Game designers, authors, artists, and scholars discuss how roles are played and how stories are created in role-playing games, board games, computer games, interactive fictions, massively multiplayer games, improvisational theater, and other playable media. Games and other playable forms, from interactive fictions to improvisational theater, involve role playing and story-something played and something told. In Second Person, game designers, authors, artists, and scholars examine the different ways in which these two elements work together in tabletop role-playing games (RPGs), computer games, board games, card games, electronic literature, political simulations, locative media, massively multiplayer games, and other forms that invite and structure play. Second Person-so called because in these games and playable media it is you who plays the roles, you for whom the story is being told-first considers tabletop games ranging from Dungeons & Dragons and other RPGs with an explicit social component to Kim Newman's Choose Your Own Adventure-style novel Life's Lottery and its more traditional author-reader interaction. Contributors then examine computer-based playable structures that are designed for solo interaction-for the singular you -including the mainstream hit Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and the genre-defining independent production Facade. Finally, contributors look at the intersection of the social spaces of play and the real world, considering, among other topics, the virtual communities of such Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) as World of Warcraft and the political uses of digital gaming and role-playing techniques (as in The Howard Dean for Iowa Game, the first U.S. presidential campaign game). In engaging essays that range in tone from the informal to the technical, these writers offer a variety of approaches for the examination of an emerging field that includes works as diverse as George R.R. Martin's Wild Cards series and the classic Infocom game Planetfall. Appendixes contain three fully-playable tabletop RPGs that demonstrate some of the variations possible in the form.

Meet Babymouse--the spunky mouse beloved by young readers for more than a decade! Babymouse and her best friend, Wilson, are ready to race! Will they be the first to cross the finish line? This groundbreaking young graphic novel series, full of humor and fun, is a bestseller that’s sold more than three million copies! "Move over, Superman, here comes Babymouse!"—The Chicago Sun-Times Babymouse's big dreams of becoming a race car driver come true when she and her best pal, Wilson, enter the Race of the Century (or at least the school year). But will she and Wilson crash and burn? Or will they cruise to the Winners' Circle? Find out in Babymouse Burns Rubber! DON'T MISS The BIG Adventures of Babymouse: Once Upon a Messy Whisker, the newest, brightest, and BIGGER THAN EVER graphic novel from BABYMOUSE!

"Cyanide and Happiness" collects episodes of the hilarious, dark, and exceedingly irreverent Web-based comic of the same name.

Contains the buds of many of Biskup's recurring characters, themes, and color theories. This volume contains the first one hundred in the series of five hundred business card-sized paintings, reproduced at actual size.

New Green Homes presents the latest innovations in sustainable architecture and design. Projects include 'green' houses, apartments, lofts, and cabins, and explore various aspects of environmentally-friendly design from its ecological and economical benefits to the factors that need to be considered when choosing materials, such as the amount of energy that went into manufacturing the product; its sustainability; the life-expectency of its materials; and, the question of if the materials used can be recycled or safely disposed of if they break down over time. Specific topics covered include climate regulation, drainage systems, and regional planning. Each project contains photographs, floor and aerial plans, as well as detailed drawings that illustrate certain sustainable features revealing how much the parameters of ecological design have expanded in just a few short years. For the environmentally and aesthetically conscious, New Green Homes is as poignant as it is refreshing. It's the perfect resource for homeowners, designers, architects, and all clients interested in creating warm and inviting homes that cause only a fraction of the environmental impact of those created using conventional building methods.