| Object Jam |
[May. 22nd, 2013|11:21 am]
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A couple weekends ago, I wrangled a few friends (Rob, Tom, and William) into joining me for participation in OBJECT JAM, a neat little game jam proposed by someone on Twitter, wherein you invent games for physical objects (rather than for computers or consoles). I was thinking of it as kind of a retake of the kind of game a lot of us grew up playing, either with play-designed objects (toys) or by finding whatever was lying around on the floor or the ground. But most of the (visible) participants in Object Jam are people who've by now played (and made) a lot of video/computer games, as well as, y'know, grown up and developed different tastes and attention spans from what we had as five-year-olds (perhaps).
The result was one of the most fun 6-ish hours I've spent in the past few years. The best part about it to me in contrast to a workin'-on-computers game jam was that we were effectively all making games for each other and then playing them with each other. This jam felt fundamentally social. It's pretty easy to come up with some idea and post it on twitter, but actually assembling the pieces, testing it out, noticing some imbalances, and iterating on the design of something you wouldn't otherwise take so seriously... brought a lot of depth to it, made it into a bonding experience. There's probably nothing that makes me happier than making, sharing and discussing things with people that I like. The making doesn't even have to be collaborative; maybe even better if it's not.
Now some games! First, here are ones that I designed, implemented, and playtested:
FOLDING AT HOME
Game for piece of paper and n players (tested with n=2). Take turns folding the paper, not necessarily in half, until you can't fold it anymore (it does not lie flat).
PLAYTEST NOTES: We conjectured that this would be better as a collaborative game, "improvisational origami", where the goal is just to make something pretty. I tweeted that idea as the primary version of the game and described the above as an "adversarial variant."
MASHUP FICTION
Game for n players and n books. Players gather in a circle. Each player takes a book and opens to somewhere near the middle. Take turns reading the last full sentence on the left page, then turning the page. Stop when someone reads a sentence that's 3 words long or fewer (or when bored).
PLAYTEST NOTES: Science fiction books work well for this.
SIT
Game for chair and two players. Player One sets up the chair. Player Two must sit in it (butt touching chair, weight resting on chair) and maintain stability. Alternate until Player Two falls over and gets hurt.
PLAYTEST NOTES: this game is dangerous and surprisingly fun
LIVE ACTION FETCHQUEST
Game for post-it notes, William's house, and various objects within said house. Sorry, this one is not very cross-platform, but you could probably come up with something similar for the rooms and objects in your house. I put post-its on game-relevant things and announced the convention that pink = takeable, yellow = openable, and orange = information.
PLAYTEST NOTES: This actually worked pretty well for three separate playthroughs. Tom took a Vine of Rob playing.
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Here are some games I came up with but didn't actually playtest:
DO NOT PASS GO
Game for any board game and 1 player. Set up the game. Read the rules aloud. Sit still & meditate upon the board. Tidy up after.
NOTES: Twitter liked this one, and one game designer I follow made some good suggestions for a multiplayer variant. I especially like the analogy between rules reading and guided meditation.
COINS IN A BOWL
A sort of minimalist betting game for n players with pocket change and 1 bowl. Players deposit all pocket change into a bowl. Everyone writes down a guess for the total amount of money in it. Reveal guesses. Closest answer gets the change, may trade for bills with other players. (anticapitalist variant)
SPICES IN A BOWL
Everyone secretly picks a spice from the spice cabinet and adds a couple of shakes of it to a communal bowl. Then, the bowl is brought to a gathering spot and passed around. Players may smell and taste the contents. Winner is who correctly identifies the most spices in the bowl.
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Others' games:
- TETRAHEROES made by Tom7 and William is a large-scale object adventure game built on the grass rug in William's living room. Here is a video recording of Rob and me playing it, which is pretty much my favorite thing on the internet right now.
- a game by a dog!
- full list of games tagged with #objectjam on twitter
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Related thing: pervasive games |
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| Upcoming talk |
[May. 20th, 2013|05:51 pm]
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Next month I'll be giving a talk at the NLCS workshop, on the chiastic lambda-calculi I first presented at NASSLLI 2010 (slides[1]). After working out some of the metatheory for one of my quals, I gave more recent talks at our local PL Wonks and CLingDing seminars (slides). The NASSLLI talk was more about the linguistic motivations and the general idea, whereas the PLWonks/CLingDing talks were more about the formal properties of the calculus itself. For NLCS I hope to combine these threads a bit better— which has always been the challenge with this work.
NLCS is collocated with this year's LICS (and MFPS and CSF). I'll also be around for LICS itself, and in town for MFPS though probably not attending. So if you're around, feel free to stop by and chat.
