Shuffleboard
Shuffleboard, more deck shuffleboard, known as floor shuffleboard, is a game in which players use cues to push weighted discs, sending them gliding down a narrow court, with the purpose of having them come to rest within a marked scoring area. As a more generic term, it refers to the family of shuffleboard-variant games as a whole; the full history of shuffleboard is not known. Though there is some knowledge of its development, its actual origins, the place and date where it was first played, remain a mystery; this uncertainty gives rise to some debate disagreement, about which country can claim to have invented it. However there is no dispute concerning its age as a form of popular amusement, in Europe has a history that goes back over 500 years; the game was played and gambled over by King Henry VIII of England, who prohibited commoners from playing. In its goals and equipment, shuffleboard shares various features with many other games, including air hockey, bocce, croquet and billiards; the ancient shovelboard, about which little is known, appears to have diverged into modern shuffleboard and sjoelen, with the former leading to the development of both table shuffleboard and shove ha'penny.
Today, due to its popularity on cruise ships and in retirement homes because of its low physical fitness requirements, the deck game is associated with the elderly, though it is popular among younger generations. Its miniaturized tabletop variant is popular in bars and pubs. In deck or floor shuffleboard, players use a cue, to push their colored disks, down a court, attempting to place their disks within a marked scoring area at the far end of the court; the disks themselves are of each color belonging to a player or team. The scoring diagram is divided by lines, into six scoring zones, with the following values: 10, 8, 8, 7, 7, 10-off. After 8 disks have been played from one end of the court, the final score values of disks for each player in the scoring zones is assessed: If a disk is within a scoring zone without touching any part of the border-line of the zone, it is good and that zone value is added to the correct player's score for the frame, to the player's total points. Both players good disks are added to their respective scores Players take turns going first during a game, so that the advantageous last shot of a frame alternates between players.
The winner of the game may be the first to reach any total decided upon, or may be the higher score after playing a certain number of frames. There is the'first to 75-points' game. Ties are broken by playing extra frames. In shuffleboard, one tries to score, prevent the opponent from scoring, or both; the basic strategy involves both defense. If it is your turn to shoot first, you are automatically on the defensive, because your opponent has the last shot of the frame. If you put your first shot into the scoring area, your opponent will knock it off, if you score with your second shot, the same will happen, so on until you have used your last shot, your opponent will knock that off and score. To combat this you can use the strategy of blocking and hiding – That is your first shot will be a guard disk shot to a location so that it blocks your opponent from that part of the scoring area that you can still place a good disk. Your second shot will be the one to play into that hiding place you created with your first shot, so your opponent cannot hit you out directly.
Dimensions of a floor shuffleboard court can vary to suit available space, but an official shuffleboard court is 6 feet wide by 39 feet in length plus a 6-foot shooting area at each end. A scoring zone is painted at each end of the court to reduce set-up time between games; each scoring zone comprises an isosceles triangle 6 feet × 9 feet with the short edge away from the shooter. Behind the scoring zone is the 10-off zone, an area 1½ feet deep; the court surface is a uniform dark green. One-inch white lines form the scoring triangle and FURTHER divide the triangle into the separate scoring zones. Line width is not considered in court dimensions given here; the court is the same from each end. 6 feet for Player Shooting Area. The sides of the 10-Off area are defined by two lines running at the same angle as the Scoring Triangle. A center-line runs from the middle of the Back-7-line up the middle of the court for 6 feet; the two 7 score zones are located on each side of the Center-Line, for a length of 3 feet, bounded at the top by the Back-8 line, running side to side across and within the scoring triangle.
Olympic sports
Olympic sports are contested in the Summer Olympic Games and Winter Olympic Games. The 2016 Summer Olympics included 28 sports, with five additional sports due to be added to the 2020 Summer Olympics program; the number and types of events may change from one Olympiad to another. Each Olympic sport is represented by an international governing body, namely an International Federation; the International Olympic Committee establishes a hierarchy of sports and events. According to this hierarchy, each Olympic sport can be subdivided into multiple disciplines, which are mistaken as distinct sports. Examples include swimming and water polo, which are in fact disciplines of the sport of aquatics, figure skating and speed skating, which are both disciplines of the sport of ice skating. In turn, disciplines are subdivided into events. A sport or discipline is included in the Olympic program if the IOC determines it to be practised around the world, that is, the popularity of a given sport or discipline is indicated by the number of countries that compete in it.
