Play Development

Game development isn't just about ideas and creativity. It's about survival. It's about turning your vision into a product that retains, monetizes, and scales—without burning out your team or going broke. The Game Product Management Handbook gives you the real-world systems, mental models, and growth frameworks used inside studios that ship and scale. No fluff. No theory. Just tactics forged through 16 years of painful pivots, missed payrolls, and unexpected wins.

In this book, Greg Bottrill explores how he ensures that, in his Early Years setting, continuous provision enables children. He shares his Early Years pedagogy through the "3Ms" and explains how to apply these in the classroom. Greg also explores the definition of play - what it is and what it isn’t - and the challenging role of the Early Years teacher.

The simple way to help your kids face their fears, handle big emotions, and bolster their social skills—from the New York Times bestselling co-author of The Whole-Brain Child and a renowned play therapist “A parenting guide as useful as it is scientifically sound, The Way of Play is a gift...

Drawing from the philosophy of all-time great Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski that what just happened isn’t nearly as important as what is happening right now—your Next Play—and his work with top brands such as Pepsi, Charles Schwab, American Express, Spotify, and Starbucks, this book contains 34 powerfully simple strategies and 35 practical exercises designed to show how reaching the top of your game doesn’t require more. It requires less but better.

Often, we treat games like work. We buy shelves of thick books. We plan detailed adventures. We memorize rules. In Play Unsafe, Graham Walmsley explores what happens when you throw the serious stuff away: when you stop working, stop planning and start playing. This book explains how to make role-playing less like work and more like play; stop killing other players' ideas and build on them instead; and put stories at the heart of your game.

Baffling and beloved, with the capacity to go from joy to frustration in seconds, young children are some of the most misunderstood people on the planet. Parents and caregivers struggle with these little ones, who are known for their extreme behaviour, from tantrums, resistance, and aggression to separation anxiety, bedtime protests, and not listening. The key to understanding youngsters lies in realizing that their challenging behaviour is not personal, nor is it a disorder or deficit.

The new way to transform a sales culture with clarity, authenticity, and emotional intelligence. Too often, the sales process is all about fear. Customers are afraid that they will be talked into making a mistake; salespeople dread being unable to close the deal and make their quotas. No one is...

Middle childhood, the period for those aged 8–12 years old, is often the most overlooked phase of a child’s development, but it’s the age where play continues to serve an important role in their emotional growth. It’s also an age where we are most likely to stop playing with our children. With over 20 years of clinical expertise and neuroscientific research, psychotherapist and parenting expert Joanna Fortune shares her proven techniques that will enable you to better understand your relationship with your children as they grow.

Explore how the principles of theatre and improv can help parents engage in imaginative play with their children with actor and theater teacher Christopher Mannino.

Told from the viewpoint of a self-described competition junkie, Compete, Play, Win is a look at the psychology behind the competitive drive, a look at the sociological ramifications of acting on competitive impulses, and a book of advice on how to channel those impulses for personal gain in business, sport, and in life.

What if your biggest risk in life is playing it safe? In Never Play It Safe, bestselling author, award-winning photographer, and founder of CreativeLive, Chase Jarvis, reveals that safety is an illusion—a comforting lie that’s holding you back from true fulfillment and extraordinary success...

Raise calmer, more confident kids—and feel steadier as the adult they rely on. This practical collection pairs play therapy activities with science-backed tools for emotional regulation so you can reduce meltdowns, end power struggles faster, and deepen connection at home, in therapy, or in the classroom.

In Love, Learn, Play, Akhil Gupta—a former driver equity leader turned global seeker—offers radical yet deeply intuitive solution: real well-being arises when we engage our deepest human longings to love to learn and to play in whatever we do. Drawing from his remarkable journey—from global finance to Harvard classrooms—Gupta explores how ancient wisdom and modern science point to three essential forces that lead to true well-being: love, learning, and play. These are not luxuries, he argues, but our deepest human needs.

Play is important. Play is a fundamental human need. Play can improve every area of a person’s life. But are you really getting enough real play? It’s time to explore The Play Paradigm. This breakthrough book will help you understand and re-define your relationship with play. This has the potential to transform your life, work, relationships, and overall levels of success and happiness.

Play is the language of children. It is how they communicate. By rediscovering the joy of play as an adult, you can access a whole new way to understand and respond to your child’s needs. Created with busy parents in mind, psychotherapist and parenting expert Joanna Fortune has devised a simple but effective method to build quality playful time together at home, structured around 15-minute games that can be easily incorporated into your existing daily routine.

Play is how children explore, discover, fail, succeed, socialize, and flourish. It is a fundamental element of the human condition. It's the key to giving schoolchildren skills they need to succeed. Expert organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Centers for Disease Control agree that play and physical activity are critical foundations of childhood, academics, and future skills - yet politicians are destroying play in childhood education.

For nearly 25 years, Dr. Kim Van Dusen—a licensed family therapist, registered play therapist, creator of The Parentologist blog, and mom of two—has provided parents with practical, effective ways to transform their parent-child communication by learning to speak in a way kids can understand: the universal language of play. In this pioneering guide, Dr. Kim shares her solution-focused strategies designed to meet kids where they are and elicit positive behaviors.

Reclaim Play delivers an inspiring manifesto on why play is critical for children and a comprehensive how-to for parents to bring back the magic of childhood. Unlock the boundless creativity, imagination, and profound learning that flourish when children immerse themselves in independent play. The narrative of childhood has been rewritten over the past two decades. Play, once synonymous with childhood, has seen a worrying decline, paralleled by a concerning upsurge in children's mental health issues, such as anxiety and depression.

Huddle Up is Jim Stroker's true story of loss, love, and resilience built around one life-changing idea: E + R = O — Event + Response = Outcome. When Jim Stroker was nine, his father died suddenly. His mother, Virginia, became the family’s coach, teaching her sons that while they couldn’t control events, they could always choose their response. She filled their home with handwritten lessons: “Life is what you make it.” Through sports metaphors, parables, and humor, she taught grit, gratitude, and Amor Fati—the love of fate. Her motto: “Don’t play it safe. Swing the bat.

The Game of Life and How to Play It, published in 1925, teaches the philosophies of its author, Florence Scovel Shinn. The book holds that ignorance of, or carelessness with the application of various 'Laws of Metaphysics' can bring about undesirable life events. By studying and practicing the principles laid down in this book, one may find prosperity, solve problems, have better health, achieve personal relations-in a word, win the game of life. The world's most celebrated "success" book and guide on how to "Win" in life through positive attitudes and affirmations.