[1] N.B., the NASSLLI syntax is a bit different than the newer version: square brackets were used instead of angle brackets (the latter were chosen because they typeset better in general); juxtaposition was just juxtaposition rather than being made explicit; and the left- vs right-chiastic distinction was called chi vs ksi (however, it turns out that ksi already has an important meaning in type theory).
This entry was originally posted at http://winterkoninkje.dreamwidth.org/83774.html. Please comment there using OpenID. |
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[May. 16th, 2013|09:08 pm]
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Long day at work but makin' progress on things. The trains were kinda fucked up so I got out a couple stops early and stopped in the piano store up the street from my apartment, which turned out to be a fantastic decision. They had a old-timey rock organ in the window which was fun to play on.
Met up with william morgan in the middle of the day, who I knew from (long since defunct machine learning research lab) jprc waaaay back in the day. Like '99 or somethin'. Definitely an enjoyable mutual "what the hell have you been up to in the last decade" chat. |
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| (no subject) |
[May. 15th, 2013|09:05 pm]
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K and I went to this tapas place and it was really good. Little fried cod nuggets that were buttery soft. Warm goat cheese balls of some kind with ham. Had the obligatory patatas bravas, and they weren't very good, but whatever, everything else was. |
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| Dreamwidth vs. LiveJournal |
[May. 15th, 2013|12:11 pm]
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Differences between Dreamwidth and LiveJournal seem to fall into three buckets:
1. Some differences in features.
2. Perceived trustworthiness.
3. Who's there - who can you interact with on each one.
Originally DW started from LJ's code, but both they and LJ have independently made changes, so although the two are still quite similar, each has features (or misfeatures, in some cases) that the other doesn't. Overall, the impression I get is that DW is a little better on the feature front, for people who prefer staying closer to the spirit of what LJ was like. However, I hardly ever hear anyone say that that's why they switched from LiveJournal to Dreamwidth, or using that as the reason to urge others to switch. Almost universally, people allude to #2.
What it boils down to is that LiveJournal was originally well trusted, but then it sold to less trusted owners. Dreamwidth's founders, as far as I can tell, aren't seen as better than original LiveJournal; some people are just more comfortable with them than with LJ's current owners. But the very same thing could happen to Dreamwidth: they, too, could sell to less trusted owners.
So it it worth the time and disruption of switching over to something that may be as good as what LJ used to be, but could later become what LJ is now? Which brings us to #3 - LiveJournal is still where most of the people are. Which means that, on balance, LiveJournal remains the superior service. Feature differences aren't that huge, so they don't outweigh the fact that far more of the people I want to interact with are here compared to there.
Originally, Dreamwidth made a big deal of their founding documents as supposedly a basis for trusting that Dreamwidth won't sell out in the future like LiveJournal did. It makes a lot of sense for them to have done that, because that would've been the main reason for founding a LiveJournal alternative. But I think they botched it: I read those documents, and as far as I could tell, the key difference was that LiveJournal had been subject to one person's whim to sell, while Dreamwidth is subject to two people. I guess that's a bit better, but it's no security.
Worse, when I went to the Dreamwidth IRC channel back when the project was first announced, to try to confirm my interpretation of the document... wow, were people there nasty and mean-spirited and defensive to the extreme. By asking some factual questions in several different ways, I did eventually succeed in confirming that I'd interpreted the document correctly, but people involved in the project seeme to universally view such questioning as personal attacks in the intentions of Dreamwidth's founders, and responded with hostility and insults. That experience left a bitter taste, and a gut impression on my part that Dreamwidth is actually less to be trusted than LiveJournal.
I've got an account there in case there's ever a mass migration from LJ to DW, to make it easier for me to follow my friends there should it become necessary. But if you're curious why I'm not at all interested in supporting or instigating such a thing so far, now you know. |
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| More adventure in yogurt |
[May. 15th, 2013|12:23 am]
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I've continued my yogurt. It's currently not so much runny as outright liquid, and the curds at the bottom have either dissolved or been mostly eaten by now. I should probably move the batch and clean the pot it's in sometime.
I also got into kefir. Not with fancy grains, I just put milk in a mason jar and added some kefir from a bottle, figuring stuff was still alive in it. I didn't think to look up the species names to see if any of them were yeast; kefir is a bacteria/yeast mix. It didn't seem to be moving fast on the counter, though kefir is supposed to be room-temperature/mesophilic, so I moved it to the oven too for pilot light warmth. It soured up appropriately; I'm not sure it carbonated or made any alcohol. I'd swear for a while it was getting more solid than any of my yogurts, like jello almost, and was wondering if it was forming its own grains, but just now it was totally drinkable. Both it and the current yogurt are a few days old by now, maybe something happens over time? I dunno.
See the  DW comments at http://mindstalk.dreamwidth.org/361788.html#comments |
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