The IOC's requirements reflect participation in the Olympic Games – more stringent conditions are applied to men's sports/disciplines and to summer sports/disciplines. Previous Olympic Games included sports that are no longer included in the current program, such as polo and tug of war. Known as "discontinued sports", these have been removed due to either a lack of interest or the absence of an appropriate governing body for the sport; some sports that were competed at the early Games and dropped by the IOC, have managed to return to the Olympic program, for example Archery, which made a come-back in 1972, tennis, reintroduced in 1988. The Olympics have included one or more demonstration sports to promote a local sport from the host country or to gauge interest in an new sport; some such sports, like curling, were added to the official Olympic program. Baseball was discontinued after the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, only to be revived again for the forthcoming 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, which will see the introduction of new disciplines within a number of existing Summer Olympics sports as well as several new sports, such as karate and skateboarding, making their Olympic debuts.
The term "sport" in Olympic terminology refers to all events sanctioned by an international sport federation, a definition that may differ from the common meaning of the word "sport". One sport, by Olympic definition, may comprise several disciplines, which would be regarded as separate sports in common usage. For example, aquatics is a summer Olympic sport that includes six disciplines: swimming, synchronized swimming, water polo, open water swimming, high diving, since all these disciplines are governed at international level by the International Swimming Federation. Skating is a winter Olympic sport represented by the International Skating Union, includes four disciplines: figure skating, speed skating, short track speed skating, synchronized skating; the sport with the largest number of Olympic disciplines is skiing, with six: alpine skiing, cross-country skiing, ski jumping, nordic combined and freestyle skiing. Other notable multi-discipline sports are gymnastics, volleyball, wrestling and bobsleigh.
The disciplines listed here are only those contested in the Olympics—gymnastics has two non-Olympic disciplines, while cycling and wrestling have three each. It should be noted that the IOC definition of a "discipline" may differ from that used by an international federation. For example, the IOC considers artistic gymnastics a single discipline, but the International Federation of Gymnastics classifies men's and women's artistic gymnastics as separate disciplines; the IOC considers freestyle wrestling to be a single discipline, but United World Wrestling uses "freestyle wrestling" for the men's version, classifying women's freestyle wrestling as the separate discipline of "female wrestling". On some occasions, notably in the case of snowboarding, the IOC agreed to add a sport that had a separate international federation to the Olympics on condition that they dissolve their governing body and instead affiliate with an existing Olympic sport federation, therefore not increasing the number of Olympic sports.
An event, by IOC definition, is a competition. Therefore, the sport of aquatics includes a total of 46 Olympic events, of which 32 are in the discipline of swimming, eight in diving, two each in synchronized swimming, water polo, open water swimming; the number of events per sport ranges from a minimum of two to a maximum of 47 in athletics, which despite its large number of events and its diversity is not divided into disciplines. The list of Olympic sports has changed during the course of Olympic history, has increased until the early 2000s, when the IOC decided to cap the number of sports in the Summer Olympics at 28; the only summer sports that have never been absent from the Olympic program are at
Board game
A board game is a tabletop game that involves counters or pieces moved or placed on a pre-marked surface or "board", according to a set of rules. Some games are based on pure strategy. Games have a goal that a player aims to achieve. Early board games represented a battle between two armies, most modern board games are still based on defeating opponents in terms of counters, winning position, or accrual of points. There are many varieties of board games, their representation of real-life situations can range from having no inherent theme, like checkers, to having a specific theme and narrative, like Cluedo. Rules can range from the simple, like Tic-tac-toe, to those describing a game universe in great detail, like Dungeons & Dragons – although most of the latter are role-playing games where the board is secondary to the game, serving to help visualize the game scenario; the time required to learn to play or master a game varies from game to game, but is not correlated with the number or complexity of rules.
