Board Games
When I first heard about the Battlestar Galactica board game I dismissed it as a shameless cash-in; might as well buy a Battlestar themed happy meal at McDonald’s (or, I suppose, a Starbuck themed coffee at Starbucks). I’m a big fan of the show. It was fresh and gutsy and the writing and acting were good enough [...]
Just a quick post today on a recent revelation I had about Monopoly. In one of my earliest posts I wrote about Monopoly as a Parasite-Zombie-Hydra-Vampire-Cannibal and ended that post with the claim that Monopoly is “a shitty game”. Well now I’m not so sure. I may owe a big apology to Charles Darrow and [...]
Apple markets its iPad as “The best way to experience the web, photos and video. Hands down.” But we can do all those things just fine on a laptop, so what’s the iPad’s real raison d’être? The answer, of course, is board games. The iPad seems custom designed to lie flat on a table and [...]
Imagine a utopia in which all human needs are met and all interpersonal problems solved. In such a world, what would we do to pass the time? Three things immediately spring to mind: 1) Sex 2) Art 3) Play Three things immediately spring to mind: 1) Sex 2) Art 3) Play In his 1978 book The Grasshopper Bernard Suits addresses this [...]
Last week I briefly described how games and play help explain Jacques Derrida’s post-structuralist theory. This week I would like to continue on that same topic and focus on just one of Derrida’s neologisms (or, I should say, neographisms, because Derrida valued the written word over the spoken word): différance. Derrida claims that différance is [...]
Last week I discussed how Saussurean structural analysis can be understood in terms of games, and how game strategy can be understood as structural analysis. This week I would like to introduce one of the most influential and controversial philosophers of the twentieth century, Jacques Derrida, and suggest how his notoriously difficult theories can be [...]
In his seminal, posthumously-published work, the Course in General Linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure writes: “Of all the comparisons that might be imagined, the most fruitful is the one that might be drawn between the functioning of language and a game of chess. […] A game of chess is like an artificial realization of what language [...]
In Galaxy Trucker you play an impoverished space ship pilot, charged with hauling a load of construction components across the galaxy. You are too poor to even buy a space ship: you must build your own out of the very components you are delivering.
Race for the Galaxy is a card game in which players vie for domination of the galaxy through military, economic and cultural might. Each player begins the game with a single homeworld, but over the course of a game they settle, build and conquer their way to a galactic empire. Although players can build up [...]
The history of chess-playing machines goes back at least as far as 1770. It was in that year that Baron von Kempelen first exhibited his “Turk”, a clockwork automaton that could play chess as well as the top human players of the day: The Baron’s new invention was wheeled into Court by an attendant and [...]
In Poker or Chess, you always want your opponents to guess wrongly about your true intentions; in Charades or Taboo you always want your teammates to guess correctly; but as the storyteller in Dixit you want to create a state of affairs that is perfectly ambiguous. As the players cast their votes and the round resolves it sometimes becomes clear that you should have made your story more or less obvious in order to place it more fully within that region of fuzzy uncertainty.
In the case of modern games, authors are, in principle, much more readily identifiable, and yet unlike with books, visual art, music or film, the creators of popular games are rarely known. Few people know the names of the inventors of Scrabble, Trivial Pursuit or Monopoly, even if they play those games all the time. I suspect that designing a game that is fun, challenging and well-balanced requires just as much skill, artistry and hard-work as writing a book or recording an album, and yet game designers seem to be considered so unimportant that they remain totally anonymous to the majority of gamers. Why is this?
