January 2012
1 post
5 tags
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...
December 2011
11 posts
19 tags
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...
4 tags
'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!
http://thenewyeargames.com/
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...
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...
5 tags
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...
6 tags
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...
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...
It's my birthday!
And I want TREATS! Particularly, I am interested in treats that remind me of games.
How about these game inspired desserts? Send them by mail to 123 My Mouth Street, and rush delivery so they arrive by eat o’clock.
Confederates in the fog
Greg and I are originally from Northern California; if we still lived up there (and some day soon, we may again!) we’d surely be playing games with Gabe Smedresmen: his work has been featured at Come Out and Play SF and he is a co-founder of Undercover Street Games. This is precisely the spirit of play that we work to galvanize here in LA. The two cities have a very different flavor, but...
7 tags
November 2011
11 posts
The Sixers that aren't Suxors
The above is a reference to Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” in which the villainous henchmen all have 6-digit ID numbers that start with 6. I’ve referenced that book a couple times recently; I’m almost through with it! What should I read next?
Of course, I would never dedicate a blog post to game griefers; rather, today I tip my blogger’s hat to Adrian Hon...
6 tags
Games you will never play, ever
Flavorpill and Cracked.com have some of the best lists on the internet. This collection of “10 Fictional Games We’d Really Like to Play” covers many of the best from TV, literature, and comic strips.
Suggested additions: the Oasis from Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One and Pyramid from Battlestar Galactica. But not the card game, that just looked lame.
I would also not play...
14 tags
Plural of glitch
Glitches, right? But what is the noun of assemblage? How about an agon of glitches?
Two unrelated matters with not (yet) connected glitches:
1) “Butterfly milking and pig nibbling,” a great ArsTechnica article sent to me by my father-in-law Jed. I like the creative environment described at the company that created this game. Here is Jed’s accompanying email:
It is entirely...
3 tags
Shoots and ladders
Red rover, red rover… here’s a peculiar crossover: Keita Takahashi, creator of Katamari Damacy, one of the few videogames I have played (and enjoyed) has taken on a new project: designing playgrounds in England.
“What inspired you to move from game design to playground design?
Before I started making videogames, I studied sculpture. I’ve been in the videogame industry...
Smell of success (maybe)
For those of you who haven’t been visiting Gameful.org, you should! It’s a wonderful place to connect with the rest of the gaming community and learn about some groundbreaking, inspiring games, big and small, across all platforms, that are springing up all over.
I especially enjoyed reading about this submission to the summer Gameful Challenge series: a game about smell designed to...
This is not a game
Sadly, it isn’t. It’s just a blog post. (“JUST.”) However, by following this link you will be transported to another world! SPOILER: It’s the world of Cracked.com, a humor site with many great lists that are as informative as they are amusing.
The list I direct your attention to today names 5 of the most notorious, influential (aka “insane”) Alternate...
6 tags
4th Annual Scavenger Hunt
One of the biggest games in LA all year long: don’t miss this event!
The L.A. Scavenger Hunt will be taking place on Saturday, November 19th in order to help gather material goods for the Union Rescue Mission, The L.A. Food Bank, Operation Blankets and Love, The Downtown Women’s Center, My Friend’s Place and the Dream Center. Not only does the hunt serve as a good cause for those in...
5 tags
Crimson Connections
If you want to get started playing the most exclusive game being played only in LA with some of the most creative up-and-comers in the media and arts world, first you’ll have to get accepted to the University of Southern California.
And even then, you’ve barely even begun.
My business partner Greg and I are both Bruins, but I’m going to avoid all the cheap shots and instead...
5 tags
Gorilla Marketing
You may be familiar with the selective attention test; if not, you can try it for yourself now!
If you’re like most people who take the test, you might not have noticed the person in the gorilla suit who walks through the middle of the video. That may be because we tend only to see what we are looking for.
And if what you’re looking for is a Great Urban Race style adventure with a...
Ludicrous fun
The last time I went to Portland I spent the weekend playing pinball and board games, eating tacos, and watching all of “Better Off Ted” on Netflix instant. I had the best time! I love Portland, and this most recent visit just cemented that impression with me.
