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You first need to choose a game to play. You probably already have a game in mind, and it might not have occurred to you to try to win at other games. Different games require different skills, and it is not always clear to the beginner or even the intermediate which skills a particular game really demands. It’s best…
In The Interactive Book, designer and scholar Celia Pearce presents a different typology for understanding the ways games manifest information. She proposes four scenarios: · Information known to all players: In Chess, this would consist of the rules of the game, board layout, and piece movement parameters. ·…
There are at least two senses in which the RULES schemas offer a "formal" way of looking at games. First, the term formal is used in the sense of "form": rules constitute the inner form or organization of games. In other words, rules are the inner, essential structures that constitute the real-world objects known as…
Mr. Hedges realizes that this technique could neatly simulate the complexity of the Iowa caucuses. He creates a deck of cards to represent Democratic and Republican candidates and all of the different kinds of factions and perspectives that might influence how voters behave in their individual caucus sites. He has one…
Buzz. An example of a low-stress, win-win game is Prime Number Buzz. Students stand in a circle or at their desks and go around the room in order, saying either the next sequential number if it is a composite or “buzz” if it is a prime. If they are incorrect, they sit down, but they keep listening and when they catch…
Prepare a list of the calculations from the flash cards on a sheet of paper. These can be on a template, with multiplication facts at the appropriate level pulled and copied for the student. On these forms, include three columns next to each multiplication question, labeled “correct repeat,” “correct wait,” and…
When I realized that I was unintentionally disengaging from some students, I developed a classroom management practice that ensures equal participation and on-the-fly formative assessments. I use a deck of playing cards, each of which is marked with a student's name, to determine who will answer the next question. The…
A good card magician knows many tricks that depend on luck—they don’t always work, or even often work. There are some effects—they can hardly be called tricks—that might work only once in a thousand times! Here is what you do: You start by telling the audience you are going to perform a trick, and without telling them…
Yu-Gi-Oh! demonstrates how pervasive media technologies in everyday settings integrate the imagination into a wider range of sites of social activity. Far from the shut-in behavior that gave rise to the most familiar forms of antimedia rhetoric, this media mix of children’s popular culture is wired, extroverted, and…
Trading cards, Game Boys, and character merchandise create what Anne Allison (2004) has called “pocket fantasies,” “digitized icons . . . that children carry with them wherever they go,” and “that straddle the border between phantasm and everyday life” (p. 42). The imagination of Yu-Gi-Oh! pervades the everyday…
I had at one time a very bad fever of which I almost died. In my fever I had a long consistent delirium. I dreamt that I was in Hell, and that Hell is a place full of all those happenings that are improbable but not impossible. The effects of this are curious. Some of the damned, when they first arrive below, imagine…
...the process of innovation often relies heavily on the combining and recombining of previous innovations, the broader and deeper the pool of accessible ideas and individuals, the more opportunities there are for innovation. We are in no danger of running out of new combinations to try. Even if technology froze…
Sometimes we can literally count the number of ways you can reshuffle a series of bits - as with a pack of cards, for instance, where the 'bits' are the individual cards. Suppose the dealer shuffles the pack and deals them out to four players, so that they each have 13 cards. I pick up my hand and gasp in…
In the World of the Blind / the one-eyed man is an hallucinated idiot
What realm of human endeavour is not morally ambiguous? Even folk institutions that purport to give us advice on behaviour and ethics seem fraught with contradictions. Consider aphorisms - haste makes waste; yes, but a stitch in time saves nine. Better safe than sorry; but nothing ventured, nothing gained. Where…