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Place navigation on the left of the screenHere are the slides from the presentation Gary Weisserman and I did at the 9th Annual Communication and Social Action Conference:
Old news, but still cool
Posted by: Jeff Kupperman Sat, 24 Mar 2007 15:46:08 GMT
These would have been breaking news, oh, a year or two ago, but I just found out about them. Still, worth passing on for others who haven't seen them yet:
flOw
This is a game developed by a USC student as part of an MFA thesis, and it was recently picked up by Sony and ported to the PS3 platform. It's beautifully done, and is a great example of how an independently produced game can make it big. (This sort of path from personal project to platform game is still rare, though the big console makers are increasingly turning to independent game producers for material.)
You can play flOw online and read more about flOw and its creator, Jenova Chen.
Line Rider
This has been around for a while, and the latest version is on the "official line rider site," but I actually prefer the earlier, slightly simpler version hosted on deviantART. The idea is exceedingly simple: Draw a sloping line, click the play button, and a little sledder rides down your line. The charm is in the fact that you can learn to play it in three seconds, but what you can do with it is wide open, as evidenced by the number of Line Rider videos on YouTube. I don't quite know what to call it -- it's not a puzzle, since there is no particular optimal solution, and I'm not sure it qualifies as a game either..... It makes me think of the idea of "microworlds" -- self-contained simulations that allow experimentation, a bit like Geometer's Sketchpad or Interactive Physics (or one of my old favorites, Sodaplay), though I suspect the physics in Line Rider is only vaguely related to the real world. Or maybe it should be categorized a very very simple programming language....
Scratch
Speaking of simple programming languages, the folks at MIT are still making programming environments for kids, building on their seminal work creating tools like Logo and Lego Mindstorms. The latest effort is called "Scratch," and it's kind of like Lego Mindstorms without the Legos -- instead of bricks, you control "sprites" on part of the screen, all through drag-and-drop programming commands. It's way cool, and my only complaint is it's available now only as a downloadable application -- it's just shouting for a javascript/web version. I'm not volunteering to do that, mind you....!
The wisdom of the novel
Posted by: Jeff Kupperman Sat, 16 Dec 2006 17:08:52 GMT
Fred writes:
As I continue to pursue my interest in Rene Girard, I have found a fascinating article relating his work to Richard Rorty. Here's a paragraph that suggests a whole new approach to ICS-character playing exercises:
[T]he names of Dickens's characters take the place of moral principles and of lists of virtues and vices. They do so by permitting us to describe each other as "a Skimpole," "a Mr. Pickwick," "a Gradgrind," "a Mrs. Jellyby," "a Florence Dombey." In a moral world based on what Kundera calls "the wisdom of the novel," moral comparisons and judgments would be made with the help of proper names rather than general terms or general principles. A society which took its moral vocabulary from novels rather than from ontotheological or ontico-moral treatises would not ask itself questions about human nature, the point of human existence, or the meaning of human life. Rather, it would ask itself what we can do so as to get along with each other, how we can arrange things so as to be comfortable with one another, how institutions can be changed so that everyone's right to be understood has a better chance of being gratified. (78)
The URL for this extensive analysis is:
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3777/is_200307/ai_n9277742/
Patterns game
Posted by: Jeff Kupperman Mon, 11 Sep 2006 19:33:20 GMT
I started out a few days ago asking Fred if he could help me come up with an updated version of his game, The Helping Hand Strikes Again, and he led me to a game by Sidney Sackson called Patterns. Here's a brief synopsis, based on Martin Gardner's treatment of the game in his column in Scientific American, November, 1969.
We've been discussing how this might work as a "Helping Hand" type of game, or maybe more interestingly, as a game about teaching. Here's a simple variation:
Each group has a "teacher" and "students." The teacher is given a pattern to start with, and must "teach" it to the students in the following way: The student fills in AT LEAST THREE cells and hand the paper to the teacher. The teacher then must correct the cells, and fill in AT LEAST THREE MORE cells. The student gets one point for each correct cell, minus one for each wrong cell, and cells filled in by the teacher don't count.
Now add another group of players -- call them "helpers," who are given the task of "improving the performance of the people in the room." The helpers may make observations and talk to the teachers, but they are not allowed to talk directly to the students. Needless to say, there is room for dissonance about what it means to "improve the performance of the people in the room," as well as the potential for the helpers to be more in the way than helpful.