Board games have been played in societies throughout history. A number of important historical sites and documents shed light on early board games such as Jiroft civilization gameboards in Iran. Senet, found in Predynastic and First Dynasty burials of Egypt, c. 3500 BC and 3100 BC is the oldest board game known to have existed. Senet was pictured in a fresco found in Merknera's tomb. From predynastic Egypt is Mehen. Hounds and Jackals another ancient Egyptean board game appeared around 2000 BC; the first complete set of this game was discovered from a Theban tomb that dates to the 13th Dynasty. This game was popular in Mesopotamia and the Caucasus. Backgammon originated in ancient Persia over 5,000 years ago. Chess and Chaupar originated in India. Go and Liubo originated in China. Patolli originated in Mesoamerica played by the ancient Aztec and The Royal Game of Ur was found in the Royal Tombs of Ur, dating to Mesopotamia 4,600 years ago; the earliest known games list is the Buddha games list. In 17th and 18th century colonial America, the agrarian life of the country left little time for game playing though draughts and card games were not unknown.
The Pilgrims and Puritans of New England frowned on game playing and viewed dice as instruments of the devil. When the Governor William Bradford discovered a group of non-Puritans playing stool-ball, pitching the bar, pursuing other sports in the streets on Christmas Day, 1622, he confiscated their implements, reprimanded them, told them their devotion for the day should be confined to their homes. In Thoughts on Lotteries Thomas Jefferson wrote: Almost all these pursuits of chance produce something useful to society, but there are some which produce nothing, endanger the well-being of the individuals engaged in them or of others depending on them. Such are games with cards, billiards, etc, and although the pursuit of them is a matter of natural right, yet society, perceiving the irresistible bent of some of its members to pursue them, the ruin produced by them to the families depending on these individuals, consider it as a case of insanity, quoad hoc, step in to protect the family and the party himself, as in other cases of insanity, imbecility, etc. and suppress the pursuit altogether, the natural right of following it.
There are some other games of chance, useful on certain occasions, injurious only when carried beyond their useful bounds. Such are insurances, raffles, etc; these they do not take their regulation under their own discretion. The board game Traveller's Tour Through the United States and its sister game Traveller's Tour Through Europe were published by New York City bookseller F. & R. Lockwood in 1822 and today claims the distinction of being the first board game published in the United States; as the U. S. shifted from agrarian to urban living in the 19th century, greater leisure time and a rise in income became available to the middle class. The American home, once the center of economic production, became the locus of entertainment and education under the supervision of mothers. Children were encouraged to play board games that developed literacy skills and provided moral instruction; the earliest board games published in the United States were based upon Christian morality. The Mansion of Happiness, for example, sent players along a path of virtues and vices that led to the Mansion of Happiness.
The Game of Pope and Pagan, or The Siege of the Stronghold of Satan by the Christian Army pitted an image on its board of a Hindu woman committing suttee against missionaries landing on a foreign shore. The missionaries are cast in white as "the symbol of innocence and hope" while the pope and pagan are cast in black, the color of "gloom of error, and... grief at the daily loss of empire". Commercially produced board games in the mid-19th century were monochrome prints laboriously hand-colored by teams of low-paid young factory women. Advances in paper making and printmaking during the period enabled the commercial production of inexpensive board games; the most significant advance was the development of chromolithography, a technological achievement that made bold, richly colored images available at affordable prices. Games cost as little as US$.25 for a small boxed card game to $3.00 for more elaborate games. American Protestants believed a virtuous life led to success, but the belief was challenged mid-century when the country embraced materialism and c
Curling
Curling is a sport in which players slide stones on a sheet of ice towards a target area, segmented into four concentric circles. It is related to bowls and shuffleboard. Two teams, each with four players, take turns sliding heavy, polished granite stones called rocks, across the ice curling sheet towards the house, a circular target marked on the ice; each team has eight stones, with each player throwing two. The purpose is to accumulate the highest score for a game. A game consists of eight or ten ends; the curler can induce a curved path by causing the stone to turn as it slides, the path of the rock may be further influenced by two sweepers with brooms, who accompany it as it slides down the sheet and sweep the ice in front of the stone. "Sweeping a rock" decreases the friction, which makes the stone travel a straighter path and a longer distance. A great deal of strategy and teamwork go into choosing the ideal path and placement of a stone for each situation, the skills of the curlers determine the degree to which the stone will achieve the desired result.
