Video Games: Design and Code Your Own Adventure

This addition to the Build It Yourself series explores the history of video games, tracing their popularity from ancient board games like mancala up through Minecraft today, while providing readers with the basic material to design, write, and code game programs. The 25 included projects range in type and complexity, from making a board game with a video-game-like concept to writing a pseudocode algorithm for a memory and matching game. Ceceri delves into the psychological aspects of playing video games (one headline asks, “Do video games have a dark side?”), and vocabulary words and phrases like “define a function, variable, string, and Boolean logic” are placed in context. Digital natives with a serious interest in gaming should find Ceceri’s handbook an excellent resource. Ages 9–12. (Sept.)