Joseph – A Response to Costikyan

There was some great information in this reading. I don’t feel like there is much to add to what Greg Costikyan has said in “I Have No Words & I Must Design: Toward a Critical Vocabulary for Games”. I don’t disagree with what Greg has said. Rather, I felt myself nodding in agreement with what Greg mentions. I’m glad we were assigned this reading because I found myself jotting down so many notes from the advice that Greg gives. Making games is not an easy task. There’s a lot that goes into the process and the information Greg lists is a great place for people to start if they want to make a game. I think this reading is a great read for people who are not familiar with games because it really helps illustrate that games are a serious and difficult art form to get right.

Joseph’s Response to Huizinga

This reading was great. I’m glad that people like Huizinga have taken time to really understand play and why play is important in our lives. It’s important to evaluate the nature and value of play. Play is often looked at as a children’s activity and it is a large part of a child’s life. People look at it as something frivolous and unimportant. I think my connection to this piece came from personal experience since I was raised in a home where play was seen as a wasteful activity.

I like the piece because it gives us new ways to interpret the idea of play as designers. To explain further, society’s idea of play is to think of it as a frivolous activity. Huizinga’s redefines play as something essential to being alive. Since play is essential to our experience as humans, how can we add play to constructs that don’t normally have play assigned to them?

Jeanna’s Response to IAA and Sant

I generally think of maps as being unsuccessful if they are difficult to read or interpret. It seems like a really foreign idea that people would focus on visualizing data in a secondary or inferential way- but thus is critical design, and Parsons. This reading makes me wonder how we came to adapt Cartesian coordinates at all? How did the standard map, (one that is not subject to heavy interpretation) become a google one? Why do we define  maps as linear, by places, and thoroughfares? Why not by movement, sound, density, pathways, or relationships?

In particular, the correlations and relationships that could develop between visual or aural data from different neighborhoods seemed especially promising, in particular- mapping a city by ambient sound. Literally allowing the pitch or amplitude of ambient sound be graphed overtime and finding correlations to population density, neighborhood, cultural backgrounds, density and proximity to cafes, bars, restaurants, bookstores? That would be a map that I would want to explore.

I had read about Guy Debord and the Situationists last semester for our public space project. The idea of why anyone would stage “derives” in “threatened” spaces in the slums and suburbs of Paris. However, I considered it a good analogy to the trials of alternative mapping. A map needs to be consistent, or at least consistency inconsistent for someone to be able to read it and derive meaning from it. The issue of longevity, or a temporal quality seemed to be of greater significance than the actual visualization technique.

Julynn’s response to Huizinga

What I found most interesting about this article was the interpretation that sacred rituals/ceremonial customs and rites are a large-scale form of play for the benefit of society or community as a whole.  Just as when children play, they create a “temporary suspension of normal social life”, the same holds for sacred rituals/ceremonial customs.  Huizinga also mentioned young man and the saturnalia that they participate in while at university as an equivalent of sacred play during his time period.

When trying to think of a comparison to our times, I thought of the festivities during Mardi Gras, particularly in New Orleans, or Carnival.  Huizinga mentioned that play has a locality and duration.  During Mardi Gras, there is definitely a “temporary suspension of normal social life” as a mass of people participate in large-scale, multi-day sacred play.

Group 3 – Gregory, Ashley and Ya-Han

Here are our rules:

1. If you roll a 5, you automatically die.
2. the dog always wins.
3. when you score a point it is doubled if you run in circles.
4. the opposing team can steal points by screaming louder than you.
5. the team that first reaches 50 pts will win.
6. the winning team can take one object from the losing team.

you need:

a dice
a deck of cards
a least two teams of peolpe

The goal of the game is to colect dog accessories to attract the dog to you.
There is a deck of card.  You roll the die to decide how many cards you take.
Some cards are points, some are dog accessories
The idea if to get exactly 50 points. if you go over, you lose.

Group 1- Basak, Garrett, and Lindsey

(May be subject to edit.)

Spanks-A-Lot

Requirements/Supplies:
People with a spanking fetish (or just super drunk people)
A Paddle
A Switch
A Rolled up paper
A Deck of Cards

Game Play:

There are two teams of even numbered people
The teams alternate in a circle 1/2/1/2/1/2
The player with the closest birthday to the current date draws a card first
The player acts out the action of that card, or has that card’s action performed upon them, by the player immediately to that player’s lef.
If the player wins the round he places the card into his team’s “spank bank” pile
If the player loses, the card goes to the opposing team’s “spank bank”
The gameplay continues until everyone has drawn a card.
The teams must shuffle players such that nobody is sitting next to someone they were in Round I.
Round II is played in underwear.
Round III is played without underwear or pants.

Cards:

The player must act out the cards based upon the following criteria
If the card is RED, the player is spanked by his opponent.
If the card is BLACK, the player performs the spanking upon his opponent.
Hearts: Spanks delivered with a hand
Clubs: Spanks delivered with a paddle
Spades: Spanks delivered with a switch or a stick
Diamonds: Spanks delivered with a rolled-up newspaper or magazine
The player delivers the number of spanks corresponding to the number of the card.
All face cards are TEN spanks.
A player who draws an ace of any suit may deliver TEN spanks to an opponent of their choosing using their hand or reserve that card so as not to be spanked in subsequent rounds.