This gives curling its nickname of "chess on ice". Evidence that curling existed in Scotland in the early 16th century includes a curling stone inscribed with the date 1511 uncovered when an old pond was drained at Dunblane, Scotland; the world's oldest curling stone and the world's oldest football are now kept in the same museum in Stirling. The first written reference to a contest using stones on ice coming from the records of Paisley Abbey, Renfrewshire, in February 1541. Two paintings, "Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap" and "The Hunters in the Snow" by Pieter Bruegel the Elder depict Flemish peasants curling, albeit without brooms; the word curling first appears in print in 1620 in Perth, Scotland, in the preface and the verses of a poem by Henry Adamson. The sport was known as "the roaring game" because of the sound the stones make while traveling over the pebble; the verbal noun curling is formed from the Scots verb curl. Kilsyth Curling Club claims to be the first club in the world, having been formally constituted in 1716.
Kilsyth claims the oldest purpose-built curling pond in the world at Colzium, in the form of a low dam creating a shallow pool some 100 by 250 metres in size. The International Olympic Committee recognises the Royal Caledonian Curling Club as developing the first official rules for the sport. In the early history of curling, the playing stones were flat-bottomed stones from rivers or fields, which lacked a handle and were of inconsistent size and smoothness; some early stones had holes for the thumb, akin to ten-pin bowling balls. Unlike today, the thrower had little control over the'curl' or velocity and relied more on luck than on precision and strategy; the sport was played on frozen rivers although purpose-built ponds were created in many Scottish towns. For example, the Scottish poet David Gray describes whisky-drinking curlers on the Luggie Water at Kirkintilloch. In Darvel, East Ayrshire, the weavers relaxed by playing curling matches using the heavy stone weights from the looms' warp beams, fitted with a detachable handle for the purpose.
Many a wife would keep her husband's brass curling stone handle on the mantelpiece, brightly polished until the next time it was needed. Central Canadian curlers used'irons' rather than stones until the early 1900s. Outdoor curling was popular in Scotland between the 16th and 19th centuries because the climate provided good ice conditions every winter. Scotland is home to the international governing body for curling, the World Curling Federation in Perth, which originated as a committee of the Royal Caledonian Curling Club, the mother club of curling. Today, the sport is most established in Canada, having been taken there by Scottish emigrants; the Royal Montreal Curling Club, the oldest established sports club still active in North America, was established in 1807. The first curling club in the United States was established in 1830, the sport was introduced to Switzerland and Sweden before the end of the 19th century by Scots. Today, curling is played all over Europe and has spread to Brazil, Australia, New Zealand and Korea.
The first world championship for curling was limited to men and was known as the Scotch Cup, held in Falkirk and Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1959. The first world title was won by the Canadian team from Regina, skipped by Ernie Richardson. Curling was one of the first sports, popular with women and girls. Curling has been a medal sport in the Winter Olympic Games since the 1998 Winter Olympics, it includes men's, women's and mixed doubles tournaments. In February 2002, the International Olympic Committee retroactively decided that the curling competition from the 1924 Winter Olympics (originally called Semaine des Sports d'Hiver, or Int
Cookie
A cookie is a baked or cooked food, small and sweet. It contains flour and some type of oil or fat, it may include other ingredients such as raisins, chocolate chips, etc. In most English-speaking countries except for the United States and Canada, crisp cookies are called biscuits. Chewier biscuits are sometimes called cookies in the United Kingdom; some cookies may be named by their shape, such as date squares or bars. Cookies or biscuits may be mass-produced in factories, made in small bakeries or homemade. Biscuit or cookie variants include sandwich biscuits, such as custard creams, Jammie Dodgers and Oreos, with marshmallow or jam filling and sometimes dipped in chocolate or another sweet coating. Cookies are served with beverages such as milk, coffee or tea. Factory-made cookies are sold in convenience stores and vending machines. Fresh-baked cookies are sold at bakeries and coffeehouses, with the latter ranging from small business-sized establishments to multinational corporations such as Starbucks.
