away to follow a safer path with a man I could understand. I always knew, however, that my path would one day lead back to Adair...'


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Author: Brian Upton
Number of Pages: 336 pages
Published Date: 02 Jul 2015
Publisher: MIT Press Ltd
Publication Country: Cambridge, Mass., United States
Language: English
ISBN: 9780262028516
Download Link: Click Here
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