Friday 25 June 2021

beige

Commissioned originally by a paint company for voice-over artist Ken Nordine to write and perform radio spots in the style of signature his “word jazz” albums (also long-time WBEZ Chicago public radio host of the programme of the same name), the work expanded by 1967 into a full recording of some thirty tracks, personifying a different colour each, kind of like Eighty-Eight Lines about Forty-Four Women. Covered hues include Puce, Chartreuse, Ecru and Mauve. The reverse of the sleeve and liner-notes included byzantine instructions for a board game and make a finger-painting based on the order prescribed and scoring was self-apparent.

Friday 19 February 2021

6x6

seven minutes of terror: Perseverance lands on Mars, beginning its search for signs of past life  

cyborg tomato: AI Weirdness (previously) generates its own mascot—plus others  

polar flare: examining every map projection and how it distorts our world view at once—see previously  

simon says: a vast archives of electronic handheld and table-top games and consoles from decades past—via Swiss Miss  

fabian society: capitalism coexists with constructivism in Czech city of Zlรญn  

hello world: the newest Martian probe beams back its first images

Tuesday 15 December 2020

six wedges

On this evening back in 1979, over a game of Scrabble two newspaper editors, Chris Haney and Scott Abbott—unable to locate all their letter tiles, decided to make up their own game, establishing the basic concept for what would become Trivial Pursuit—the board game commercially released in 1981.

Monday 21 September 2020

disrupted chess

Via the always excellent Nag on the Lake, we are introduced to the range of multi-sensory board games—fluxchess sets—conceived and crafted by studio artist (see previously) Takako Saito to question the primacy of vision to play and in the artistic aesthetic in general by tethering experience to higher planes through the richness of perception and incorporating all the senses.

In addition to the pictured version where players have to ascertain each phial-piece’s rank and range of motion by sampling the liquor it contains, there is also spice chess with the chessmen identical and distinguished into one of the six by its scent and more tactile and acoustic games. Much more to explore at the source link up top.

Thursday 18 June 2020

park place and pall mall

With a long layover and an afternoon to wander Londontown, markets consultant Dan Barker (via Kottke’s Quick Links) used his time to document the properties on that city’s version of the game Monopoly (previously) and provide a bit of history and context for each as he moves around the board with the capital’s streets and stations still in the grips of quarantine and social distancing. Real estate costs have increased significantly as compared to Atlantic City.

Saturday 28 March 2020

8x8

expansion pack: kit and ideas for remixing new board games by combining pieces and platforms of classic games one already owns—via Kottke’s Quick Links

video phone: the teleconferencing tool that’s being forced on many of us is a privacy and security nightmare whose long-term liabilities far outweigh the benefits of seeing colleagues in pyjamas

razliv haystack: a look into how the mythos of Lenin fuelled the early Soviet tourism industry

stay sane, stay safe: a graphic design community’s rapid response to promote positivity

at home everywhere: with at least a quarter of the world’s population under at least partial lockdown, a design duo has turned national flags into houses

utica club: beer steins Schultz and Dooley (voiced by Jonathan Winters) advertise Matt Brewery’s flagship beverage

tossed dallas: Tuna Antipasto and assorted silliness—see previously

mashrabiya and mezzanine: a celebration of balconies

Thursday 31 January 2019

15 x 15

Delightfully, some eight decades after it was first prototyped and trialled in the basement of a Methodist church in the neighbourhood of Queens, the board game Scrabble, still enduring and having gone multi-lingual, has earned a semi-official historic marker in the form of this street sign.
In 1938, out of work architect Alfred Mosher Butts (*1899 – †1993) came up with the concept of play and conducted a frequency analysis on letters, assigning values to the tiles. The street sign may not be a high-scoring hand and was originally probably an homage of an enthusiastic Scrabble club but the city’s department of public works have dutifully replaced the modified marker when it was inevitably pilfered.

Monday 5 November 2018

tafl top

Our gratitude to TYWKIWDBI for the introduction to the family of Nordic and Celtic strategy board games played out on a grid with asymmetrical armies with the player on the defensive clustered at the centre of the board—protecting a king or castle from capture.
Known as hnefatafl (fist-table—I guess for pounding the table and upsetting the pieces out of frustration over losing) or Viking chess, variants were played in the British Isles and Scandinavia for centuries—with the received rules written down by natural philosopher Linnaeus in the eighteenth century, but so rife with errors and mistranslations that the rules needed to be re-written and the original form of play was lost. Trying to reconstruct this ancient game, however, and watching it evolve has proven to be a fun and fertile activity. Learn more at the link up top.