I haven’t enjoyed discovering a city so much since - until, that is Ludocity! A great aggregator/wiki of...
Mind games
My proudest non-Wise Guys association is with ComedySportz Los Angeles, the longest running show in LA. I’ve been doing short form improv games since I was about 11 years old, and performing with CSzLA for nearly 10 and am probably near (if not past) Malcolm Gladwell’s ten thousand hour rule when it comes to improv (the minimum required to achieve expertise, if not mastery - to the...
October 2011
9 posts
Haunted Museum
Happy Halloween everybody! May all your candy be full-sized and all doors open when you knock. Our best Halloween experience this year was the scavenger hunt game we created for the Haunted Museum event for members of the Natural History Museum in downtown LA. We worked with Erin and all the great volunteers there to create this game for parents and kids to play together.
Players could choose...
We're All Mad Here
[This guest post is… not by a guest: please welcome game master Greg’s first post on the blog!]
You will pardon me if this post reads as amateur, it is my first blog entry. I do not regularly write about, well, anything, but I recently had such an enjoyable time playing a game that I had to share the experience with anyone willing to listen. Or read. Or do you all have synesthesia? It...
I want to play this game.
I want to play this game. I want to play this game. I want to play this game I want to play this game. I want to play this game I want to play this game I want to play this game. I want to play this game I want to play this game I want to play this game I want to play this game I want to play this game I want to play this game.
I want to play this game.
I want to play this game I want to play...
5 tags
Occupy Wall Street
I am tempting all kinds of fate by picking such a provocative title for this blog post… let’s see who comes a-knockin’!
The game “Red Cloud Rising,” which I read about here, is a continent away, which makes me sad. But what makes me happy is the way it captures what I like about blending the lines between playacting and game play:
“Red Cloud Rising” is theater...
7 tags
5 tags
School's out. So what's in?
“We want to be the Zynga of games, but on the long-term act more like Disney where we have a strong brand that parents trust and kids love using.” - Andrew Hsu
By now the school year is well underway - even if you’re at UCLA (darned quarter system). It was timely, then, that I recently watched this documentary “Waiting for ‘Superman’” about...
3 tags
Play where you work
My wife and I just moved from a one bedroom to a three bedroom. Moving is always an enormous pain in the hiney but there was one major upside: I got rid of the atrocious Ikea piece of garbage desk I’d been using for 8 years and bought a beautiful Spanish desk from Wertz Brothers. The desk has a false back in its topmost drawer, and a latch mechanism that keeps the side drawers from opening...
3 tags
Blisteringly cool game might change world...
Unless it was contaminated by its second player. There’s no way for me to describe how awesome this is, so you need to see it for yourself.
My advice: Watch the first 15 minutes of this video.
Then read this Wired article about what happened next.
Then marvel. The world of games, their designers and players, is amazing, n’est-ce pas?
Also, on the topic of thwarting games and...
September 2011
10 posts
7 tags
Ten to twenty percent
This photo was taken at Exchange LA: Greg and I presented our game Star Catcher as part of a program for ISES, the International Special Events Society. The winner, Mario, was so proud of his 5 stars he didn’t want to take them off! Note the colorful display, tastefully arranged on his lapel. Bravo Mario!
I was reminded of this simple networking game (which can be played with a cocktail in...
Come Out and Play-like festival in DC! →
Submit your game!
5 tags
Triple Awesome Sauce
The caption says it all: “The World’s Most Beautiful Scrabble Set.” Actually, no the picture says it all:
That’s some board gamer porn right there… well done Andrew Capener!
Note: Do not buy this for me. I already have enough Scrabble games to last me a life time, including many of the complete un-Scrabble like board game produced by Selchow & Wrighter during...
4 tags
"Playing dumb": an oxymoron?
Imagine beginning a job training and being forced to watch an instructional video covering some of the basics at your new workplace. Set aside the fact that these videos are usually corny or stodgy at best and laughably bad at worst: they aren’t supposed to be art, they’re supposed to make you smarter, more competent, and better prepared for your new responsibilities. Few people would...