GET SPANKED.

Team Cinco Exquisite Corpse Game – George/Julynn/Chris

Rules
1. Use rock, paper, scissors to determine play order.
2. You may only use your non-dominant hand throughout the game.
3. You have to make drawings.
4. You can’t sit down.
5. When you are traveling, you have to walk backwards.
6. You can only communicate by spelling backwards.

Game play:
The game is played by 2 groups of at least 3 people.  At the beginning of the round, one person on each team is the designated artist, while the rest will guess.  The artist must walk backwards toward the opposite end of the room (the word pit) and retrieve a card.  Each card will have a point value assigned from 1-3.  One point indicates an easy level of difficulty, while three points indicates a high level of difficulty.  The artist then takes the card s/he selects and proceeds back to their team in a backwards motion.
When the artist returns to his/her team, they begin to draw pictures with their non-dominant hand to get their teammates to guess the word on the card.  The teammates may only guess aloud by spelling the word backwards.  Once the word has been guessed, the person who guessed correctly then travels backwards to the word pit to select the next clue.
If a team is unable to guess the word, then the artist may pass on the word and must travel back to the word pit to retrieve another card.
Play proceeds for a total of 5 minutes.  At the end of the 5 minutes game play ends, the point values from the cards are added up and the team with the highest point value wins.

Group 4- Joe Kat Jeanna- Rules of Knives+Grapefruit+ Thumbs

Initial rules created by using exquisite corpse in 2 rounds…
1. Characters move by rolling dice
2. The game board is shaped as a spiral
3. Each player must stand during their turn and lie flat (or sit) when it is not their turn.
4. When it is his/her turn- player is mute while other players may speak freely
5. If two players say the same word simultaneously both must thumb wrestle.
6. The loser of the thumb wrestle moves back 3 spaces
7. Player in lead must stand on one foot during their turn and respectively move via hopping (or 1-legged motions)
8. 1st to win, or achieve win state can throw things, (like grapefruit or knives) to deter other players from winning.
9. The others can deflect the thrown things by answering a set of trivia questions somehow related to the thrown objects.

Addition/Conditions that we thought of after reviewing our rules:
- No touching rule between players, except during thumb wrestling)
- Players are penalized 1 space during their turn
- The goal is to advance to the center of the spiral first, where all the knives and grapefruits are located.
- Once 1 player has achieved this- the new goal is for other player to retreat out of the spiral before being “knifed” by the first player.

George’s responses to Huizinga and Costikyan readings

Response to Huizinga Reading

Huizinga’s paper was helpful in that it put forward some ideas as to what constituted play and where this phenomenon came from (or didn’t come from). I found the article a little hard to get through since it seemed to shift back and forth between philosophical debate and subjective unsubstantiated observations. I did however find the discussion of myth and ritual as forms of play to be very interesting, and it is not a relationship that I’ve seen drawn before. As he started to go down that path I thought about the controversy this article might have caused, given the time period in which it was produced. He goes to great lengths to point out that this wouldn’t necessarily remove the holiness from these rituals, but it’s obvious that many would find the comparison shocking. However, his main point here seemed to be what it was throughout- that play is an almost unclassifiable part of animal behavior that exists in so many forms and at so many levels.

The other interesting thing he points out early on is that English the only modern language that has a separate word for fun. I’d be interested in hearing more about this because he doesn’t go into what this might mean in an anthropological sense. What is the relationship/history that other cultures have to play? Where does play/fun fit into the spectrum of human emotion and behavior in different societies?

Response to Costikyan Reading

In this text Costikyan puts forward a very accessible overview of what makes a game a game, as well as what make them work well. I found the section on endogenous meaning to be a helpful way of thinking about how to differentiate between games and other systems that have game like characteristics but lye outside of the realm of games because their structure and meaning are not connected.

The challenges of conceptualizing a (good) game were also put forth in a clear way that I think will be helpful moving into the next project. What I found particularly interesting was the discussion of struggle and the disconnect between how we regard struggle in the real world and in a game. It’s hard to rationalize why it is fun to struggle, given the correct circumstances, and how the desire for struggle came about despite our natural aversion, when in non-play mode, to adverse situations.

jaqi’s response to costikyan

“Game design is ultimately a process of iterative refinement, continuous adjustment during testing, until, budget and schedule and management willing, we have a polished product that does indeed work beautifully, wonderfully, superbly.” This last sentiment of this reading does a fine job of describing my experience last semester when I took Game Design I with Nick Fortugno. Even though I am not pursuing game development here at Parsons, I think that there is much value in experiencing the iterative prototyping of designing a game mechanic. Whether or not an individual values games or not, games to some degree can be an example of a successful interactive experience. It is extremely challenging to create a system of rules that create fun, especially so after one considers what Costikyan described in his writing.