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The term magic circle is appropriate because there is in fact something genuinely magical that happens when a game begins. A fancy Backgammon set sitting all alone might be a pretty decoration on the coffee table. If this is the function that the game is serving-decoration-it doesn't really matter how the game pieces…
In the play-state you experience a protective frame which stands between you and the "real" world and its problems, creating an enchanted zone in which, in the end, you are confident that no harm can come. Although this frame is psychological, interestingly it often has a perceptible physical representation: the…
Time is not the only life-enriching resource granted to us by technology. Another is light. Light is so empowering that it serves as the metaphor of choice for a superior intellectual and spiritual state: enlightenment. In the natural world we are plunged into darkness for half of our existence, but human-made light…
The principle of an opportunity cost does not at first glance seem hard to understand. If you spend half an hour noodling around on Twitter, when you would otherwise have been reading a book, the lost book-reading time is the opportunity cost of the tweeting. If you decide to buy a fancy belt for £100 instead of a…
"If video games had been around in 350 BC, Euclid would have made a video game," Devlin told me. The thirteen books of Euclid's Elements would have been the supplemental material, a PDF file that you could read if you wanted to. "People think I'm joking—I absolutely mean that. Euclid would not have written a textbook…
Though it has become a naturalized part of music-making since the first one was built in 1710, the pianoforte (its name means "soft-loud") was a technical marvel for its time, a machine that changed music in ways that are hard to imagine. Computer pioneer Alan Kay once observed that any technological advance is…
Game designer Robin Hunicke has noted that Facebook is actually a complex, massively multiplayer online game, with challenges, rewards, and levels just like any other. Think about it for a second and you'll realize that the rules are simple: be the most fun, intelligent, witty, caring version of yourself. The benefits…
According to Devlin, teachers have a responsibility to learn about kids' interests. "It's not the students' responsibility to put themselves in our place. As teachers, it's our responsibility to put ourselves in the students' place. And if they are in a digital world, where they will invest many hours solving…
You will be thinking that we are coming to the end of this book: we’ve dealt with eight centuries, so there are only two to go. You may be surprised to learn, therefore, that in historical terms we are not even halfway. The reason for this discrepancy is that history is not time, and time is not history. History is…
Comparing computer play with reading fiction reveals much about thes^se shortcomings. Reading stimulates the mental recreation of settingg, characterers, a and acactiojons in viLxal, auditory, tactile, kinesthetic, and other sensory images. One "sees" the pirate h the scar slashing across his cheek. One "hears" the…
I had the most satisfying Eureka experience of my career while attempting to teach flight instructors that praise is more effective than punishment for promoting skill-learning. When I had finished my enthusiastic speech, one of the most seasoned instructors in the audience raised his hand and made his own short…
...worldplay can be studied as a kind of self-apprenticeship in creative practice, rather than prodigious application in discipline or craft. The childhood inventor of imaginary lands often elaborates his or her world in multiple ways at once. He or she may write stories and compose music, draw maps and build models…
Meredith's worldplay was shot through with yet another well-recognized ingigredienlent of creative thinking, the comparison and synthesis of two or more unlike things. As the mathematician and poet Jacob Bronowski famously expressed it, the discoveries of science and of art "are explorations—^more, are explosions, of…
It has been observed that if the last 50,000 years of man's existence were divided into lifetimes of approximately 62 years each, there have been 800 such lifetimes. Of the 800, fully 650 were spent in caves. Only during the last seventy lifetimes has it become possible to communicate effectively from one lifetime to…
It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven. But why is it important? After all,
DI for documenting his journey to shamanism in the 1994 book Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic, and Initiation in the Life of African Shaman. He writes about the proverbial dive into the rabbit hole as he was studying with the elders of his community and balancing his newfound wisdom with his Western education…
Yet your prison without coherent design continues to imprison you. How can this be, if it has no strong places? The rational prisoner exploits the weak places, creates order from chaos: instead, collectives like the FSF vindicate their jailers by building cells almost compatible with the existing ones, albeit with…
Reading and experience train your model of the world. And even if you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world persists. Your mind is like a compiled program you've lost the source of. It works, but you don't know why. [...] ...reading and experience are usually "compiled" at the…
The Great Man theory is the notion that behind every great innovation is a single individual -- usually a man. It attempts to write a simple story about every innovation. But Ford didn't invent the automobile, Edison didn't invent the light bulb, and the Wright brothers didn't invent the airplane. The simple story…
Most fantasy RPGs follow the tried and allegedly true formula, which strips them of anything ‘fantastic’ and grounds them in the dull ‘reality’ of the familiar. Sadly, the much coveted instant recognition usually means instantly forgettable. How many times should we save an utterly predictable and generic world before…