In most English-speaking countries outside North America, including the United Kingdom, the most common word for a crisp cookie is biscuit. The term cookie is used to describe chewier ones. However, in many regions both terms are used. In Scotland the term cookie is sometimes used to describe a plain bun. Cookies that are baked as a solid layer on a sheet pan and cut, rather than being baked as individual pieces, are called in British English bar cookies or traybakes, its American name derives from the Dutch word koekje or more its informal, dialect variant koekie which means little cake, arrived in American English with the Dutch settlement of New Netherland, in the early 1600s. According to the Scottish National Dictionary, its Scottish name derives from the diminutive form of the word cook, giving the Middle Scots cookie, cooky or cukie, it gives an alternative etymology: like the American word, from the Dutch koekje, the diminutive of koek, a cake. There was much trade and cultural contact across the North Sea between the Low Countries and Scotland during the Middle Ages, which can be seen in the history of curling and golf.
Cookies are most baked until crisp or just long enough that they remain soft, but some kinds of cookies are not baked at all. Cookies are made in a wide variety of styles, using an array of ingredients including sugars, chocolate, peanut butter, nuts, or dried fruits; the softness of the cookie may depend on. A general theory of cookies may be formulated this way. Despite its descent from cakes and other sweetened breads, the cookie in all its forms has abandoned water as a medium for cohesion. Water in cakes serves to make the base as thin as possible, which allows the bubbles – responsible for a cake's fluffiness – to better form. In the cookie, the agent of cohesion has become some form of oil. Oils, whether they be in the form of butter, vegetable oils, or lard, are much more viscous than water and evaporate at a much higher temperature than water, thus a cake made with butter or eggs instead of water is far denser after removal from the oven. Oils in baked cakes do not behave. Rather than evaporating and thickening the mixture, they remain, saturating the bubbles of escaped gases from what little water there might have been in the eggs, if added, the carbon dioxide released by heating the baking powder.
This saturation produces the most texturally attractive feature of the cookie, indeed all fried foods: crispness saturated with a moisture that does not sink into it. Cookie-like hard wafers have existed for as long as baking is documented, in part because they deal with travel well, but they were not sweet enough to be considered cookies by modern standards. Cookies appear to have their origins in 7th century AD Persia, shortly after the use of sugar became common in the region, they spread to Europe through the Muslim conquest of Spain. By the 14th century, they were common in all levels of society throughout Europe, from royal cuisine to street vendors. With global travel becoming widespread at that time, cookies made a natural travel companion, a modernized equivalent of the travel cakes used throughout history. One of the most popular early cookies, which traveled well and became known on every continent by similar names, was the jumble, a hard cookie made from nuts and water. Cookies came to America through the Dutch in New Amsterdam in the late 1620s.
The Dutch word "koekje" was Anglicized to "cookie" or cooky. The earliest reference to cookies in America is in 1703, when "The Dutch in New York provided...'in 1703...at a funeral 800 cookies...'"The most common modern cookie, given its style by the creaming of butter and sugar, was not common until the 18th century. Cookies are broadly classified according to how they are formed, including at least these categories: Bar cookies consist of batter or other ingredients that are poured or pressed into a pan and cut into cookie-sized pieces after baking. In British English, bar cookies are known as "tray bakes". Examples include brownies, fruit squares, bars such as date squares. Drop cookies are made from a soft dough, dropped by spoonfuls onto the baking sheet. During baking, the mounds of dough flatten. Chocolate chip cookies, oatmeal raisin cookies, rock cakes are popular examples of drop cookies; this may include thumbprint cookies, for which a small central depression is created with a thumb or small spoon before baki
Canada
Canada is a country in the northern part of North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic to the Pacific and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering 9.98 million square kilometres, making it the world's second-largest country by total area. Canada's southern border with the United States is the world's longest bi-national land border, its capital is Ottawa, its three largest metropolitan areas are Toronto and Vancouver. As a whole, Canada is sparsely populated, the majority of its land area being dominated by forest and tundra, its population is urbanized, with over 80 percent of its inhabitants concentrated in large and medium-sized cities, many near the southern border. Canada's climate varies across its vast area, ranging from arctic weather in the north, to hot summers in the southern regions, with four distinct seasons. Various indigenous peoples have inhabited what is now Canada for thousands of years prior to European colonization. Beginning in the 16th century and French expeditions explored, settled, along the Atlantic coast.
