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The win-screen from Windows Solitaire, made physical. (Scroll down for explanations).
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"I am not naive and I am not a fool. I realize that gamification is the easy answer for deploying a perversion of games as a mod marketing miracle. I realize that using games earnestly would mean changing the very operation of most businesses. For those whose goal is to clock out at 5pm having matched the strategy and performance of your competitors, I understand that mediocrity's lips are seductive because they are willing. For the rest, those of you who would consider that games can offer something different and greater than an affirmation of existing corporate practices, the business world has another name for you: they call you "leaders."" Ian's whole article is great, and the comment thread is eye-opening.
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"Something terrible has happened in our city (and may yet continue to happen). It's damnable, deplorable, heartbreaking. But it is also extraordinary, unusual, bizarre. Slamming the door on it without studying and understanding it is a dangerous and short-term tactic. Allowing yourself to feel nothing but anger, and doing nothing but lashing out … isn't that a little mindless? It would be nice, and useful, if we could ask London "why" without already having an answer in mind." Excellent, sober, cautious writing from Will Wiles.
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"In this volume, people of diverse backgrounds — tabletop game designers, digital game designers, and game studies academics — talk about tabletop games, game culture, and the intersection of games with learning, theater, and other forms. Some have chosen to write about their design process, others about games they admire, others about the culture of tabletop games and their fans. The results are various and individual, but all cast some light on what is a multivarious and fascinating set of game styles."
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Lovely little round-up of games about architecture and the urban environment from Kars.
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"Seven hot air balloons, each with speakers attached, took off at dawn and flew across the capital. Each balloon plays a different element of a musical score, together creating an expansive audio landscape." Marvellous.
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"It was supposed to be a £12,000 art project in which a helium-filled sculpture of a desert island floated eerily above the heads of spaced-out festival-goers. It has become instead a £12,000 art project in which a helium-filled sculpture of a desert island floats somewhere through the troposphere without anybody actually seeing it, or even knowing where it is." Awesome but sad all at once; and yet, expensive or not, it feels like a genuinely valid affordance of the art. Oh well.
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"the footage gopro cameras produce is fantastic and i’ve seen some crazy stuff filmed with a gopro, but i think i found it’s achilles heel – my skateboard." The camera may be dead, but the footage is ace.
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"Children will turn anything into a toy, any toy into a game and any game into a story. Adults do just the same thing, they just don’t do the noises. At least not when anyone’s looking." Yes. (Also: Sorrell is blogging. This is good.)
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"Artist Rodrigo Derteano's autonomous robot plows the desert ground to uncover its underlying, lighter color, using a technique similar to the one of the Nazca lines, the gigantic and enigmatic geoglyphs traced between 400 and 650 AD in the desert in southern Peru. Guided by its sensors, the robot quietly traced the founding lines of a new city that looks like a collage of existing cities from Latin America." Oh gosh this is awesome.
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"I want to suggest that there is a utility for procedural literacy that extends far beyond the ability to program computers. Computer processing comprises only one register of procedurality. More generally, I want to suggest that procedural literacy entails the ability to reconfigure basic concepts and rules to understand and solve problems, not just on the computer, but in general."
Being With Each Other
17 July 2011
From this week’s Cardboard Children, over at Rock Paper Shotgun:
I don’t know if Subbuteo is a great game. I’m sure it is. It just wasn’t really a game to me. It was just one of many things I shared with my da. Like Star Trek and in-depth conversations about the nature of the universe. Now, as a father myself, I realise what was actually happening when we were playing that game we didn’t know the rules of. We were just being with each other. Flicking plastic. Shooting the shit. Playing.
What’s the point of all this?
Being with each other – for me, that’s the key element of board gaming. When you get that occasional person who openly tells you they see board games as “sad”, I feel a bit sad that they don’t get it. If I want to play a board game with you, it really just means I want to sit with you a while. That’s not a bad thing, is it?
No, Rab, that’s not a bad thing at all. And this is why some of my favourite boardgame memories are from afternoons and evenings sat in pubs around the country, rattling through game after game of Lost Cities, or Blue Moon, sat by a welcoming fire or bright window, pints in hand. It’s just a way to spend some time with a friend.
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“I guess you could ask people to make recommendations on LinkedIn,” said Scott. Scott and I both work in information technology. “ 'Working with Cynthia was an amazing experience as she always made deadlines and was incredibly prepared for meetings and she is as good as her word when it comes to not dropping a deuce on your floor.'” Marvellous writing, as ever, from Paul Ford.
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"I’d really like more week-long exercises in fiction delivered to me via Twitter. The problem with other accounts for fictional characters – including, say, The West Wing’s Joshua Lyman and Donna Moss – is that they’re continuous, shapeless roleplay. I want a planned narrative that ends."
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"It has been interesting to watch the rise of the subsequent discourse on gamification, because to me, the focus on "achievements" and such misses the real power of games: they teach us dynamic system models. The instruments we build at Bloom will each provide a different "physics of information," or game-like rule set that maps the variables from the data the user is viewing (how many followers does my friend have) into a set of rules that govern the behavior and presentation of the data (how big is the dot that represents that friend). Once users learn how these rules work, they can perform the system like they might perform a video game, zooming through structures, using tools, and interacting with the environment. Play is the way humans learn how new environments work. We'll let people play in countless environments built by their own network data and resources." Dingdingding!
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"Not least among these movements is larp, brought to its apotheosis in the Nordic countries, where vast, imaginative works of enormous artistic ambition receive attention not only from game geeks but from their national cultures as well. This vital phenomenon is now accessible to English speakers through this landmark work, an anthology of articles describing some of the most impressive and compelling works of the form. Anyone seriously interested in role-play, interactive narrative, and the collision between games and theater will find it of enormous interest." Greg's introduction sounds good, and the PDF sample made this book look really quite something.
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Christian Nutt interviews Jesse Schell Lots of really interesting stuff in here – to be returned to, I think.
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Nice list of restuarants and pubs. One of my favourite things about The Trip is turning out to be the food.
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"The Bones gathers writing about fandom and family—about gamers, camaraderie, and memories— and ties them together where they meet: our dice. These are essays and anecdotes about the ways dice make us crazy, about the stakes we play for and the thrill we get from not knowing what the next roll will bring."
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"More primal and immediate than any of the previously mentioned examples, it was couch cushion architecture that established the basic building blocks of our design logic. Unrepresented and ignored for too long in the architectural industry, today’s post pays respect to the wonders of couch cushion architecture. We’ve rounded up a (mostly) admirable collection of projects, taken from a randomly conducted search on the internet. Join us as we take a critical analysis of the architecture, methods and design philosophies of living room furniture re-appropriation." Charming, and generous, too.