I very much enjoyed this talk by Nick Fortugno that I found on Twitter this morning. It was a good reminder, as I am considering what game or games to submit to this year’s Indiecade. To read more about the fun I had with Nick at last year’s festival, click here
Bell and Some Hessian: A New and Unsafe Game for 2
Hi everybody, sorry there haven’t been many new posts this year. I have a newborn son, which is not a game, but is a challenge all its own, and one I quite like.
However, I simply HAD to post this video. I’m not allowed to tell you too much about it, because it’s sort of secret, but suffice it to say this is a game that was submitted to a popular reality TV show as a potential challenge. Whether or not it will appear on the show will remain a mystery. Here’s the game:
Bell and Some Hessian: One player, the Chaser, is blindfolded. The other player, the Runner, has 2 bells: 1 bell is large and heavy and the clapper has been wrapped in knots and hessian (muslin). The other bell is attached to the Runner and makes noise when he runs. The Chaser is trying to tag the runner before the runner can untie and ring the heavy bell. The Chaser has only the sound of the bell attached to the Runner to guide his motions. If the Runner rings the heavy bell before the Chaser tags him, he wins. Play this with your friends!
In this demo version, the small bell is a simple hotel tap-bell and the heavy bell is from the U.S.S. Baffins, the navy battleship my paternal grandfather was stationed on during WWII. When the war ended, he took the bell with him and it hung in the kitchen of his house on 8311 Buckingham Drive. He rang it when it was time for dinner and you could hear it all over the neighborhood. I took ownership of the Baffins Bell when Papa John died and I used it for this silly game!
The video is taken on a cell phone. The Chaser is Greg. You can see me protecting him from running out of the game zone. The Runner is James Ryan. Video by Mike Boothby. Who wants to form a league?
Steve Jobs’s Mind On a Bicycle
This video from 1990 shows Steve Jobs (not working for Apple at the time) talking about two of my favorite things: games and bicycles.
http://www.cultofmac.com/136734/steve-jobs-on-gaming-its-the-future-of-learning-video/
I’m using the low-expectations week between Christmas and New Year’s to watch some of the longer videos I have bookmarked and promised myself to watch, although this one is only 5 minutes long. Thanks to @BrainPickings for the link.
After you watch the video, please explore the rest of my blog. I add new posts a couple times a week about the value and pleasure of real-life gaming, specifically in Los Angeles my home (there are many such sites about New York games, and I often link to them from here) but I have struggled to find a reading audience that will engage in back-and-forth Disqus with me. Perhaps I’ll have more luck in the new year.
Visit again soon for posts about Black Letter game, a puzzle adventure by mail; Sarah Thacher on QR codes; corporate meeting engagement; and my recent experience contributing challenges to Survivor.
‘Tis the season
Well, it’s the wrong season, but it’s the season all the same.
Congratulations to the winners of the Gameful Summer Challenge Series! The winners and their games are listed here:
http://gameful.org/blog/2011/11/01/gameful-summer-challenge-series-winners/
Now the next challenge will be… who will be first to play all these games?
16 days to go!
Hey everybody, let’s fly to Scotland! Come on! Who’s with me? But look at this awesome new games festival they’re having on January 1st!
Given that my wife is likely going to deliver a baby 1 week after this, maybe I should save my airfare dollars and just wait for next year’s IndieCade to come around again. Unless I get a teleportation machine for Christmas.
Anyone going to this?
The Island of Broken Games
Jesse Fuchs - Monopoly : Part 1/2 from New School Game Club on Vimeo.
Jesse Fuchs - Monopoly : Part 2/2 from New School Game Club on Vimeo.
One of the stand out talks at the debut “Practice” conference in New York a few weeks ago was Jesse Fuchs’s two-minute talk about Monopoly. This is the more complete version of the talk addressing this comprehensive subject. I love the idea that New School has a club for broken games: it’s like the island of lost toys.
Mr. Fuchs clearly has given the matter plenty of thought, but I’m going to give the last word to board game maven Scott Nicholson.
Speaking in mime?
Practomime, that is
Practomime is a new word for what stories, games, and many other kinds of works of art have in common: they all involve creative activity in a cultural zone regulated for play. In plain language, that means that the Iliad and the Odyssey are really the same kind of thing as some of the most popular video games today.
The ancient Greeks learned most of the stuff that made them able to found Western Civilization from Homer. Kids and grown-ups playing video games are learning a lot more than most people think.
Well now I can’t turn off this gray stripe, but that’s just the way the cookie crumbles. The Pericles Group is one of a few innovative organizations around the country trying to transform education. And anyone who saw “Waiting for Superman” will tell you, that’s a very good thing. Learning Roman isn’t always as much fun as it looks in “Monty Python’s The Life of Brian.”
We learned about this innovation, the brainstorm of one Latin teacher, from KQED’s “Mind/Shift” blog. We say three cheers to anyone who’s trying to education children using game play. We are doing the same for adults, mostly, but we’re all on the same page, whatever language we’re speaking.
The December Game at a fancy Beverly Hills Hotel
Check it out!
See more photos here. Get our own December game here!
Mind, games
Jane McGonigal was right!
Fourteen-year-olds who were frequent video gamers had more gray matter in the rewards center of the brain than peers who didn’t play video games as much — suggesting that gaming may be correlated to changes in the brain much as addictions are.
[Source: Los Angeles Times]
As I believe I’ve mentioned before, my wife is a neuroscientist, and she would explain this with the old saw, “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” Well, it’s a saw in the world of brain science. It’s the old Skinner box schtick: an unexpected reward gives your brain a bigger hit of dopamine than an expected one. Do that often enough and you’ll wear a groove in your brain like a wagon wheel on a dirt road, only instead of a groove, it’s the synapses in your brain fusing together. What all of this means is somewhat up to interpretation. Are gamers just another flavor of addict, like alcoholics? Are they a super-race, with brains that have been transformed by stimulation? Yes and no, to both. How unsatisfying! Well that’s why my wife is the grad student and I am not.
By the way, if mind games are what you’re after, you must watch ABC’s misbegotten game show “Million Dollar Mind Game.” I wrote for this show: not the version that aired, but the episodes that got it on the air when it was still in development at ABC. If it comes back, maybe I’ll write for it again! They only made 6 episodes and they buried them (by broadcasting them on Sundays at 1 PM against football) but they’re all watchable on YouTube. Here’s the best one. Enjoy!
Reality+
When I saw Elan Lee speak at the Transmedia LA event downtown, he said the sad truth that most Augmented Reality programs, as they are currently implemented, are at best herky-jerky and at worst just plain suck. The question of whether AR is over before it even began (like the VCR before it) is a raging one, but this blog post indexes a few ways that Augmented Reality is living up to the hype - or trying to.
Like Greg and I, many of the gamers whose work we look up to is about getting people to interface with their surroundings in a new way. Our own personal technique is to hide clues in special places that we think are of particular interest; this has a compounding effect, for they are both surprised (pleasantly, we hope) to find the clue we concealed, and also surprised by this particular work of public art / shop / hidden nook or cranny in the city that they might have walked by a million times before without recognizing. That’s certainly something that happens to me when I play games in urban areas, even if they are no more augmented than a standard 2-D scavenger hunt.
I would argue that watching a clip of a movie in the real-life location where it was filmed hardly constitutes augmenting reality or playing a game. I also hope this trend doesn’t catch on or the streets of LA will be even more clogged than they are now with tourists and people paying attention to their phones instead of where they are going. However, I think the playful opportunities for AR apps like this one are ample: it just takes someone with the right playful attitude to figure out how best to use them.