As a consequence of various armed conflicts, France ceded nearly all of its colonies in North America in 1763. In 1867, with the union of three British North American colonies through Confederation, Canada was formed as a federal dominion of four provinces; this began an accretion of provinces and territories and a process of increasing autonomy from the United Kingdom. This widening autonomy was highlighted by the Statute of Westminster of 1931 and culminated in the Canada Act of 1982, which severed the vestiges of legal dependence on the British parliament. Canada is a parliamentary democracy and a constitutional monarchy in the Westminster tradition, with Elizabeth II as its queen and a prime minister who serves as the chair of the federal cabinet and head of government; the country is a realm within the Commonwealth of Nations, a member of the Francophonie and bilingual at the federal level. It ranks among the highest in international measurements of government transparency, civil liberties, quality of life, economic freedom, education.
It is one of the world's most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, the product of large-scale immigration from many other countries. Canada's long and complex relationship with the United States has had a significant impact on its economy and culture. A developed country, Canada has the sixteenth-highest nominal per capita income globally as well as the twelfth-highest ranking in the Human Development Index, its advanced economy is the tenth-largest in the world, relying chiefly upon its abundant natural resources and well-developed international trade networks. Canada is part of several major international and intergovernmental institutions or groupings including the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the G7, the Group of Ten, the G20, the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. While a variety of theories have been postulated for the etymological origins of Canada, the name is now accepted as coming from the St. Lawrence Iroquoian word kanata, meaning "village" or "settlement".
In 1535, indigenous inhabitants of the present-day Quebec City region used the word to direct French explorer Jacques Cartier to the village of Stadacona. Cartier used the word Canada to refer not only to that particular village but to the entire area subject to Donnacona. From the 16th to the early 18th century "Canada" referred to the part of New France that lay along the Saint Lawrence River. In 1791, the area became two British colonies called Upper Canada and Lower Canada collectively named the Canadas. Upon Confederation in 1867, Canada was adopted as the legal name for the new country at the London Conference, the word Dominion was conferred as the country's title. By the 1950s, the term Dominion of Canada was no longer used by the United Kingdom, which considered Canada a "Realm of the Commonwealth"; the government of Louis St. Laurent ended the practice of using'Dominion' in the Statutes of Canada in 1951. In 1982, the passage of the Canada Act, bringing the Constitution of Canada under Canadian control, referred only to Canada, that year the name of the national holiday was changed from Dominion Day to Canada Day.
The term Dominion was used to distinguish the federal government from the provinces, though after the Second World War the term federal had replaced dominion. Indigenous peoples in present-day Canada include the First Nations, Métis, the last being a mixed-blood people who originated in the mid-17th century when First Nations and Inuit people married European settlers; the term "Aboriginal" as a collective noun is a specific term of art used in some legal documents, including the Constitution Act 1982. The first inhabitants of North America are hypothesized to have migrated from Siberia by way of the Bering land bridge and arrived at least 14,000 years ago; the Paleo-Indian archeological sites at Old Crow Flats and Bluefish Caves are two of the oldest sites of human habitation in Canada. The characteristics of Canadian indigenous societies included permanent settlements, complex societal hierarchies, trading networks; some of these cultures had collapsed by the time European explorers arrived in the late 15th and early 16th centuries and have only been discovered through archeological investigations.