Sunday 30 September 2018

rent gap and rehabilitation

Via the always brilliant Nag on the Lake, we are invited to play an unauthorised edition of the board game Monopoly whose rules and scoring invoke the spirit of the original version of “The Landlord’s Game” far better than the Parker Brothers’ interpretation or regional variants.
The art collective Chinatown Soup’s Chinatown edition features anchoring shops and local businesses rather than more or less desirable properties for development and poses challenges to players to save neighbourhoods from the blight of gentrification rather than be rewarded for it as a virtue and promotes socially responsible growth. One has to rehouse, for example, displaced residents priced-out of their homes—another reason that the board is not given addresses owing to the amorphous nature of gentrification that’s not bounded by certain streets or districts and people are moved to the margins. Learn more about the collective’s activities and activism at the link above.

Thursday 20 September 2018

game of optional goals


Had I not learned otherwise, I would have thought that this alternative reality version, meritocratic of the board game Monopoly was some sort of commission from some No Such Agency to communicate with its field agents but Careers from Parker Brothers was introduced in 1955. In addition to the outer track, there are several internal loops, career paths to try and many more regular opportunities to draw cards of chance and a rather involved scoring system (recorded on a Magic Slate Paper Saver pad) to monitor progress and achieve a sort of work-life balance with a Success Formula of money, fame and happiness. Designed by sociologist, ethnographer and author James Cooke Brown (*1921 - †2000), players could aspire to be an astronaut, farmer or a uranium prospector among other things and landing on the same square as another knocked the first player to “the park bench”—intimating that they were out of work and fallen on hard times. Later versions of the game were adapted to better reflect the cultural milieu.


Sunday 3 June 2018

tabletop

TYWKIWDBI directs our attention to the ultimate, extended Monopoly board—which was apparently prototyped, with the rules of play laid out here but was never put into production due to (ironically) copyright issues. The discussion at the source thread is a pretty interesting one on how most game play is conducted according to house-rules and most never bother with the formal instructions. Would you like to play this Inception-version of the game? Maybe an enterprising designer could pull it off and successfully pitch it to the company.

Tuesday 20 March 2018

zero-player game

Conceived in 1970, the Game of Life is a demonstration of iterative arrays from British polymath and professor John Horton Conway. Categorised as a zero-player game, human involvement or volition only takes place at the initial state, seeding the game’s grid universe, which determines how the board evolves over subsequent generations. Each grid square or cell can be either populated or unpopulated—on or off—and interacts with the eight other cells that frame it according to four basic protocols: an isolated cell perishing from underpopulation, a cell with the right amount of neighbours thrives, a cell with too many neighbours dies from overcrowding, and an unpopulated cell with a precise amount of neighbours becomes populated—as if by reproduction.
Cellular automata such as these have practical applications in encryption and security, owing the unpredictable nature of the outcome though the world and conditions can be fully known, but also produces interesting, stable algorithmic organisms that oscillate and creep across the board. Of course these creatures only evolve by analogy, sort of like how artificial intelligence is an approximation of cognition through pattern-recognition and exploitation, but is a useful tool for visualising how computational routines work and a way to comprehend how machines learn and behave in novel and unexpected ways.

Tuesday 27 February 2018

monte carlo method

Notwithstanding the adage that only God can generate truly random numbers—that is outcomes not contingent on some inscrutable or traceable series of prior actions—or the pronouncement that God does not play dice, in 1955 (and reprinted to the playful derision of critics in 2001) the RAND Corporation published its big book of random numbers, one of the last in the genre, under the title A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates. Made obsolete by the ability of computers to generate serviceably pseudo-random numbers (much like logarithmic tables), such endeavours, made with a roulette wheel and a computer, were important and foundational brokers in cryptography and security ciphers.

Thursday 22 February 2018

tabletop

The curatorial staff over at Hyperallergic feature an absolutely amazing collection of board games acquired by ardent collectors Ellen and Arthur Liman that reach back to the conception of the evening’s entertainment in the early nineteenth century. A spinoff from advances in printing technologies, as ephemera, the topics emphasised and values signalled (here are a few other examples of select messaging) offer a rather unique glimpse at the popular imagination of people the UK of Georgian and Victorian eras. Be sure to visit the link up top to peruse a whole gallery of wholesome pastimes and to learn more about the collection’s recent compilation in book form.

