Seek Ye the Gnarl (part 2)
More notes on Salen & Zimmerman’s Rules of Play.
Unit 3: PLAY presents six different schemas for talking about games with respect to “play”.
Editorial notes: This unit seems to be the real core material of the author’s interests. It is better edited and provides a more thorough discussion of the areas covered. Here we get 20-30 pages on each schema, almost twice the amount of material compared to units 2 and 4. The commissioned game notes by Kira Snyder reveal more interesting detail about the design process than the previous two.
Seek Ye the Gnarl
I am working my way through Salen & Zimmerman’s Rules of Play. (I discovered this book by way of andrew’s reading list [grandtextauto].) I’ve just completed Unit 2, which puts me somewhere around the halfway mark. Some preliminary notes:
- plenty of typos (a useless thing to say, really)
- I’m not sure I like the writing style. Lots of remarks like “Do you remember when we talked about…” and “As a game designer, you need to…” I think this was a choice to give the book a focused target audience, but it could have been taken up a level. Add a little redundancy for things like key definitions, or at the very least add page number references instead of “back in Chapter 3″. These are all things I’m sure will be taken care of in the second edition.
- It’s a textbook.
Now, as far as content goes…
The Wet Paint Manifesto
I’ve been sorting through some files (real, paper files) and I came across something that I wrote some time around 1996-1997. This was before I wrote the Anti-Modal Manifesto (the location of which is currently unknown).
Wet Paint
i.
A sign on a pole reads: “Wet Paint” and it is not true. The paint has dried.
Driving down the freeway, orange signs declare: “Under Construction” but no work is being performed. The act of construction is not at all visible.
Do these signs actually mean their opposites? Under Construction means: there is no construction. Wet Paint means: the paint is dry. Well, there is that small window of time when the signs are correct. But why do the signs remain?
Putting up signs and taking them down again when they have served their purpose is a human activity, it requires a human being present to do the thing. When we see a Wet Paint sign, we understand that it might be old, it may have expired. But we also know (infer) that someone was there to put up the sign.
After having seen the same Wet Paint sign on a pole for three days, one might be inclined to take it down. If not, it might stay there for weeks, becoming dust-blown and wind-ragged, falling to the ground and drifting to the gutter, its sans-serif letters fading and unreadable until some final catastrophic event, a seasonal rainstorm or a street sweeper, removes the final traces.
A Real Blog
Hello and welcome to my blog! I’ve recently converted the site to use the MovableType publishing system, so things should be a little more organized than before.
If you are looking for the penguin game, you can find it here.
I will be tinkering with the configuration of the site, exploring the dark corners of what can be done with this software. It is good to know how these things work when you are a web developer.
First letters only:
NaNoWriMo 2003 Winner
I am a NaNoWriMo 2003 Winner! That is to say, I am one of the thousands of writers around the world who wrote a 50,000+ word novel in the month of November 2003. See: NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month
My novel, Black as Blood, came in at 50,201 words. It is a police mystery set in a fictional town in New Mexico. The writing is still very rough, so I won’t be posting a copy for anyone to read just yet. Perhaps after a few weeks of editing…
Media Studies Title Generator
Need a title for that research paper, academic conference, or digital exhibition? Just click on the Media Studies Title Generator for some suggestions.
Arnold’s Race for Governor
This is a Flash game I put together back before Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected governor of California. Arnold scores points by running over his female costars, but only when the news is not on. Arnold’s Race for Governor
sphere grid
Here’s a strange Flash gizmo. Project a spherical map onto a rectangular grid, then show how each region of the map connects to its neighboring regions. sphere grid
The idea behind this was to remove the distortions you get when you play a game like Civilization with its rectangular map. With a sphere grid, you could build a city at the North Pole and do pathfinding that would follow great circle paths.
A* pathfinding
I was tinkering around with some code for an A* pathfinding algorithm written in Flash. Now, Flash is far from the ideal environment for writing fast code, but it is an interesting demo. It is set up so that you can watch the algorithm in progress. A* pathfinding demo.
Sleepy Echidna Game
The Sleepy Echidna Game. Get the penguins across the screen before the Echidna wakes up. Or just listen to the soundtrack.