The indigenous population at the time of the first European settlements is estimated to have been between 200,000
Game design
Game design is the art of applying design and aesthetics to create a game for entertainment or for educational, exercise, or experimental purposes. Elements and principles of game design are applied to other interactions, in the form of gamification. Game design creates goals and challenges to define a board game, card game, dice game, casino game, role-playing game, video game, war game or simulation that produces desirable interactions among its participants and spectators. Academically, game design is part of game studies, while game theory studies strategic decision making. Games have inspired seminal research in the fields of probability, artificial intelligence and optimization theory. Applying game design to itself is a current research topic in metadesign. Sports and board games are known to have existed for at least nine thousand, six thousand, four thousand years. Tabletop games played today whose descent can be traced from ancient times include chess, go, backgammon, mahjong and pick-up sticks.
The rules of these games were not codified until early modern times and their features evolved and changed over time, through the folk process. Given this, these games are not considered to have had a designer or been the result of a design process in the modern sense. After the rise of commercial game publishing in the late 19th century, many games which had evolved via folk processes became commercial properties with custom scoring pads or preprepared material. For example, the similar public domain games Generala and Yatzy led to the commercial game Yahtzee in the mid-1950s. Today, many commercial games, such as Taboo, Pictionary, or Time's Up!, are descended from traditional parlour games. Adapting traditional games to become commercial properties is an example of game design. Many sports, such as soccer and baseball, are the result of folk processes, while others were designed, such as basketball, invented in 1891 by James Naismith. Technological advances have provided new media for games throughout history.
The printing press allowed packs of playing cards, adapted from Mahjong tiles, to be mass-produced, leading to many new card games. Accurate topographic maps produced as lithographs and provided free to Prussian officers helped popularize wargaming. Cheap bookbinding led to mass-produced board games with custom boards. Inexpensive lead figurine casting contributed to the development of miniature wargaming. Cheap custom dice led to poker dice. Flying discs led to Ultimate. Personal computers contributed to the popularity of computer games, leading to the wide availability of video game consoles and video games. Smart phones have led to a proliferation of mobile games; the first games in a new medium are adaptations of older games. Pong, one of the first disseminated video games, adapted table tennis. Games will exploit distinctive properties of a new medium. Adapting older games and creating original games for new media are both examples of game design. Game studies or gaming theory is a discipline that deals with the critical study of games, game design and their role in society and culture.
Prior to the late-twentieth century, the academic study of games was rare and limited to fields such as history and anthropology. As the video game revolution took off in the early 1980s, so did academic interest in games, resulting in a field that draws on diverse methodologies and schools of thought; these influences may be characterized broadly in three ways: the social science approach, the humanities approach, the industry and engineering approach. Broadly speaking, the social scientific approach has concerned itself with the question of "What do games do to people?" Using tools and methods such as surveys, controlled laboratory experiments, ethnography researchers have investigated both the positive and negative impacts that playing games could have on people. More sociologically informed research has sought to move away from simplistic ideas of gaming as either'negative' or'positive', but rather seeking to understand its role and location in the complexities of everyday life. In general terms, the humanities approach has concerned itself with the question of "What meanings are made through games?"
Using tools and methods such as interviews and participant observation, researchers have investigated the various roles that videogames play in people's lives and activities together with the meaning they assign to their experiences. From an industry perspective, a lot of game studies research can be seen as the academic response to the videogame industry's questions regarding the products it creates and sells; the main question this approach deals with can be summarized as "How can we create better games?" with the accompanying "What makes a game good?" "Good" can be taken to mean many different things, including providing an entertaining and an engaging experience, being easy to learn and play, being innovative and having novel experiences. Different approaches to studying this problem have included looking at describing how to design games and extracting guidelines and rules of thumb for making better games Game theory is a study of strategic decision making, it is "the study of mathematical models of conflict and cooperation between intelligent rational decision-makers".
An alternative term suggested "as a more descriptive name for the discipline" is interactive decision theory. The subject first addressed zero-sum games, such that one person's gains equal net losses of the other participant or participan
