The definitive work on the language of baseball—one of the “Five Best Baseball Books” (Wall Street Journal). Hailed as “a staggering piece of scholarship” (Wall Street Journal) and “an indispensable guide to the language of baseball” (San Diego Union-Tribune), The Dickson Baseball Dictionary has become an invaluable resource for those who love the game. Drawing on dozens of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century periodicals, as well as contemporary sources, Dickson’s brilliant, illuminating definitions trace the earliest appearances of terms both well known and obscure. This edition includes more than 10,000 terms with 18,000 individual entries, and more than 250 photos. This “impressively comprehensive” (The Nation) book will delight everyone from the youngest fan to the hard-core aficionado.

ACCT3 Management is the Asia-Pacific edition of the proven 4LTR press approach to management accounting, designed to enhance students’ learning experiences. The text is for teaching students learning the preparers/debits and credits approach and is presented in an easy-to-read and accessible style. This third edition includes a strong suite of student and instructor resources that enhance student learning and revision. New, print versions of this book come with bonus online study tools on the CourseMate Express platform Learn more about the online tools cengage.com.au/learning-solutions

An unexpected take on how games work, what the stakes are for them, and how game designers can avoid the traps of optimization. The process of optimization in games seems like a good thing—who wouldn’t want to find the most efficient way to play and win? As Christopher Paul argues in Optimizing Play, however, optimization can sometimes risk a tragedy of the commons, where actions that are good for individuals jeopardize the overall state of the game for everyone else. As he explains, players inadvertently limit play as they theorycraft, seeking optimal choices. The process of developing a meta, or the most effective tactic available, structures decision making, causing play to stagnate. A “stale” meta then creates a perception that a game is solved and may lead players to turn away from the game. Drawing on insights from game studies, rhetoric, the history of science, ecology, and game theory literature, Paul explores the problem of optimization in a range of video games, including Overwatch, FIFA/EA Sports FC, NBA 2K, Clash Royale, World of Warcraft, and League of Legends. He also pulls extensively from data analytics in sports, where the problem has progressed further and is even more intractable than it is in video games, given the money sports teams invest to find an edge. Finally, Paul offers concrete and specific suggestions for how games can be developed to avoid the trap set by optimization run amok.

Tennis is the second biggest sport for in-play turnover in the betting markets. It offers fantastic potential for educated, professional traders to achieve high levels of profits. Mastering Tennis Trading gives you the tools to take a calm, strategic approach to tennis trading - in contrast to the emotional, impulsive trading style of many - and this will give you an edge in the markets. You will learn tennis trading strategies for the in-play markets on the online betting exchanges - the largest of which are Betfair and Betdaq. The strategies presented will open your eyes to the possibilities in the in-play tennis markets and help you to add statistically-proven techniques to your trading armoury. This will give you a professional, organised trading script and prevent you from taking a haphazard, impulsive and purely gambling trading approach. Strategies featured include: - Backing the favourite when losing - Backing the server - Laying bad servers - Tiebreak trading - At the end of the first set - The deciding set - And many more! Guidance is given on basic areas such as a trading set-up and how to avoid technological issues, through to more advanced subjects such as assessing which trading strategies work best and which entry points provide the best risk/reward ratios, as well as avoiding specific danger points which will help to eradicate costly losses. There are also statistics, compiled over many hours, that reveal high-odds trading opportunities. With the help of Dan Weston, you will be able to improve your tennis enough to earn you a part-time income, or to eventually allow you to turn full-time once you have gained enough experience. You'll soon be on course to master tennis trading.

Offers an innovative approach to teaching and coaching sport that combines contemporary theory with the experience of practical and reflective work in real sport environments. It covers a wide range of team and individual sports, including archery, table tennis, flag football, skiing, cricket and track and field.

This third edition now covers all school age groups from primary to secondary. It shows teachers how to make the switch from using a traditional games teaching approach to a tactical one using detailed unit and lesson plans, a DVD-ROM with video clips, reproducible elements and a standards-linked performance assessment system.

Inside the Video Game Industry offers a provocative look into one of today's most dynamic and creative businesses. Through in-depth structured interviews, industry professionals discuss their roles, providing invaluable insight into game programming, art, animation, design, production, quality assurance, audio and business professions. From hiring and firing conventions, attitudes about gender disparity, goals for work-life balance, and a span of legal, psychological, and communal intellectual property protection mechanisms, the book's combination of accessible industry talk and incisive thematic overviews is ideal for anyone interested in games as a global industry, a site of cultural study, or a prospective career path. Designed for researchers, educators, and students, this book provides a critical perspective on an often opaque business and its highly mobile workforce. Additional teaching materials, including activities and study questions, can be found at https://www.routledge.com/9780415828284.

A comprehensive and up-to-date investigation of what research shows about the educational value of computer games for learning. Many strong claims are made for the educational value of computer games, but there is a need for systematic examination of the research evidence that might support such claims. This book fills that need by providing, a comprehensive and up-to-date investigation of what research shows about learning with computer games. Computer Games for Learning describes three genres of game research: the value-added approach, which compares the learning outcomes of students who learn with a base version of a game to those of students who learn with the base version plus an additional feature; the cognitive consequences approach, which compares learning outcomes of students who play an off-the-shelf computer game for extended periods to those of students who do not; and the media comparative approach, which compares the learning outcomes of students who learn material by playing a game to those of students who learn the same material using conventional media. After introductory chapters that describe the rationale and goals of learning game research as well as the relevance of cognitive science to learning with games, the book offers examples of research in all three genres conducted by the author and his colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara; meta-analyses of published research; and suggestions for future research in the field. The book is essential reading for researchers and students of educational games, instructional designers, learning-game developers, and anyone who wants to know what the research has to say about the educational effectiveness of computer games.

Learn Game Design, Prototyping, and Programming with Today’s Leading Tools: Unity™ and C# Award-winning game designer and professor Jeremy Gibson has spent the last decade teaching game design and working as an independent game developer. Over the years, his most successful students have always been those who effectively combined game design theory, concrete rapid-prototyping practices, and programming skills. Introduction to Game Design, Prototyping, and Development is the first time that all three of these disciplines have been brought together into a single book. It is a distillation of everything that Gibson has learned teaching hundreds of game designers and developers in his years at the #1 university games program in North America. It fully integrates the disciplines of game design and computer programming and helps you master the crucial practice of iterative prototyping using Unity. As the top game engine for cross-platform game development, Unity allows you to write a game once and deliver it to everything from Windows, OS X, and Linux applications to webpages and all of the most popular mobile platforms. If you want to develop games, you need strong experience with modern best practices and professional tools. There’s no substitute. There’s no shortcut. But you can get what you need in this book. COVERAGE INCLUDES In-depth tutorials for eight different game prototypes Developing new game design concepts Moving quickly from design concepts to working digital prototypes Improving your designs through rapid iteration Playtesting your games and interpreting the feedback that you receive Tuning games to get the right “game balance” and “game feel” Developing with Unity, today’s best engine for independent game development Learning C# the right way Using Agile and Scrum to efficiently organize your game design and development process Debugging your game code Getting into the highly competitive, fast-changing game industry