5 tags
Gamers succeed where others could not →
Click for link:
The monkey-virus puzzle was one of several unsolved molecular mysteries that a colleague of Khatib’s at the university, Frank DiMaio, recently tried to solve using a method that took advantage of a protein-folding computer program called Rosetta. “This was one of the cases where his method wasn’t able to solve it,” Khatib said.
Fortunately, the challenge...
3 tags
Mutilating books
This is a puzzle book I learned about through Jane McGonigal’s Twitter feed. It seems the book is a mystery that you solve by cutting out its pages and manipulating its contents. The librarians at Hillcrest Elementary would NOT approve of this adventure, but it sounds fun! Learn more here.
Also, I am nothing short of FLABBERGASTED to learn that the mysterious number 12 has STILL not been...
14 tags
If you must use Foursquare
I’m a big Foursquare player - a year ago I didn’t know if I’d for sure still be playing, or using Twitter, and I do both multiple times every day, so I think that’s great. I’m very eager to get in the habit of playing Revel and SuperGoing (see more of which below). But for now, I am a habitual Foursquare player (it is a game, though not a great one, so that makes me...
3 tags
Play with our competitors (if you must)
For the truly puzzle-hunt hungry, there’s no way that our operation could ever be enough to satiate you. So if you need to spend more of your weekends running around solving clues and completing challenges, there are a couple other ways to do it besides playing with Wise Guys. Though if you haven’t signed up for our mailing list yet, you’re pretty much nuts.
Urban Dare is coming...
4 tags
Another game not by us!
This one’s totally new to me - does anyone know anything about PDX Hunt? The game is in Long Beach on 11 September.
PDX makes me think of Portland and Portland makes me think of Voodoo Donut.
Anyway, back to the game: looks to be an urban scavenger hunt conducted mostly by SMS. There’s a bonus for best costume and a “missing idol” you claim. Players are allowed to...
6 tags
Masquerade for a new Millenium
It’s on!
Who best to revive the tradition of the global treasure hunt than Google? Kit Williams was just one man (and a slightly nutty one, in my opinion), but with the combined brainpower of Google earth and MENSA puzzler Tim Dedopolus, it will take a concentrated effort to find the ultimate solution- and even then, you’ll be entered into a drawing for a prize of $80K. Wow! Let the...
August 2011
7 posts
http://gamecognito.wordpress.com/2011/08/26/the-rea... →
Discussed: QR codes, ARIS, Tagwhat, Nintendo 3DS.
They've found me: the Libyans!
Anyone who’s been to Echo Park has seen 826 LA’s Time Travel Mart. We even used it as a clue location in one of our first ever Clockwise games! But now there’s another way to travel through time - and no, it’s not through the cross-time adventures of Colonel Tick-Tock.
No, this chrono-lunacy is brought to you by Superfreako Productions: they’ve created a QR code...
Urban Dare in Long Beach Sat August 20th! →
Lights on, nobody home
Having a fleet of planes on autopilot is - maybe - okay if you’re, say, bombing Libya. I think: I can’t say for sure, I have a lot of stars and badges on various games but I am not actually a general.
But if you’re running an organization and your captains are all just going through the motion, you’ve got a serious problem.
Well, according to this study by the Gallup...
Risky Business
Thanks to friend Silvie Z. for drawing this to my attention!
Though I am, I admit, a pretty regular Foursquare player - and I do get a thrill each time I surpass one of my friends - I am keenly aware of its shortcomings as a game. It never ends, for one thing, though I suppose being played in one-week rounds is kind of like an ending; the same could be said for Ken Jennings’s weekly quiz.
...
A genius any way you look at it
Start your week off right by reading this inspiring WSJ article about a man at the top of his game.
“Growing up in Los Angeles, Mr. Kim was obsessed with magic and mathematics. He began drawing mazes and creating crossword puzzles in the second grade. In the sixth grade, he made his first original puzzle. As a college student, he wrote letters to Martin Gardner, the author and...
July 2011
10 posts