Tuesday 25 April 2017

boardwalk empire

The ever-intrepid explorers at Atlas Obscura treat us to a rather gloomy tour of faded glory that permeates the once bustling Atlantic City, New Jersey—whose real estate is reflected in the Monopoly board game. Considering how this collapse in the jobs market and touristic draw was in part precipitated by Dear Leader’s personal mismanagement, it does seem rather fitting that the iconic game itself was plagiarised from an earlier game meant to teach economic-literacy and warn players of the dangers of slum lords and concentrated wealth.

Monday 18 April 2016

parity or difficulty-setting: hard

Thanks to Messy Nessy Chic’s for spotting this 1970 reimagining of the board game Monopoly in Blacks & Whites: The Role Identity & Neighbourhood Action Game—by the brain-trust at Psychology Today.  The purpose of this game, debuted not long after the was to illustrate to adult players lessons about racial-relations, privilege, economic disparity and the opportunity gap.  White game pieces are afforded considerable advantages and for them the rules about going to jail are rather more fluid.  The goal of playing, more in the spirit of the original concept for Monopoly, was not to accumulate the most money and property and causing one’s opponents to give up but rather to achieve an economic-balance, one which the game’s rules made impossible.  

Friday 4 March 2016

snakes and ladders

In 1971, a company decided it might be a good idea to release a Monopoly-style board game knock-off called Beat the Border, reports Dangerous Minds. The objective of trafficking in the game was far less fraught with danger and intrigues—and less rewarding, although one’s friendly neighbourhood pusher was careful to put out the disclaimer that it was all in good fun and reinforce the message that drugs are bad and the “dope” peddled was left up to imagination—though handy conversion charts were included. In these times, rather than exploring one’s hidden fantasies of being the head of a Mexican drug cartel—which does not strike me as particularly wholesome family-fun for the 1970s, in the same rather vicious spirit, I detect “Run for the Border” to be a new gladiatorial reality television franchise for the presidential-pretender.

Thursday 28 January 2016

the encircling game or alphago

The artificial intelligence research division of one internet giant (with other rival concerns not far behind) has developed a tandem neural-network that’s able to best human champions at the ancient strategy game Go.
Meaning the encircling game in Chinese, its goal is to capture more territory on the board than one’s opponent, AI experts once believed that a machine could never excel to human competence as unlike checkers and chess, where computers can use their bullying calculating speeds to forecast out all possible moves and outwit its challengers, the go game-board has more combinations than atoms in the known Universe (incidentally, I’ve started to wonder what that means, really, as I trust it’s more than just some clichรฉ and represents some exponential threshold, but does it take into account the Universe that’s mostly dark energy or the amount of stuff that ought to be there be that cannot be directly observed…) so brute force calculations are not a practical option for even the fastest computers. Human players—and there are grand-masters of go, which is quite sophisticated and challenging despite deceptively simple rules of engagement, began to lose their edge once a dual bit of programming was introduced that asset values and policies in a segregated fashion and apply those judgments in the same way as its competition. What do you think of this enterprise? Does it make for sore-losers?

Sunday 8 February 2015

larp oder knutepunkt

Though this event reported in Spiegel (DE) is not the first instance of live-action role play—in some ways Renaissance Fairs, Civil War re-enactments and Comic Conventions can be considered games in the same genre and a few epically sophisticated ones are cited in the article, but this four day challenge that was held on board a battleship turned into a marine museum, transformed into an elaborate gaming environment in Wilhelmshaven probably really surprised its creators for its depth and wrenching emotion. Project Exodus, loosely based around the arc-of-story of Battlestar Galactica—with humans on the run from cyborgs intent on wiping them out, was immersive and elicited a lot of bathos, well-up from unexpected places, due to the game’s “play-to-lose” nature. The scripted plot had leadership killed off at crucial moments and the crew had to manage to carry on. The organisers of the game hope to eventually bring this experience to the classroom—to schools and universities, since it might prove more effective in teaching lessons about conflict and what it means to be a refugee better than a lecture.

Saturday 23 August 2014

dig dug

Spotted on the ever-excellent BLDGBlog, here is beautifully crafted nineteenth century German boardgame from the collections of the British Museum called Der Bergbau. This precursor to Minecraft (which also does not have rules, per se) looks like a version of 'Chutes and Ladders' but there are unfortunately no instructions on how to play.